Shirin & Thomas Johari

She wanted to talk to the tall man putting his luggage away. He wanted to sleep. By the time their flight from Frankfurt to Bombay landed, neither knew that their conversation would lead to borders, paperwork and a life neither had planned. This is how Shirin and Thomas’s story began.

Shirin Johari, a Mumbai-based creative director and entrepreneur, first met Thomas Daniel Johari (née Krippner), a German cultural anthropologist and academic, on a flight from Frankfurt to Bombay in May 2019. She was returning from a United Nations conference on the Sustainable Development Goals in Bonn. Thomas, who was working on higher-education projects in India, was travelling to Bangalore.

Meet-cute in the skies

Shirin remembers noticing the tall man stowing his luggage in the row ahead and feeling an immediate urge to speak to him. “He basically turns around and smiles at me at some point and that just has me instantly,” she recalls. Thomas had planned to sleep through the flight. “His plan was to basically sleep on the flight, which I completely sabotaged.”

By the end of the flight, they had talked about Thomas’s PhD thesis, his newborn nephew, Shirin’s creative projects and even the food on board. “We fell in love in the skies somewhere above Afghanistan,” Thomas remembers with a laugh.

After landing, Shirin stayed at the airport during Thomas’s layover before his connecting flight to Bangalore. They discovered that their professional interests overlapped, too. Shirin had founded education-focused initiatives bringing international travellers into Indian classrooms, while Thomas’s academic work had taken him through rural South India. Both were interested in how people encounter unfamiliar places and cultures.

Finding a Place in Each Other’s Families

Their relationship soon moved between Bombay, Bangalore and Germany. Both were in their mid-thirties, with established careers and lives of their own, and they learned each other through time spent in one another’s homes and social circles.

One of Thomas’s early surprises was how comfortable he felt with Shirin’s family. He had been apprehensive before visiting her home in South Bombay, but Shirin’s mother welcomed him warmly. Shirin remembers watching her mother smile as Thomas moved comfortably around the apartment and realising that he had made a good impression.

Both families responded with curiosity rather than resistance. Thomas already had some familiarity with India, spoke several Indian languages and was comfortable in Indian social settings. Moreover, his mother spoke English fluently, making communication easier.

Shirin grew up in a Muslim Bohra family, and her years of travelling and living independently had shaped expectations around her choices. Thomas’s attentiveness to local customs helped, too. At a family gathering in Gujarat, Shirin remembers, he greeted the elders with a traditional salaam, a small gesture that helped him win wider family approval. 

After the wedding, Thomas took Shirin’s family name, “Johari.” “Shirin’s entire family embraced me from the beginning, without exception. No one ever said anything like, ‘Why are you with this long-haired firangi [foreigner]?’” says Thomas.

When Borders Became Personal

Then COVID-19 turned their ability to move between countries into a problem. When European governments introduced special permissions for unmarried couples, they applied. The process required timelines, photographs and letters confirming their emotional commitment. Thomas wrote a formal declaration that effectively turned their private history into evidence for the state. For him, the experience felt intrusive. For Shirin, the paperwork was simply the price of being reunited.

If borders created an external obstacle, language was the more personal one. Thomas was already a natural linguist, while Shirin struggled on her early trips to Germany, where she sometimes felt isolated. On one occasion, the frustration became overwhelming and she broke down.

Learning Each Other’s Languages

It was a turning point. Rather than accepting German as a barrier, Shirin decided to learn the language. What initially felt like an obstacle gradually became a way into German culture, opening up literature, humour and everyday life.

“I genuinely enjoyed learning German,” she says. “It was just so much fun because you're diving into a new culture.”

Building a Home

For almost three years, they moved between Thomas’s studio in Bangalore, Shirin’s apartment in Bombay and periods in Germany. When their son, Alex, was born, the transience gave way to new considerations of a stable home.

Today, Shirin and Thomas live in Goa, where they are building a more settled family life as Alex grows up. Almost seven years after their first conversation above Afghanistan, the flight remains an important marker: they celebrate their anniversary not on the date of their wedding but on the day they met.

Shirin and Thomas’s story is not one of cultural contrast so much as cultural fluency. It’s built through openness, flexibility, and the quiet courage to stay open while crossing borders.