You tell your story of the crazy Kochi wedding where the bride was so covered in gold that in the videos her face was not visible because of the glare. Your acquaintance tells you the story of the wedding where a family took a chef from an Italian restaurant in Delhi to their destination wedding in Venice (to cook Italian food, in case you were wondering). You tell your story of a wedding that crowded a huge palace in Rajasthan and your acquaintance raises the stakes with her story of a wedding in a hockey stadium in Gujarat. You tell the story of a destination wedding at Macau to where the family imported a camel and an elephant. Ha, says your acquaintance. She knows a wedding where the wedding video invitation was shot “in foreign” on a cruise ship and used an ad film director. That’s for the three-minute video invite.
And then there is the point at which the crazy avarice and gross display tips over from the ridiculous to the sublime. At least for me, it does.
I have never been to a truly out-of-control wedding. I feel sorry for myself that I recently missed a wedding in Rohtak where drones flew in the night sky taking in the guests and the multiple stages with multiple groups of performers. I really feel sorry that I wasn’t working along with my friend’s film crew at a wedding outside Delhi. My friend R goes into asthmatic fits laughing each time she describes this ‘fairytale wedding village’ created by a famous fashion designer for a local politician’s niece’s wedding.
At some point in the evening, she spotted the fashion designer standing half in and half out of an outdoor loo. He was helping the bride hold up the magnificent, extra heavy ghaghra he had designed so she could attend to a biological imperative.
The only time I was invited to a Crazy Wedding, I looked at the six-page invite to the three-day affair and the dress codes for each event and knew I couldn’t afford to go. I just didn’t have enough clothes. But I will cherish that invitation forever because it’d entered the category of stories you tell with relish and other people suspect you of making up — a bit like the ghost your friend’s friend swore he saw. Particularly because somewhere in that three-day reception to which thousands of people were flown down from around the world also featured (between Hindustani classical music concerts and other genteel cultural events) a screening of An Inconvenient Truth — a documentary about global warming.
“ The only time I was invited to a Crazy Wedding, I looked at the six-page invite to the three-day affair and knew I couldn’t afford to go. ”
But all of these fun and games are for cheap thrills-seeking bystanders only. For people who genuinely want simple weddings and may have harboured the idea that this is a reasonable desire, wedding planning comes as a shock. Your sweet, kindly mother suddenly is insistent that no, a Rs.3,000 sari, however pretty, or your grandmother’s 50-year-old Kanjeevaram silk, will just not do. Your father, who despises eating out, will suddenly burst into tears and leave the house if you say you don’t want to have an exorbitant wedding caterer. Family members may go nuclear at the bride or groom’s very first suggestion that maybe they should keep it uncomplicated. “You want to invite only 50 people?” They will laugh waves of contempt, wipe away their tears and then tell you to get real.
The simple-seeker (which could be bride, groom, or an unfortunate parent) at this point would have a flashback to their teen years when some dearly held political belief (men and women are equal, domestic workers should be treated well, casteism is bad) is stripped naked by the family with that scathing comment: you don’t know anything about real life.
How is that a social event — which involves improbable animals, glazed people seated on gilded thrones, the gathering of hundreds of people who don’t ordinarily meet and the supposition that a man and a woman will be devoted to each other for the rest of their lives — is an arbiter of reality?
Under the threat of the nuclear option, I only know one couple who have called their family’s bluff (not including all the couples who picked the even simpler choice of not having their families at their weddings, I mean). This couple was made of steel even in their early 20s. They told their families over and over again that they didn’t want a reception in a five-star hotel. It was against their personal beliefs. Their families guffawed and went ahead. On the day, though, the couple simply didn’t turn up. What happened next, I asked. My friend R giggled: her parents had a couple of friends whose 30th wedding anniversary it was. All the hundreds of guests were told to wish them instead.
Occasionally the truth may emerge even among tethered swans and flying camels. Here is a story I heard of a wealthy Mumbai family. They are the kind of family that cries for days each time a girl is born. And they approve hugely when even wealthier Indian families donate millions to American universities.
Every now and then a young person from this family would be wed and in the week of the wedding there’d usually be an Income Tax raid. Nowadays, this family will tell you, an Income Tax raid is almost shubh, a good omen. So in time this family took to whisking away the young couple and a mountain of the most decadent wedding gifts to an empty flat to hide out until the threat of raids had passed.
I always imagine that young couple, who barely know each other, looking out through a high window on to Worli Seaface, away from the rooms they are locked in and the objects that have trapped them together.
Talk about a reality check.
Nisha Susan is a writer and co-founder of the online feminist magazine The Ladies Finger
