Two months later, in March 2019, he demonstrated just how serious he was when Ms. Chatterjee’s father developed pneumonia. He died in Kolkata, India, where Ms. Chatterjee grew up, later that month. When she returned to the United States after grieving with family in India, being home alone was a struggle.
“Sandeep mitigated my pain,” she said. “He said, ‘Why don’t you come and stay with me?’” While he hadn’t told Ms. Chatterjee, Mr. Kumar was already in love with her. “I felt like, when something sad or shaky happens, that’s the test,” he said. “I wanted to prove to her I really loved her.”
By the fall of 2019, after his show of support and her brief stay in Princeton’s graduate student housing, Ms. Chatterjee and Mr. Kumar were a committed couple. The following year, the pandemic reinforced their compatibility. When Princeton’s neuroscience labs shut down in March 2020, Mr. Kumar moved into Ms. Chatterjee’s studio apartment in Secaucus.
“We did not plan at that moment to live together,” Ms. Chatterjee said. “But it was seamless.”
In 2021, they moved in together permanently, into an off-campus apartment in Princeton. That year, on Sept. 5, Mr. Kumar asked Ms. Chatterjee to take a walk around the university’s grounds with him.
“Pooja loves campus, and it played a special role in our relationship,” he said. As they strolled through Holder Hall, he dropped to one knee and proposed. When Ms. Chatterjee said a surprised “yes,” a cluster of students on their way to the building’s dining hall stopped to cheer.
On April 30, Ms. Chatterjee and Mr. Kumar returned to campus, where they were married at the Princeton University Chapel in front of 25 fully vaccinated friends and family members by Len Scales, a Presbyterian chaplain at the university. Because of travel logistics complicated by Covid, Ms. Chatterjee’s mother and Mr. Kumar’s parents, all in India, could not attend.
