Circling back to San Francisco

The first thing she noticed about the date her friends set her up with: he had a British accent. 

Literature and AVID-12 teacher Monica Jariwala has been with her fiancé Mikun for five and a half years and still vividly remembers joking with him about “being with someone from England” during their first date in San Francisco. 

Jariwala’s first impression of Mikun was his “charm,” but throughout their relationship, she has come to admire how he always finds a way to make her laugh. Even though they are not married yet, Jariwala’s niece calls Mikun “massa,” Gujarati for “uncle.” According to Jariwala, her niece “[gets] along so well,” with Mikun, and they often converse over video calls to share “silly things” and inside jokes with each other. 

“Some of our best moments are just when we have these little dialogues where I’ll make a joke and then he’ll follow it, and we’ll just keep connecting it and we go down this spiral, but it works really well,” Jariwala said. 

When the COVID-19 pandemic first hit, Jariwala and Mikun had to navigate teaching in the same living room in a one-bedroom home. Jariwala acknowledges that “in some cases, COVID wasn’t good for relationships,” but believes being in close proximity to each other only strengthened theirs. 

“We were able to have good conversations about, you know, where do we see ourselves in the future?” Jariwala said. “And it was good because before he proposed earlier last year, we were pretty much at that point where it’s like, yeah, you know, let’s do this.”

During their first date in 2016, Mikun was coming from the East Bay and Jariwala from the Bay Area peninsula, so San Francisco “happened to be the median” for both of them. Five years later, in July of 2019, San Francisco was where Mikun proposed. He was pointing out plants on a vista point when she had the sudden sense that “something was happening,” and turned around to find him on his knee. 

“I just couldn’t stop crying,” Jariwala said. “And it was funny because he was like, ‘Monica, my knee’s hurting. What’s your answer?’ And then I was like, ‘Oh my God, yes.’ But it was good, it was happy tears.” 

Jariwala and Mikun plan to get married in Santa Rosa on June 30 in a traditional Hindu wedding ceremony with about 150 attendees, complete with Indian music and mehndi.  

“It’s feeling more real because I’m like, ‘Oh my God, [we have] under three months [until the wedding],’” Jariwala said. “But I’m excited. I feel like once school is [over] and I can just focus on that, it’ll feel real.”