Pre-Monsoon Wedding

I’ve spend two days of walking far, far in the heat in a new pair of flip flops – not the best idea. Last week I bought a kurta to wear to my Indian wedding today. A kurta is a long, traditional shirt – kind of a tunic. With it is worn pajama pants – pants tight at the ankles and huge at the waist and tied tight around the waist with a drawstring. I was really worried about being underdressed or misdressed at the wedding. But now I know, I could’ve bought a cheaper kurta – not that the one I bought was expensive. In India if a meal costs over $3, it’s trending toward expensive. So my kurta just seemed expensive when an hour taxi ride is $3. The entire outfit – pajama pants and hand-stitched kurta – was less than a shirt from Banana Republic.

I was invited to the wedding by my Singapore friend Christine, who was herself invited by her Singaporean professor – a Tamil man (Tamil being people who hail from the state of Tamil Nadu in extreme Southeast India; Tamils are also the ethnic group rebelling in Sri Lanka; the rebel group calls themselves the Tamil Tigers, and the U.S. considers them terrorists), called Rama, short for Professor Ramaswati, a very Tamil name. He is now a professor of marketing at Singapore Management University. Alvin and Jingyi came too. Getting married was the daughter of Rama's cousin.


The wedding was a little long. There was breakfast and lunch. The wedding was mainly the couple – who by the way met in grad school at Indiana University – sitting amid flowers and shirtless priests. The priests chanted, and every once in a while they did activities with the bride and groom. They dropped water from leaves into a fire burning in a large iron bowl. The priests tied strings around the bride’s and groom’s hands. The bride and the groom also walked around the area where the priests were sitting. It was very ritualistic, and our Americanized bride and groom often looked bored and confused performing these rituals.



This wedding was far out in the suburbs. Far, far out. I took the train, then I tried to take a rick to the temple. The rick dropped me off at the entrance to an alley and told me to walk down the alley and to turn left at the train tracks and that’s where I’d find the temple. This wasn’t the worst slum, but I was a white guy in traditional Indian dress in a slummy-area, and I must’ve looked lost. The temple was very small and could probably fit 7 people max. The men there didn’t speak English, and a man stopped to help. He didn’t speak English either. He probably stopped because he was so shocked to see the freakish site of the white guy in traditional dress in a slummish area on the railroad tracks. Then another guy stopped. Then another guy. They asked if I was a Hindi wallah. I said, “Nay.” This slum was under a bridge that passed over the railroad tracks. I walked up to the bridge and took another rick and found the temple. I was about half hour late. No problem.

The kurta was not made of breathable material, and as the day worn on, I was sweatier and sweatier, and it started to smell like a gym bag inside my kurta. And the main outlook for this stench was out the narrow neck right into my face. We took a taxi to a shopping mall where I bought a counterfeit Zara shirt and a pair of factory-second Banana Republic chinos. The pants are an unidentifiable gray-green color, and this bizarre color is probably the reason they ended up in this “Western clothes” emporium (the store was called Tomato, which I guess is a rip-off of the popular-and-expensive-in-India European designer clothing store called Mango).


There was no silverware with lunch, and yes we are eating off plantain leaves; this is a very traditional Tamil meal.

South Indians tend to be much more conservative than North Indians. Their weddings are also more sober afairs, and there was no dancing. There were two short songs sung by a lady without a microphone. One of these songs included a few notes played on an electric guitar. I guess this is as festive as they get. There was no bar.

Part II
Smelling less bad in my new clothes, we watched Oceans 13. The mall was so far out we were actually driving through countryside. We were heading west. On the left, the south side was all new construction. On the right was a scrub landscape with small hills in the background. Bombay is on a peninsula and can only grow north. We were in the exurbs. In these exurbs, unlike in American exurbs, apartment towers are being built -- not big houses on lots of land.

I got wrapped up in Ocean’s 13. It of course takes place in the U.S. and the cast is of course all American. When the movie was over I said to myself, as if waking from a dream where I was in the U.S., “Oh yeah. I’m in India.” A few interesting facts: theaters play the national anthem before films, there are no preview trailers before films, and there is an intermission.

After the film we went to the Hyper Mart cause I wanted to buy peanut butter. There was no peanut butter, and shopping there was madness. It is Sunday night – maybe grocery shopping is a Sunday activity. This store was as busy as a Bombay train station or Times Square subway station at 6pm in the evening. The store was an absolute ocean of people, and shopper traffic circulated like a thick, clumpy sludge. And there weren’t friendly smiles in every aisle with awkward Hello Sirs like there were during my other Hyper Mart experience. Fighting the traffic at the Hyper Mart is like fighting the traffic anywhere else in Mumbai. One must resign oneself to a slow rate of travel even if one pushes one’s way past slower travelers. To do so, one need emulate the way Indians rudely push their way through wherever there are masses of people – I guess you just got to do this because there are so many people everywhere. Have I mentioned the road traffic?

You should see the mad, mean surge to get on and off the suburban trains. The meanness of this train surge is exacerbated because men don’t move from the doorway into the train to let others on, because standing at the door is the prime spot. The doors don’t close and air blows you cooler when you’re standing at the open door. Because men are always bunched at the doors, trains usually look from the outside like they’re so full they’re bursting at the seams, even when they’re not. Men just want to stand in the doorway rather than move into the train car.