Nerve Endings Firing Away

If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed or email alerts. Thanks for visiting!

Flying down to India for our wedding was always going to be a nervous journey in anticipation of things to come. Although we flew through that obnoxious and ill-planned Paris airport, we hardly got an opportunity to experience the lack of hospitality of the French airport personnel. The advantage of numbers worked in our favor as a bunch of Indians transiting through were personally escorted through the labyrinth alleys of the Parisian airport to catch the delayed flight. After the overdrawn wait at Bahrain airport, our fellow desi passengers did not disappoint by trying to grab their overhead luggage as soon as the aircraft touched the tarmac; repeated pleas by the frazzled stewardesses be damned. To be fair, many of these people are first-time fliers and haven’t gotten over their fear of missing their station when traveling by buses or trains. Thanks to our requisite stopover in Bahrain, our flight to India took us nearly 36 hours and we swore never to do it again.

The next few days went off in a blur as Ash and I went about the wedding preparations in our own way. I completed all my wedding attire shopping in less than 3 hours whereas Ash took nearly 3 days. But in her defense, I didn’t have to customize my blouses for each different sari for every different occasion. Thanks to some farsighted planning, my mom and various assortments of aunts had already shortlisted the various dresses we were expected to wear complete with color coordination to match our better halves. But I still had to try out and approve five different sets of clothes (and footwear) for my wedding and haldi ceremony in Bhubhaneshwar, my brother’s wedding and haldi ceremony in Thane, and our joint reception in Thane. And I’m not even counting the umpteen other occasions like dewak puja, satyanarayan puja, and other correctional rituals that preempt every Indian wedding. However, I heartily recommend Pramanik in Matunga for all your wedding attire needs. Get in touch with Pramodji who will offer his expert counsel on the latest trends that aren’t necessarily gaudy. Pramanik was literally our one-stop shop for clothing not only our immediate family but also our wedding guests including my brother’s host parents from Belgium.

Nope, Ash didn’t have to marry a tree or anything remotely inanimate (unless you count me as such after a particular heavy meal). Not having allowed for comparing our horoscopes, we were spared the torture of subsequent remedial measures. The only pre-wedding ritual we had was the dewak puja which is merely the beginning of the wedding rites and setting up of the ceremonial mandap of banana tree plants.

Since going off to a faraway place like Bhubhaneshwar was something new for our family, my mom, aunts, and her other accomplices were busy bustling around making sure they had remembered to carry every ingredient necessary for the haldi and other puja ceremonies. It was so bad that they had to be reminded that we weren’t flying out to some desolate island in the Pacific where we couldn’t get the things we forget. But every community in India has their own customized ritual which almost always uses localized ingredients that would be difficult to obtain elsewhere. The entire exercise was conducted in near-professional manner with every aunt delegated to a certain responsibility and assigned specific duties (so you knew whom you could blame if things went wrong). The home in Panvel before leaving for Bhubhaneshwar was always filled with people and even my dad’s office staff and my mom’s school teachers joined in decorating our home and busying themselves in preparations. Only in India would you see your employees willingly volunteer their time and effort in personal occasions like weddings. Couple of the school teachers have known me for more than 10-15 years and have literally seen me as a pimply teenager and one of my dad’s office accountant has seen me as a baby. So it was quite evident that they were helping out my parents purely out of love and affection.

The house bore a festive look although not overly garish. Simple white lights and flowers were used to highlight the existing features of our home. Thankfully my dad and I were in agreement for once on what looked beautiful although I had virtually given up control on what I wanted in my wedding after a brief altercation where I was reminded that some aspects of my own wedding fell outside my jurisdiction of opinion and control.

Although my parents were a little sad that our home would host neither my or my brother’s wedding, the home didn’t look any less. I am attaching couple of photos taken by yours truly to show you what I mean.

More on the Bhubhaneshwar trip and the wedding later.

by Patrix | on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 2:26 pm | Personal . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.