The unforgettable wedding - Part 1

At 10 am today as soon as I woke up I went straight to the bathroom, without a care in the world as I let some of me flow into the toilet hole I had not the slightest hint of how memorable this damned day would turn out to be.


My family is not the typical sort of Indian families that people have been led to believe; my family has a few screws missing here and there. For starters we are PRETTY LOUD, and for some reason my parents’ idea of a fun weekend is attending a wedding. I for one hate weddings, I love the food though. But today, today we were to attend a special wedding, my cousin who is 3 years younger than my eldest unmarried brother was getting married. In India it is a sort of an unspoken tradition to first marry off the oldest in the family and then the younger ones would follow in their footsteps, consequently this wedding was drawing a lot of unwanted attention and believe me this wedding was already topping the gossip charts of all the aunties in my family, my own mother included.


The aunties of my family were playing the judge and jury in the majestic court of Whatsapp and boy did they love it. This wedding in my opinion was no less than a classic bollywood movie; it sure as hell had the dialogs and the tears for it. The only thing missing were the songs that the actors would spontaneously start singing while the entire street broke out into a perfectly synchronized dance led by the lead actors them self , to be honest I wouldn’t be surprised if this had actually happened, as a matter of fact I would’ve joined in myself.



It all started about a little over a month ago, when this cousin of mine came to our house and told us all about how he was a changed man, he’d quit smoking, clubbing and even trying to pick up girls. This abrupt change of his was brought about by a girl he’d fallen in love with, obviously. He went on about how he’d drastically cut down all of his bad habits and how he was embracing our religion Islam more than ever before in his entire life.


 I was happy for him I guess, he’d found a girl and he claimed it was true undying love, he used sophisticated Hindi/Urdu words such as “Mohabbat and Ishq” and as soon as he did I puked internally but I was happy for him all the more. A few days later he’d returned and this time the situation had drastically escalated, this time he was talking about marrying this girl, against her parents’ wishes. I thought he was joking of course, it was a whim which he would soon overcome I believed. I was a fool to think that I was right.


Up until a week ago I hadn’t thought much about the plans he’d made for the secret wedding for I truly believed that he’d already forgotten about the marriage. But two weeks ago my mom called me and said to me, ‘Did you hear?’ and without waiting for a reply she said, ‘They got married, the girl and your cousin!’ I could sense the excitement in her voice for she and the other aunties had a hot case file to be entirely discussed in their little whatsapp court. ‘Her parents have no idea about the marriage and she’s just going to return to her home like nothing happened’ she continued, I was instantly taken aback but deep inside I also secretly marveled at the display of balls my cousin had just made, nevertheless I didn’t fully agree with the drastic measures he’d employed.


A week later my cousin and a few of uncles finally go to the girl’s house and confess  to the secret marriage, not before keeping the girl at the safety of their own home first. Their talks lasted for several hours and my uncles returned home very late into the night. I thought this would become a huge problem but surprisingly the girl’s side of the family had all of a sudden accepted my cousin and were also will willing to hold a mediocre reception for the newlywed couple.



The reception was very hastily organized all the invitations printed and distributed within the same week. The big day finally arrives, there is not as much excitement in air, but the food was really great. It was a normal wedding, all was well until that one small incident which flipped the place upside down, fires started going off everywhere, but more about that later.



All the while when the guests went up to the stage and showered the newlywed 1`couple (Now excluding the one week when they were married for a week. Correction, secretly married) with gifts and money shoved into colorful envelopes me and my brother sat in the last few seats of the hall and talked about various things.


My eldest (Unmarried) brother was making fun of a young cousin of ours who is still studying in 8th grade. ‘Do you ride the train in your school?’ he asked the kid. ‘What do you mean?’ my cousin was confused. ‘The trains, don’t you ride them?’ my brother asked again. At this point I too was perplexed myself, why would my brother ask the kid if he rode on the train, in the school. As soon as my brother was done he looked into the kid’s eyes and in very little movements started moving back and forth. You see my dear readers, in India the trains are not very gentle to the passengers and as a result, no matter how much one tries he cannot stay still on a moving train. When my brother started moving back and forth in his chair I suddenly realized what he was doing, he was teasing the kid with a gesture only the adults or people who watch porn understood, as soon as I realized this I burst out laughing without a care for the guests sitting around us.


When all the guests were done eating and all of them left only the immediate families of both the sides still remained in the hall. In India we have a tradition wherein the bride’s family tearfully sends-off the bride to start a new life with the new family where she will bear kids for her husband, this tradition is called bidai. The entire night I hadn’t once seen the bride’s mother or her sisters talk to her, hence I wasn’t looking forward too much of crying tonight.


For the sake of this paragraph let’s assign names to the four characters, my cousin will be H1 whilst his wife is W1 and the eldest daughter will be W2 whereas her husband will be H2. The mother wouldn’t step close to her daughter, so her eldest daughter and her husband came forward, now while I was able to see what happened after she started talking to the bride I wasn’t quiet in the earshot of all of it, therefore all I could make out was that the W2 was expressing her disappointment on the shame and embarrassment W1 had brought upon their entire family and H1 didn’t quiet agree with this and lost his cool, he went on and told W2 to shut her trap.


 H2 had just seen his wife being insulted right in front of him and unless he didn’t do anything his manly honor would be deeply affected in other people’s eyes, for this reason he too hurled a few abuses at W1 and fueled the fire that would have burnt out if he had forsaken his useless sense of honor and just urged his wife to congratulate the brand new couple (Excluding the one week of secret marriage once again) and taken her away and gotten the fuck out of there.



 Within a few minutes W2 and H2 were storming out of the hall or to be more precise H2 was being dragged out of the hall by W2 who was holding H2 by his hand, in my opinion he kinda looked like a dog being dragged by his master. In midst of all this, all the dragging and the asking people to calm down I felt there a brief moment of complete silence, maybe just a second or two, yes exactly like the calm before a storm, and all of a sudden all hell broke loose.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

When nobody cares anymore.