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yesterday, i spent and hour or more on a journal entry. filled with stories of my rickshaw walla, my family here, and yoga. yet, the power went of randomly and i lost it. all of it. so here's an email zach sent to his friends and maybe i'll write one a little later this week if i have time:
Weddings have always confused me. As a young'n, no more than knee-high
to a grasshopper, I attended my first one. I remember being confused
about why the priest's voice got so much louder when he read from the
Bible. I assumed that the Almighty was moving through him only when he
looked down (in retrospect, I believe that he was speaking directly into
the microphone as he lowered his head to read el Biblo. Hardly
awe-inspiring). I also remember chasing the fish who lived in the moat
surrounding the gazebo, at the reception. Look Mommy! So many pretty
goldfish. Can I have a goldfish, please please pleeeeeeease? I promise
to walk it every day.
The only other wedding I've attended came many years and no
goldfish later. Last November I drove to Washington D.C. with my family
and girlfriend to attend my cousin's wedding. She married a Navy man,
which is perfect because she's a Navy woman. I remember being confused
about why she wore white and he black, given their clear preference for
dark blue. Unlike my first wedding, I got to drink at my cousins'. And
drink I did. Like a fish, so to speak.
So when I was invited to attend an Indian Hindu wedding, I
was floored. "This will be great!" I shouted in my head, thinking of
beautiful Indian bridesmaids. Wincing from the hollow echo, I quickly
made sure that I could indeed fit a trip to Mumbai from Pune into my
schedule. Given my tendency to do very little, it was easy. On the
particular weekend I was to travel, the rest of my group was going hiking
through a Ganesh-forsaken part of this state, sleeping on cement floors
covered in cow patties (not hamburgers). I, unfortunately, would have to
forgo hours of sloshing in the rain and mud, risking life and limb
between perilous cliffs and poisonous snakes to instead travel three
hours in an air-conditioned bus to the economic and cosmopolitan hub of
India to stay in a lush hotel and apartment, enjoying hot food and chai
as well as a 10th story view of flooded streets. To quote the The
Eagles' millennial Joe Walsh, "Life's been good to me so far. (Guitar
riff)."
I was invited to the wedding by my Indian-American friends of
the family, the Shuklas. The Razavis (my dad, mom, younger brother, and
I) have known the Shuklas (Pradeep, Haruko, Akira, and Meena) since just
before my birth, when Haruko and my Dad worked together at Sprint
Telecom. She is Japanese, speaks fruent Engrish and Spanish, and travels
globally in the grandest style. Akira is a year ahead of me, which
officially means I've been friends with him for longer than anyone (20
years, 8 months, 15 days and counting). Meena is two years behind me, in
my brother's grade, and suffers the anguish of being a younger sister to
an older brother. Pradeeps' nephew, Sachet (Saw ket) was getting married
to his boss, Jyoti (Jyoe tee), and they wanted me to attend as the token
clueless guy.
Pradeep is an architect from Delhi who owns his own one-stop-shop design,
construction, and building management company. He loves Porches, but
pines for a Ferrari. He works when he wants to, if he wants to. In his
words, "If I don't get a job contract, then I get to take a vacation. If
I do get a job contract, then I get to pay for my next vacation!" And
vacate he does. Traveling alone, he's hiked up through the mountains to
Machu Pichu with an extra backpack of medicine and clothes for
impoverished locals, trekked around India and Europe on a shoestring
budget, and is the most likely candidate to find the Northwest Passage
using laser-guided GPS satellite navigation with espresso machine and
surround sound. His biggest complaint in life is that when he travels
with his family, they want to stay in 5 Star hotels, shop for expensive
and exotic things, and soak in the sun instead of standing in line for
national monuments and sleeping in hostels. He's got the heart of Mother
Theresa, the wisdom of Yoda, and the bankroll of Scrooge McDuck. He's the man.
I set out for Mumbai on a rainy Friday afternoon. At the bus
station, which was no more than a stall in a shop, I saw an Indian
transvestite (much sexier than the Transylvanian variety. Tim "I don't
eat no" Curry should come to India and sample women's clothing). These
cross-dressers are called Heizeduh (He-tze-duh), and are considered a
third sex. They appear at weddings and births and give fertility
blessings to the families. It's considered very bad luck to not pay one
if he/she/it comes to an auspicious ceremony.
The drive takes two to three hours in good weather, four or
so in MONSOON! The bus driver didn't seem to notice that the bus was
loaded with passengers and luggage as he deftly swerved the bus through
tight traffic and around hair-pin mountain turns. On the bus, I was
watched a funny? Hindi comedy. The movie involved Tom, Dick, and Harry
kidnapping an attractive Indian woman and delivering her to the Bad Guy,
a tragic rip-off of Dr. Evil named SOPRANO! He was the only person to
speak in English in the film, and claimed that he was American (must have
been the bad guy then). Like all Hindi films, this was not without a
love story, a murder story, a lesson about family, heroes and villains,
and of course, oddly timed song and dance numbers. The worst part was
that the audio was piped in through the overhead speakers, so I HAD to
listen to SOPRANO! screech his nonsense about being the world's best
criminal, and I couldn't ignore the light-speed Hindi dialogue. By the
end of the trip, I needed an Advil for the headache and a Prozac for the
acting. Ai Guh!
The bus was supposed to drop me in front of a place called
the Gold Fort Factory (it manufactured water, I think). In classic
Indian fashion, I was dropped half a kilometer short of the factory. My
mobile, of course, didn't have service in Mumbai, so I had no way of
contacting Surrendra, my host, and Pradeep to tell them, in quite good
English, that "I'M LOST! FIND ME BEFORE I'M EATEN BY BATS!" (there are
giant bats in Mumbai, and they have been known to eat good-looking
American men). I found an S.T.D. (not hard to do in a city of 12 million
people), and called Surrendra's mobile. After standing on a curb for an
hour, I saw the familiar face of Akira walking toward me. We ran towards
each other in slow motion, as a symphony played in the background. It
was beautiful. Then we escaped to the car.
The car took us to a banquet hall/hotel, where all of the
groom's family was staying. Rushing upstairs into the AC (oh, sweet AC,
ye blow wint'ry relief upon me), we changed into good-looking ("smart,"
say the Britishers) kurta-pajamas, traditional Indian men's dress, and
headed downstairs to the party. A kurta is a shirt that looks like a
well-fitting night-gown, with full sleeves (past your fingertips), a hem
that goes to about your knees, and four buttons running up the chest.
Pajamas are just baggy pants that are designed to be about 8 times too
wide for your body. I had some tailored for the occasion, and I could
hold the waisteline 5 inches from my belly, before they were tied. This
looseness gives the novice wearer the insecure feeling that your pants
will fall down should you choose to dance too vigorously. Using the only
skills I ever learned in Boy Scouts, I tied a square knot so tight that
my pajamas bordered on bondage and set out for the party.
Friday night's festivities reminded me so much of a Harris
party at Grinnell. A lot of people sat and stood on the perimeter of the
dance floor, sipping beverages (non-alcoholic), and watching all of the
young'ns dance to loud techno music and carry on like my grandpa never
did. Indians, like Grinnellians, typically dance in groups, facing
inwards, smiling, shouting, and being carefree. Very much unlike
Grinnell, no one grinds, or otherwise touches people of the opposite sex.
When dancing, you stand in a circle and dance counter-clockwise. Most of
the movement is in the shoulders, hands, and head. Sometimes people jump
in the middle of the circle and put their right leg in, then their right
leg out, then their left leg in, and their left leg out... It's all very
hokey-pokeyish, and it's always a lot of fun.
After two hours of socializing with Indian elites, dancing,
eating hor' d'oeuvres, and listening to the same song, we bounced and
went to dinner. Oh dinner. There was a huge room full of food. More
food than I could eat. More food than I could even sample. There were
soups, sauces, and salads; chunks in currys and chutneys; lentils,
leaves, and lingering tastes of mystery spices, and not a hint of non-veg
food to be found. (The host family was Brahmin, and many Brahmins are
pure vegetarians. Some are so strict that their dogs are vegetarians
too. No joke). After sampling flavors and scents like these, I can
empathize with imperialists. They weren't bad people; they were just
hungry. For desert, they served Indian sweets and ice cream, and my
personal favorite, chocolate ghetto. It was black chocolate cake on the
inside, white vanilla frosting on the outside, and American metaphor all
over.
After I gave my plate to the guy at the used plate table, I
took the lift upstairs because one flight was too much to handle with the
load I carried in my belly (god, I sound like I'm pregnant). From that
time, around 10:00 p.m. until 2:00 or 3:00 a.m., the quite extended
family sat around the common room and sang songs, played drums, told
stories and socialized. It was the lowest-pressure atmosphere I've ever
been in, and it allowed me to meet cousins, nephews, aunts, uncles,
grandmothers, and best of all, children. Indian children exhibit a
degree of cuteness inversely proportional to their age. Infants are
irresistible, young children are precious, elementary and middle school
children are adorable, and by the time they're in high school, they just
look plain. Somehow, the cute children turn into very unattractive
adults. In fairness, though most of the Indians I've seen do not turn my
head, they do age very, very well. I have trouble telling the age of
women and men, especially those between 16 and 35. Even those people in
their golden oldies look quite healthy, and have a lot of spring left in
their shuffle.
The youngest child, Has***uh (Ha s*** tuh), was 5 months old,
and he was about as cute as I could tolerate. He loved my beard (all the
babes do) and expensive things (all the babes do, too). We conducted
tests with him, seeing which objects he preferred. Between glasses and a
spoon, he went for glasses. Between glasses and a camera, he grabbed the
camera. Between a Nokia and Samsung, he chose Samsung and tried to make
an international call. If given a set of keys, he would automatically
find the keys to the most expensive car, and play with those. Not only
was this baby cute, but in four days, he didn't cry once. At all. Ever.
I was blown away. Sometimes I'd hear a shrill scream and would think
"He's finally crying." But I would look at the baby and see that he was
smiling when he screamed. He was perfect. The next cutest were some
young girls and boys who tore around the hotel like Shiva was destroying
all of creation. But they were so cute while they were causing havoc!
The young adolescent girls were already beginning to get that look on
their face that they reserve for men, which is one of amused disgust. It
really knocks a fellow down a peg when he gives a friendly smile and all
he gets is a look that says "be lucky I don't really hate you." The
older women looked young, but unappetizing.
I went to bed at 3:00 and woke up around 9:00 a.m. to the
sound of rain plinking down on my air conditioner. I was forced to get
out of bed by this terrible noise and lamented the monsoon once again.
Walking out of my room, I found that most everyone else was awake and in
good spirits, sipping chai and eating biscuits (cookies) as they waited
for breakfast. Saturday was slow. I got a long lecture on the great game
of cricket from a nephew of the host who lives in Punjab (a northern
state of India, near Pakistan and China). I watched everyone else laugh
at a 10 year-old kid in a wheelchair tell jokes about his mom on an
Indian comedy show. I guess he was pretty funny, but I don't speak
Hindi. In the afternoon, the family got together for a Ganesh puja
(prayer). Ganesh, the child god with an elephant head, is worshiped at a
new beginning (i.e. weddings, births, business transactions, sports
seasons, etc.) Two priests set up a small alter, beautifully colored,
with lots of food, spices, and swastikas for good luck. For three hours,
they prayed with the groom, the groom's parents, uncles, aunts, cousins,
everyone. We burned some food and offered money to Ganesh, and it was
generally entertaining to watch Sachet's complete disinterest in the
whole affair.
This was the first time I had seen a Hindu ceremony, and I
was a little surprised by who it was conducted. In the U.S., at a
marriage or other important moment, any guests or audience is expected to
maintain silence and pay attention to the event (quick aside. My
neighbor is playing "Who Let The Dogs Out" to their Ganesh statue. Jeezy
creezy, can't that song just DIE?) Given the significance of asking
Ganesh to bless the marriage, I expected the family and guests to act
similarly; to be quite and respectful of the procession, which took place
in the middle of the common room. What I saw, instead, was almost a
complete lack of interest in the affair. Most of the 30 or so people in
the room were still drinking chai or talking to each other, ignoring the
ceremony. Those who were paying attention would make sarcastic comments
to each other, or watch for a few minutes then go back to watching the
kid on TV. For three hours, most people didn't care, except for a moment
when we all had to take a plate of fire and move it in a circle, and
throw rice into another fire (fire is big in Hindu mythology. It
represents the destruction of the old, and the transformation of the old
into new, and so is common at religions ceremonies. Bodies are cremated
at death, traditionally). The groom was distracted by his friends and the
comic, the father of the groom answered his cell phone in the middle of
the ceremony, and in general, you watched it if you had nothing else to
do, no one to talk to, and weren't tired enough to take a nap. That
really struck me as a difference between our cultures, and when I brought
it up to some of my Indian friends, they said "who wants to sit for three
hours watching that?" No one, I guess. But if we have to do it for our
weddings long and boring ceremonies, they should have to too.
Saturday ended without much fanfare, and I fell asleep
dreaming of beautiful bridesmaids that I would get to see the next day.
Sunday I woke up to the thundering of rain on my air conditioner again.
This time I was pissed. Mother nature had better learn to retain water
if she was going to interfere with my sleep. Throwing off the sheet, I
dressed and marched into the hall, determined to make someone share my
misery. I walked by the window, throwing it a glance, and what I saw
drained the ire from my sleep-groggy mind. The city was flooded. There
were four inches of water, with level rising. The television showed my
city of Pune under a foot of water, and it was way up in the mountains.
All day, I stood by the window, safe and warm on the 5th floor, sipping
steaming chai and watching people going about their business enjoying the
flood. Pradeep and I talked about reincarnation and life as we watched
people walking and children jumping in rain water mixed with sewage. We
made ironic comments about people walking through the water, holding
their umbrellas to avoid getting wet from the rain (as if). It was
almost peaceful to watch the city flood, even though some parts were
under 9 inches of water, and the slums which house about 50 percent of
Mumbai's 12 million people were definitely the hardest hit. The rain was
so bad they canceled all planes, trains, and automobiles (well, buses)
between Mumbai and Pune for Monday, the day I was scheduled to return. I
was rained in.
Mumbai is on an island off the west coast of India in the
Arabian Sea, and when the tide went out around 1:00 p.m., the flood water
went with it. We ate a delicious lunch, talked about cricket, Pune,
India, America, and my experiences here. When Indians want to know how I
like India, they ask, "How do you find India?" For the first few weeks,
I thought they meant, "How did you find India," and I understood that to
mean "Why did I choose India." Now when they ask me how I find India, I
tell them I find it on a map! They get a kick out of this. Everyone was
superfriends by the end of the day.
When it was finally time to go to the ceremony, I had a lot of people to
keep me company. We dressed in our bests (I borrowed part of my best
from Akira) and walked down to the entrance to caravan over to the
wedding reception, which was at a different reception hall. Outside of
the hotel, I was ambushed by a 7-piece band playing the loudest jangle
I've heard in some years. There were drummers, horners, fluters, and
cymballers (holler!) dressed in red bell-boy outfits who would play and
solo and then stop until someone gave them 20 rupees to continue. The
wedding guests and I reacted to this Indian war party by circling our
wagons and dancing in a counter-clockwise motion, shimmying our shoulders
and waggling our hands to the off-beat of loud, live music. If you ever
attend an Indian wedding, when in doubt, dance!
I hopped into a mercifully air-conditioned Land Rover and we
drove across town to a different banquet hall, where all of the groom's
guests stood outside listening to the band as they jammed and demanded
money, waiting for the man of the hour to arrive in his golden chariot, a
florally-arranged Honda. When he got out, dressed to the nines in a
sharp black thing and funny red hat, we all danced some more, said some
prayers, offered gifts, and headed inside to a large room with lots of
chairs and a stage, where it looked like a wedding was about to take
place. I sat around for a while talking to Sandeep, a cousin of the
groom, eating delicious spring rolls and veggie hors d'oeuvres, drinking
soda laced with pesticide, and talking about Buzz Aldrin's sightings of
aliens or something on the moon. After about an hour, I asked Sandeep
when the ceremony was going to begin. He looked at me kind of funny, and
said that the ceremony HAD been going on for about an hour in the room
just off from the reception hall. Surprised and a bit confused, I dashed
(yes, dashed) into the wedding room to watch my very first Hindu wedding.
The room was small. Really small. Maybe 30 feet squared,
the size of a small classroom. In the middle was a canopy decorated with
curtains, bells, flowers and everything, where two immaculately decorated
chairs sat facing a small alter with a Ganesh statue, surrounded by every
kind of color, spice, flower, nut, and rupee denomination. The families
of the bride and groom were there, but the groom was the only one seated.
The bride didn't participate in this part of the ceremony, which had to
do with notifying the groom of his duties and cleansing him and other
things. I think. Seated around the larger alter was a horseshoe of
about 30 seats for the few guests who wanted to watch. Immediate family
and close friends were the only ones in attendance, and even they were
having private conversations between themselves. Everyone else was in
the large room I had come from, enjoying their air conditioning and not
at all paying attention to the wedding. 300 guests - 30 spectators = 270
people waiting for the food to be served. At an American wedding, if you
have 300 hundred guests, they are all simultaneously spectating and
waiting for the food. We're much better multi-taskers.
I pointed this apparent rudeness to Sandeep, who for all
intents and purposes, was my cultural interpreter for the wedding. I
said, "Sandeep, how is it that 300 people were invited to witness these
people and families joining in a lifelong union, and none of them is
actually watching? It just seems rude. In the U.S., everyone attends the
ceremony, no matter how totally uninterested they are in the ceremony of
the people." He replied, "Zach, these are the exact same observations
I've made for years, and it's for reasons like these that I'm 35 and
single. I always say the only difference between a wedding and a
restaurant is that at a restaurant you pay for your food after you get
it." He went on to explain that this wedding was unlike most Hindu
weddings because the ceremony was taking place before the reception, like
in the U.S. Typically, everyone comes and eats and mingles and dances and
then leaves, and the actual wedding ceremony doesn't happen until the
early morning, around 2 or 3 a.m., and is only attended by the families.
Though I was attracted to this idea of going to a wedding reception
without the wedding (having my wedding cake and eating it too, I might
say if I were prone to poor puns), it just seemed unfair to enjoy the
hospitality and celebration of a wedding without putting in a few hours
of suffering through the ceremony. It was too selfish for me to feel
comfortable embracing, so I dutifully sat through the ceremony, watching
strange things happen and waiting for the food to get in my belly.
The ceremony was long. It took about three hours to go
through all of the rituals, of which the bride was present for maybe the
last hour or so. Priests chanted in Sanskrit, parents made offerings,
Surrendra answered his cell phone again, and a few minutes later, so did
the priest. Sachet looked uninterested, or at best, entertained by all
of the fuss. When Jyoti sat down with him, they both looked like they
were ready for this to be over. They walked around a fire seven times to
symbolize seven sacred somethings (seven is very auspicious in Hindu
weddings), and the priest poured popcorn through Sachets' hands as he
held them over Jyoti's shoulders (check out the pictures on the blog I'm
going to establish). The bride and groom were each draped in silk
scarves, and at the time of the actual marriage, the scarves were tied
together (tying the knot). Two hours and a thousand questions later,
the ceremony was over and I returned to the holding room to grab some
spring rolls and snap some pictures of more cute, cute children.
After everyone and their grandmother had lined up to shake
the hand of Mr. and Mrs. Groom, we stampeded like buffalo to an outdoor
eatery, which was about a thousand times bigger than the feast I had two
nights before. There was an hors d'oeuvres and salads table with 6 guys
working it, 3 huge buffets of good, good food, with a special table for
Jains, who have stricter dietary restrictions (the Jain's mushroom and
cheese casserole was the best thing I had that night). I ate and ate and
ate, then I paused to breath and loosen my pants, then got desert and
more desert, then exploded into a thousand gooey bits of curry, masala,
paneer, chapati, buttermilk and bottled water.
By the time I put myself back together, everyone had gone
home or evaporated due to the heat, and it was just the groom's family
and me, sitting around a table talking about Akira's unfortunate
situation in the bathroom. (After issuing some rumbling fatwas of
regional unrest, Akira's large intestine revolted and forced his
breakfast and lunch to walk the plank. Following a protracted
negotiation with his pajama pant's knot in a bathroom stall, he made the
unilateral decision to halt diplomatic relations, preferring to just take
his pants off without untying them first. At this point, Sandeep entered
the war zone to negotiate with his own insurgents, and the great nations
of Akira and Sandeep struck up an allied bathroom dialogue. Sandeep
quickly dispatched with his domestic unrest and, unbeknownst to Akira,
withdrew from the region leaving Akira in a conversation of one. Akira,
not detecting that he was deserted, continued making comments and
observations about his insurgents' sloppy organization and guerrilla
tactics. After a rough and bloody battle, he had finally spread
democracy and peace over the region, the rebuilding process could begin
to ease the chafing of a new regime. Akira left the stall, expecting to
see his ally Sandeep waiting for him, and found to his surprise a
complete stranger staring at him in wide-eyed terror, having been an
innocent bystander not only to Akira's merciless bombing but also the
blow-by-blow narration from his imbedded journalists. Akira was
internationally shamed, and beat a hasty retreat to the safe and
civilized Western reception hall). The entire family got a huge kick out
of this.
Sunday night ended back at the hotel, with a lot of dancing
and talking about the happy couple. I retired from the field of battle,
having had my fill of culture and food, and in no shape to dance. Waking
up early to yet more rain (oh wait, it's Monsoon season, of course it's
raining), we packed in a hurry and headed across town to my host's house,
where I was to stay for the night. I spent that day recovering from the
previous days festivities, so full from dinner after the wedding that I
literally didn't eat anything the next day. It was tragic. Akira and I
talked of home and watched episodes of a Japanese animated show called
Ghost in the Shell (go get the movie. If you thought Waking Life was
good, this is good and futuristically realistic). I relaxed, napped, and
watched some seriously funny Indian stand-up comedy (the guy was
ethnically Indian but culturally Canadian. If you believe that Canadians
have culture). By days' end I was ready for a night's rest. I slept
well, arose, and caught a bus back to Pune. I arrived in time for Yoga,
where we tried to get our heads as close as possible to our butts in as
many different ways as our teacher could imagine. He had quite an
imagination. At one point, I was standing on my shoulders with my legs
bent over my head and my arms tied by a rope for "support" (the pervert),
staring myself in the eye as I tried not to breath so deep that I might
inhale things my intestines were exhaling. I was supposed to feel
something like divine euphoria or endless bliss, but I ended up walking
away from that pose with a crick in my neck and a renewed respect for
proctologists.
That was my monsoon wedding, in a nutshell. I'm posting
pictures with captions on a blog as soon as I pull my head out of
wherever I left it during yoga. Some of them are already on facebook. I
love hearing from you, so if have time between classes and kegs, drop me
a line about your summers, you semesters, your hopes and dreams. You all
have been great, thanks for listening.
Zach
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