Tori and Prakash first met in 2009 when Tori came to Nepal for three months to conduct research for her master’s thesis. She was working with Salvation Worship Ministries, a para-church organization focused on supporting church musicians, and Prakash was a member of one of their worship teams. He and several other team members were also part of a local church’s English language worship service, and they invited Tori to visit. Tori would go on to become a regular part of the English language worship team. Over the years, Tori and Prakash continued to get to know each other each time Tori returned to Nepal. Their interactions were primarily through mutual friend circles from the English language service and music ministry, but Prakash would occasionally call Tori just to see how she was doing as she traveled to other parts of Nepal for research or work. At Prakash’s invitation, Tori spent three days in January 2013 visiting with his family in Dadeldhura, Prakash's hometown in far western Nepal. Tori appreciated that each time she left Nepal, Prakash would ask, “When will you return?”

Tori and Prakash started talking online regularly during the pandemic in February 2020. Being an extrovert living on his own in Kathmandu when Nepal went into lockdown, Prakash was looking for people with whom he could regularly talk. The 12-hour time difference between Nepal and California meant that Prakash (a night owl) and Tori (a morning person) could find a regular, mutually agreeable time to talk (needless to say, when Tori moved to the East Coast last year, the time difference became much more of a challenge!). When Nepal came out of lockdown in November 2020 and many of Prakash’s regular activities resumed, he still made time to regularly talk to Tori. This prompted her to ask him why he still made time to talk to her. That’s when he asked her to consider whether they should be more than just friends. Tori and Prakash started “dating” in January 2021.

Tori returned to Nepal in August 2021 so that she and Prakash could spend some time together in person. Prakash asked Tori to marry him during that trip, and she said “yes!” In the United States, engagement merely consists of asking and answering a question, usually in private, but in Nepal, Tori and Prakash had to go through their respective church families and get their approval and blessing (Tori has remained involved with the Nepali church in which she grew up). Per local custom, they had a formal engagement ceremony in September 2021 involving both of their respective church families as well as mutual friends.

The long engagement was courtesy of US Citizenship and Immigration Services! Yes, it took them 20 months to process the visa paperwork, which is unfortunately an average wait time for fiance visas at the moment.