My mother frequently asks me if it has rained. I look out the window at the low clouds, hazy skyline, and ground full of puddles. “No,” I reply. “It hasn’t rained. It’s just wet.” I am in a similar conundrum when trying to describe the previous term at Oxford. There wasn't work to do. I was just busy. It was a misty form of busyness, like picking out vegetables at the supermarket just as they turn on the water spray in the produce section. You get your carrots, but you are wet and annoyed.
The break in between terms was anything but normal, for I was invited to an Indian wedding in Delhi. I arrived at the Indira Gandhi International Airport, ready for a good time, but not quite sure what to expect, for I was told to buy a plane ticket and “not worry about anything else after that”. I found a driver waiting for me and we quickly got on our way. That short 90 minute drive to the resort was my only image of India, where we shared the road with nearly every form of locomotion – trucks, tractors, motorbikes, bicycles, camel-drawn carriages, pedestrian and wandering cows. Traffic lanes, as I learned, were to be treated as mere suggestions and not as rigid fact. After a bumpy ride down a pot-hole riddled road, we arrived at the resort and entered into a magical wonderland.
Indian weddings are known to be big, lavish occasions with an overabundance of food and drinks. Parties extend well into the nights with hundreds of guests. My driver let me off under a red canopy where a group of Indian musicians greeted me with a rambunctious drum roll. Someone put a fresh lei over my head while Laurel and Hardy and Charlie Chaplin shook my hand to welcome me to the resort. And this was only at 2:00 in the afternoon.
As the rest of the days unfolded, the size and scope of the wedding became apparent. There were three separate pavilions that were built – a blue one for the first night, a white one for the second, and a red one for the wedding – each with a custom stage. The insides were decorated with peacock feathers, candles and flower petal sculptures that scented the night air. The buffet stretched all around the pavilion while waiters carrying plates of hors d'oeuvre kept asking over and over again if you want something to eat. The entertainment was first-rate as some of the biggest stars of Bollywood came to sing their hits. The least famous one was merely a one hit wonder. We danced to their tunes till the wee hours in the morning.
The procession on the wedding night was the most indescribable moment, so I’ll attempt to do so. We were a quarter of a mile outside the resort, dressed in the best Indian Kurta Pajama, head dress and all, accompanied by two dancing bands that could be heard for miles around. If that was not enough, fireworks were set off as we progressed down the street, as if to announce our location to the rest of the world. The groom, meanwhile, sat in his carriage being drawn by four handsome white horses. All of this kept building up to the climax of reaching the bride’s party at the resort. Wow.
This was the first wedding I’ve been to that has lasted for more than a day. This was also the first wedding I’ve been to that had a game of tug-of-war and a wrap-your-husband-in-toilet-paper contest. It set a new benchmark for ‘large wedding’ and raised the standard for ‘hardcore partying’. Indeed, this wedding made up for all of the weeks of cold, British wetness.
