Two Months to Go For Forever at OZEN Reserve Bolifushi

A few weeks before I was supposed to get married, we realised my fiancée and I hadn’t really stopped in a long time. Taken a break.

Yes, life had been efficient, productive, occasionally overwhelming. Decisions were being made at scale—about work, family, future—but rarely together in the same physical space without distraction. When N and I arrived at Malé airport and boarded the catamaran to OZEN RESERVE BOLIFUSHI, watching the Sinamalé Bridge recede into abstraction, it felt less like an escape and more like a recalibration.

Having travelled together a few times now, Bolifushi was the first place that allowed us to fully feel nature’s beauty. To know that something else that could be just as grounding and exhilarating as one’s relationship, and to be able to feel it in real time, was when I knew this would be a moment to pin on the chronology.

From our Earth Pool villa, the distance between bed, pool and beach was almost comically short—it was almost as if the island was designed to discourage overthinking. We fell quickly into a shared rhythm: early mornings at VISTA DEL MAR, where I gravitated instinctively towards mas huni and strong coffee while the vegetarian N curated her greens with the serene assurance of someone long past explaining her dietary choices.

Needless to say, at each of the five specialty restaurants on the island, meals became anchors. Asian and Indian detours at SOYI and SAFFRON—said to be a favourite of the royalty, languid sushi lunches at VISTA DEL MAR, breezy afternoons at SANGU Beach Restaurant where I developed a weakness for calamari that tasted faintly of the ocean itself. She settled into mocktails without ceremony. Discussing wedding logistics became oddly restful when everything else was managed on the outside. It was at SANGU, in fact, that the beach, teeming with good-looking couples from all over the world savouring the sunset in each other’s eyes and through phone cameras, gave us the idea for a save-the-date video we had wanted to shoot since forever.

Acing kayaking at OZEN Reserve Bolifushi's excellent dive centre; Chancing upon the location for our video

It would take a flattish surface with a gorgeous background (thankfully, not too hard to find at OZEN RESERVE BOLIFUSHI), a romantic set-up and a bottle of champagne. We grabbed our bikes, and swaying from side to side, set about hunting down the perfect spot. After an hour practising the perfect U-turn on soft sand and checking out the Boutique Village festooned with truly delightful souvenirs and art, we settled on a promontory of sorts. Cardboard heart totems surrounding a candlelit dinner on the previous night formed a backdrop that could put the frothy visuals of Anyone But You to shame.

The September sun seemed to be fast slipping behind the city of Malé on the horizon. We got to work—preparing the sign with the date on it, procuring a champagne bottle (which the kind people at ORIGINE happily lent us), and the setting up of the camera.

As I cycled back to our den, our luxuriously appointed Earth Pool Villa, for the long weekend from ORIGINE after handing the champagne bottle back, the events of the night before came back to me in a tremendous tide of gratitude. The pier, hundreds of lights, a gorgeous, glass-panelled overwater restaurant. Modern European cuisine to die for. Our first dinner together in the Maldives.

But first, a wine tasting at the adjoining CUVÉE Wine Library had awaited us. I remembered sommelier Rohit taking me enthusiastically across the world—Burgundy, Stellenbosch, California, Coonawarra—with several Chardonnays that I wildly overestimated my tolerance for. Swirl after swirl and sip after sip, N and I went about examining individual terroirs in a lovers’ contest of sorts as Rohit spoilt us with one challenge after another.

But by midnight, as the dinner afterwards came to an end, the glamour had worn off. I tottered back to the villa, a strange homesickness trickling over me, exacerbated by the oncoming realisation that a major life decision awaited me on the horizon. I sat up in my bed and gazed straight into the lapping waves, my heartbeat anxiously following the swishing of the tide. Having sensed my discomfort over dinner, N sat up, switched on the TV paternally and asked me which spa treatment I would like to go for the following day. We discussed my last trip to the Maldives. She told me how psyched she was for the upcoming scuba trip. If OZEN RESERVE BOLIFUSHI having an excellent dive centre wasn’t enough, South Male Atoll is especially renowned for its dive sites.

In that moment, I felt the fledgling respite of always having someone to witness tomorrow. The slow encroachment of that liquid gold entered the cracks of my present. Being where we were enlarged those subtle moments of relief to a warm joy whose sweetness would lace every moment that we were to spend here this long weekend.

The following day, we followed Ahoo—our suave ‘butler’ with the incapability to say no—along a palm-shaded pathway to ELE|NA, the spa. I shook my head when N asked if I would indeed be getting the foot massage like I had told her. A face massage would be better suited to tackle the consequences of my choices last night, I surmised. Soon, sunshine travelling over the rippled bed of the ocean and filtered into the studio as we received a couple’s massage. Healing together was always the idea, but I had never imagined it would begin without us realising.

The thali at Saffron, the Indian restaurant; shakshouka at Vista Del Mar

A breezy afternoon at Vista Del Mar

On one of the evenings, I learnt that encouragement doesn’t always arrive with ceremony. It’s a nudge, delivered by the right source, at the right time. At the PADI dive centre, where our kayaking session had been booked, I careened towards the beach, almost getting ahead of myself in every sense of the term. But staring at the kayak and the ocean, which I’d never really entered before on my own, I realised the tallness of the order. The kayak looked like it would roll over any moment. The waters seemed too open. I hesitated, rehearsing exits. N, however, insisted in her own way that I try.

Out on the water, a hundred metres from shore, the waves rose with indifferent authority. The kayak yawed sideways, gradually coming to terms with my nerves. My body tightened and then stalled. Then the stroke pattern arrived by way of some divine intervention. One side, then the other. I dug in harder, angrier, steering the kayak back towards land, tearing again through the turquoise belly of the Indian Ocean. When I reached shore, breathless and grinning, I found her grinning back at me proudly.

Bolifushi didn’t teach us anything radical about love. It didn’t need to. What it offered instead was space—enough to notice how reassurance works, how encouragement sounds, how difference doesn’t automatically imply distance.