What’s the one thing that makes a wedding fun?
Before I started writing this, I opened a glass bottle of panjiri and shovelled about three spoons of it into my mouth. This is what happens when you’re in Delhi to attend a wedding in the family. Panjiri is a powder made of wheat flour, packed with dry fruits and sugar and ghee and naturally, calories.
It’s supposed to be good for you during North Indian winter. In this case, homemade panjiri was a gift from “the boy’s side”. It came in a drawstring pouch of gold thread. And the bottle neck was scarfed with a gold ribbon. What’s a wedding without decorative touches?
****** Yesterday, I sat on a ‘mooda’ (a low bamboo stool) and got mehendi (henna) done in a courtyard that got the last bit of the afternoon sun. I chatted with the mehndi-applying man, while he chewed on beetle leaves and went about squiggling brown stuff on my palms. I asked him for how long he’s been in this line of work. He said 35 years.
When he started being a mehendi man, he didn’t know more than a handful of patterns. One learns to improvise, he told me. He sits in Kamla Nagar, Delhi University. Even during off-season, he manages to make Rs50-100 per palm, depending on the intricacies of the pattern. It can go up to Rs4,000. He doesn’t want his kids to get into this, though. They’re in school. They don’t know this work. Dad hasn’t taught them. He wants them to be engineers and earn well. Although, he did add, if this work was round the year, and not just during wedding season, he wouldn’t mind it too much. He seemed amused that women all around, fanning their arms, holding them up, were seeking out everything from mustard oil to lemon-sugar water and even Vicks to dab on their skin to deepen the colour of the henna. I joined the gang.
****** The under-slept father of the bride was in-charge of outdoor decor. His daughter had decided to get married in the house. The wedding ceremony is to be on the lawn in the house. The flowers, marigold, as fragrant as the ones outside the Union Metro Station in Deira, would hang down in lines from trees and across hedges. Medium-sized paper moon lights with low watt yellow bulbs would be suspended from tree branches. This isn’t a family that wants anything to do with glitter-sprayed orchids flown in from Bangkok or Bangalore. An especially beautiful touch, I thought, were the rock lights placed around the collection of bonsais in the garden. Lighting is everything, perhaps ruined momentarily when a floodlights bearing cameraman flicks on his switch and
You meet these people for three consecutive days and forge some kind of a rapport with some of them at least starts recording the contents of your plate, zooming into the biryani and the tikkas, but that apart, once you’ve got the flowers, the lighting, the dhol wala, the ambience is set.
The secret ingredient that makes (not just ‘Punju’) weddings fun though are the people. Some of whom you’ve never met, most who you know, a handful who you vaguely remember only from your own wedding, some who you want to avoid like the plague. And you meet these people for three consecutive days and forge some kind of a rapport with some of them at least. You dance with strangers, and unlikely relatives, bomb photographs, say namaste to anyone who looks like they were born 40 years before you, compliment everyone on how lovely they look, holler for the photographer to get this one and get minimal sleep for the better part of a week. For all the stress and delays and inevitable chaos, weddings in the family are unbearable fun. As long as you’re not footing the bill.
nivriti@khaleejtimes.com