Gallery: On Love: Chris Dudley’s initial impression of Shristhi Puri was a strong one: “I hated her,” he says. “I was not very fond of her at all.” But that all changed after they spent much more time together.
Chris Dudley’s initial impression of Shristhi Puri was a strong one: “I hated her,” he says. “I was not very fond of her at all.”
Puri had started volunteering at the Bethesda-Chevy Chase Rescue Squad in September 2007. During her first months there it seemed to Dudley that all she did was complain.
And she, in turn, thought Dudley was “an arrogant person” who only thought of himself.
Puri, who moved to the United States from Nepal at 13, was eager to become a full-fledged member of the squad, but she found the training much more rigorous than what she had encountered when she’d served as an emergency medical technician while attending Washington College in Chestertown.
Dudley had similar struggles when he first joined the squad in 2001. A native of Windsor, England, he came to the United States to pursue a singing career and quickly landed a coveted spot in the National Cathedral Choir. Looking to fill his free time with volunteer work, he walked into the BCC Rescue Squad after seeing a sign promoting it as “the opportunity of a lifetime.”
But while most new members move through a training process within 14 months, Dudley’s singing schedule precluded him from finishing on time. Worried he’d be kicked off the squad, he decided to prove his dedication during the squad’s annual fall drive. He raised $22,000 — enough to be named the unit’s top fundraiser.
After quizzing Puri, who works at a bank on weekdays, Dudley asked a superior to give him time to properly train her. From then on, he became her hard-driving mentor, constantly drilling her on squad protocols and medical response procedures.
“I was like, ‘I hate this guy because he always makes me cry every single time I take a test,’ ” recalls Puri, now 26. “But, at the same time, he was helping me get through everything.”
They began a tradition of going to breakfast on Tuesdays with a few other young volunteers after finishing an overnight shift. In time, she grew accustomed to his teasing and admired the care he took with patients; he respected her persistence and soon found a sunny disposition at her core.
“She’s the person that you want to be near all the time,” he says. “Just because of her positive attitude.”
In the fall of 2008, with Dudley’s encouragement, Puri became the squad’s top fundraiser. That November, he invited her to join a group of friends at his home for Thanksgiving dinner. She helped him with the preparations and drank enough that she didn’t feel comfortable driving home. After the other guests had left, he kissed her.
She stayed the night, but woke up baffled about the kiss. They’d only recently warmed to each other as friends. That day, Dudley told Puri it shouldn’t have happened. Her parents expected her to marry a Nepali man; he had always believed he shouldn’t date a South Asian woman.
“It’s this thing that was bred into me at English boarding school,” says Dudley, now 31. “It goes back to this colonial stuff.”
They decided to try to forget that the kiss happened and went back to being friends and colleagues.
For months, Puri rode only in Dudley’s ambulance, but when she passed her final tests in January 2009, she was free to work wherever she was needed. “So then I hardly saw him and I’m like, ‘I kinda miss this guy. It’s kind of boring without him around,’ ” she says. “It wasn’t fun anymore to me.”
By then, they were regularly meeting up to have lunch or play squash. The pair bickered like an old married couple and were teased by rescue squad colleagues about being romantically involved. When Puri vented to friends about Dudley, they begged her to own up to the fact that she had feelings for him and to tell him as much. She routinely scoffed at the idea.
Still, in the summer of 2009, when Dudley told Puri he’d begun seeing another woman, she grew resentful. “He made me feel like we were together, and now we’re not,” she told friends. She remembers their response: “Shristhi, it’s been two years that you’ve been playing footsie with each other and never said anything, so you don’t have any space to complain. You did it to yourself.”
She became his reluctant relationship counselor, helping him work through problems with his girlfriend. And there were plenty of those, Dudley says. “We’d only been dating six months, and we already had these edges going up,” he says. But with Puri, he says, “we’d always be hanging out and having fun. And I had to really try hard with this other person.”
In late August, just after Dudley had told his girlfriend it wasn’t going to work out, Puri asked him to meet her for coffee. She couldn’t handle the ambiguity of their relationship any longer.
“There’s no easy way to say this,” she told him. “I’ve loved you for a while.”
Dudley responded that he had feelings for her, too, but needed time. Puri said she didn’t care what her family and culture said about dating a Western man. Likewise, Dudley thought he could move beyond his own initial dating prejudices.
He shared his changing feelings with a friend, who Dudley says told him, “ ‘You’ve finally grown up. You’ve finally moved beyond your classist, stuck-up upbringing.’ ” “After I did that, we were finally able to just be who we were with each other.”
He headed back to England for his brother’s wedding; by the time he returned in October, Dudley felt sure he wanted to be with Puri. Less than two months later, as they gathered with friends for another Thanksgiving dinner, he told them all that he was thankful to have Puri in his life and that he’d “like to have her in it forever.” The following March, at a rescue squad company meeting, he proposed before a crowd of their colleagues.
Puri’s parents reacted more positively than the pair had expected and were supportive of the union, especially when the couple agreed to travel to Nepal for a series of traditional wedding rituals and celebrations in January. And on Feb. 26, the couple arrived via ambulance to exchange vows in a formal ceremony at Washington National Cathedral.
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