The Wedding (Written October 1)

Hello!  Happy October!

Today was a slow day for me.  I haven’t been feeling well, so I stayed home instead of going to the basti.  I’ve spent the better part of the day working on a poster for an upcoming personal safety meeting while listening to the audiobook of Game of Thrones.  I just found out next two days are holidays.  Now I feel bad, and I wish I could have gone in to the office.  I was unwell, though, and I’m also glad I stayed home.  Conflicting emotions.

What else has been happening... I’ve been going to basti pretty much every weekday.  Last week, we missed Friday to go to a wedding.  My grandpa’s landlords’ son was getting married.  I love the landlords.  They’re a Sikh couple in their sixties, and they both call my grandpa “Grandpa.”  The husband likes to point to him and say, “This is my grandpa,” then point to my grandma and say, “This is my friend,” and then to me, “And this is my sweetheart!”  I love it.

Their 7-foot-tall son got married to a 6-foot-tall woman.  We were invited to the wedding, which I was ecstatic about.  When we were in India in 2011, we drove past weddings and they looked so fantastic.  

Man, but I had no idea how many days of celebration there are for these weddings!  Two days before the ceremony, we went to the sangeet, which was a party for the groom’s side of the family.  We sang songs (or in my case, awkwardly listened) for an hour or two, and then there was dancing.  My grandma got *super* into it.  Also, Indian guys are SO GOOD at dancing.  There were a bunch of 50-year-old dudes in turbans who were killing it on the dance floor.  

 This guy kept calling my grandma his new girlfriend.

For half an hour, we did this ritual with a metal lantern that was decorated with cloth and electric lights.  We danced with it for awhile, each person taking a turn to hold it above his or her head while spinning.  Somehow I got landed with the job of holding a staff adorned with bells, rhythmically bringing it down with the beat.  I did not want this task, but everyone was forcing me to get involved.  The peer pressure was exhausting.  

Finally the landlady took the stick from me, and we all paraded down the street with the lantern.  Everyone was chanting an announcement of the wedding.  Someone explained that this walk was traditionally done through villages to invite the community to the celebration.

The dancing picked up again when we got back.  The groom’s sister kept preying on people from the crowd and forcing them to join in, and I wasn’t able to hide from her for long.  The last time she found me was around midnight, and I luckily had the excuse of work the following day, so I was able to duck upstairs to sleep.

The second event we attended was the wedding ceremony two days later.  It was held at a gurdwara, a sikh temple.  The ceremony itself was about an hour and a half long.  There were many prayers and the couple walked around the Guru Granth Sahib (the book of Sikh scripture) four times, and we ate this oatmealy stuff that a dude handed to us out of a pot.  It wasn’t clean finger food, but it was pretty delicious.  

The really tall newlyweds (our landlords on the left)

After mingling, we made our way to the reception, at the Taj Hotel.  It was faaancy.  The food was incredible, and they played some American oldies while we ate, which was fun.  I was probably the only one in the dining hall singing along to “Another One Bites the Dust.”  Dancing followed our meal, and a older guy taught me the Punjabi move of pointing my fingers back and forth into the sky.

I thought we were done, but the following day I found out there was another party.  This one was a ways out of town.  For the first time in this series of celebrations, I wore what I felt comfortable in, a black silk kameez and leggings.  A couple of Breezers in my system, and I actually had fun when someone pulled me up to dance.

All three days, my heart was breaking for my grandpa.  He wanted to dance so badly, but his ankle is really painful.  On the final day, he got up for a minute or two and it was wonderful.

(I have two videos to add to this post, but they're refusing to load right now)