AN INDIAN WEDDING (PART 1)
I sort of knew what to expect, I have been to a couple of big Indian weddings before, but always as an American outsider. And I was certainly an outsider yesterday, but this time I was embedded within Shilpa and Hitendra’s family. I also knew the bride and the father and mother of the bride, and knew my friend Hasmukh, brother to the father of the bride, and his wife Manda, as well as Mihir, their son, and Hetvi his wife from San Francisco. So I was not quite a stranger.
There now seem to be three parts to this wedding, although some may be added that I don’t know about. The first day, Friday, there is a musical evening with about 900 invited people, all dressed in brilliant colors of saries or or the men in iridescent Kurtas, followed by a buffet meal for all and dancing. The second day is an evening of puja, Hindu worship with Hindu priests leading family members through ceremonies at the large stone temple at the edge of Ahmedabad city that Jitubhai, father of the groom built and maintains along with a hospital across the street. At this evening are 450 invited people followed by a buffet meal for all and more dancing. The third day is the wedding ceremony at 5 p.m., the actual ceremony less than an hour, the socializing into the evening for 3 to 4,000 guests, followed by a buffet meal for all.
And what I have discovered since I am sleeping in the six bed room with the entire Vaishnav family, is that before each event, there is an hour and a half beauty session in which three young women arrive with all their paraphernalia to do the hair and makeup for Shilpa and Aditi, Meet’s wife. This is presumably happening in 4000 households for Sunday’s event. Hetvi, Mihir’s wife and a close family member, had to be driven early to her daily makeup session which lasts 3 hours and is torture she says.
This first day we went down a narrow, dusty dirt road to get to the party plot (there are endless party plots in Ahmedabad) seemingly lost, until we arrived at the party plot, with its lively decorations and bright lights, and elaborate stage set. I had somehow imagined, if I thought of it at all, being unaccustomed to musical evenings, that a musical evening would be an evening of politely sitting around a harpsichord in a Victorian living room. But a musical evening turned out be a band from Mumbai on a giant stage with huge speakers amplifying raucous deafening music with lights flashing in all directions, huge back screens that featured scene after scene, sometimes rapidly firing abstractions, sometime pastoral scenes above the performers, with two drones whizzing around twenty feet above us. It was an ear splitting and and pulsating evening with a thumping base that compressed my chest and made it hard to breathe.
My plan, if I had one, was to place my iPhone on its tiny tripod up front and leave it there and to record a spatial movie to show in Swannanoa. But up front was still a hundred feet from the enormous stage. So as the evening wore on I edged closer and closer until finally I was in the middle of a scrum of a hundred close packed dancers waving their arms in the air as I held my iPhone above my head to record what was going on. About half way through the musical evening we stopped to eat. In the buffet line there were at least 100 white hatted cooks and servers and at least 100 different labeled urns of food from China and India at buffet tables that stretche all around the edge of the grassy party plot. Hundreds of guests were being served, moving from station to station and eating off of small paper plates.
The musical program for the evening was headlined by the professional singers from Mumbai, announced with great fanfare and at top volume by an electric woman MC.
But in the middle of the musical program the family of the bride took over.
Jitubhai, the elegant doctor father came up and sang a long song with the backing of the orchestra. Then sister doctor Maitri (Chuckles) danced on the stage with her husband, Raj, backed up by a a dozen dancing women in bright series. And then the bride, surgeon Mansi, came on stage with her husband-to-be, Darav, and danced a wild dance, on and on. She invited her entire extended family up on stage, about thirty people, and they all danced with their hands in the air including 70 year old Hasmukh with a smile on his face along with Manda hia wife.
As the evening went on the dancing became the more and more frantic Gujurati way of dancing, gharaba, with individuals circling in a wide or tightly packed circle, and by this time I was right in the middle of them, filming away, marring the perfect shots that the pack of professional photographers were trying to record. We arrived back at our 6 room pad at about 11, exhausted
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BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 