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Wednesday, August 20, 2025

A run for Nandani’s love

by

Joel Julien
2485 days ago
20181030

Mar­riage is a marathon not a sprint and Vashish Ma­haraj is halfway to reach­ing the start­ing line.

Ma­haraj pro­posed to his long­time girl­friend Nan­dani Dookhoo as he crossed the fin­ish line at the Uni­ver­si­ty of the West In­dies’ half-marathon on Sun­day. He ran with the ring in his pock­et for the en­tire 13.1 miles of the race.

When Ma­haraj crossed the fin­ish line af­ter three hours and 22 min­utes he was greet­ed by Dookhoo. He then got on one knee and asked Dookhoo for her hand in mar­riage.

Caught by sur­prise, over­come with emo­tion and un­able to speak, Dookhoo nod­ded yes.

Ma­haraj and Dookhoo met at an archery club in Tu­na­puna more than sev­en years ago.

“Four years ago we de­cid­ed to try our ex­per­tise in run­ning the UWI half marathon. I found out that I wasn’t very good at it, but Nan­dani was,” Ma­haraj said.

“We in­for­mal­ly de­cid­ed that I would fol­low her pace as we ran every marathon to­geth­er, which in­clud­ed the To­ba­go Sea to Sea Marathon in May this year.”

But in June, Dookhoo had a sur­gi­cal pro­ce­dure “which left her un­able to do many things,” in­clud­ing what would have been their fourth con­sec­u­tive UWI marathon, Ma­haraj said.

Ma­haraj said at first he was not plan­ning to run the race but Dookhoo en­cour­aged him to do it for them and their friend Daniel Sam­my, who al­so planned to com­pete.

“I had to train a bit hard­er for this race be­cause Nan­dani was not go­ing to be my pace keep­er this time. The orig­i­nal idea was to give Nan­dani the medal first and then pro­pose. As luck would have it, no medals were avail­able for the run­ners that came with me across the line,” Ma­haraj said.

“With Daniel to goad me on, I held her hand and told her on one knee, ‘You may not have been my pace keep­er for this race, but to­day you were my goal. Mar­ry me babe.’”

Ma­haraj said he chose the race be­cause UWI had been a ma­jor part of Dookhoo’s life and “the race it­self rep­re­sent­ed an ob­sta­cle to over­come.”

Ma­haraj said his time for the race this year went well over his pre­vi­ous per­son­al best.

“But to be hon­est, I ran this race not for a per­son­al best. I was run­ning to­wards the per­son who made me my best. My goal. My fi­ancé. My best crit­ic and love of my life, Nan­dani,” he said.

How­ev­er, he said with­out Sam­my and Jes­si­ca Dookhran he would not have been able to plan the pro­pos­al prop­er­ly.

Dookhoo said she was com­plete­ly speech­less by Ma­haraj’s pro­pos­al.

“We’ve been to­geth­er so long and we knew we would get mar­ried even­tu­al­ly but I was to­tal­ly caught off guard. It was mind-blow­ing,” Ma­haraj said.


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