Getting Married

'It takes a village' is the title of a well-known, Grammy winning book by Ms. Hilary Clinton. I have not read the book, but from what I have read about it, the title actually refers to a proverb that goes along the lines "It takes a village to raise a child."

The same can also be said of getting married in India. It takes a village (or more) to get two people married to each other. Even if they are willing to get married to each other to begin with. 

One believes that getting-the-girl is the tough part and that after she finally says "Yes", the struggles are over. What one does not realize is that the troubles are only beginning. True, one could look at it stoically and believe that whatever it is, it will bound to have a happy ending with the launching of the happy couple into blissful matrimony. Of course it will. It mostly does get over. How much patience, sense, sociability and neurons you have left over is subject to debate.

I told my folks about the girl in question saying "Yes."

All hell broke loose.

The Date
I was on the phone with my mother when I told her and suddenly, preparations were in full swing: sounds of the house being re-painted and decorations and lights being hammered in started in the background.

The first thing my mother wanted to know was when should we fix a date. I was in favour of a long-ish engagement, say 12-18 months, before we started looking for a date. My Mother wanted to get it done the following week. After a few frantic phone calls to friends, relatives, astrologers, caterers and prospective venues, the wedding date was fixed for four months later. I was informed of this counter-offer since the following week seemed unacceptable to me.

I should have known a wedding happens on war footing. It requires lots of planning, organizing, inviting, arranging, ritualizing, hosting and a little bit of meditating, mediating, intrigue-ing and steering. Getting married the following week would have meant a five person wedding, which in hindsight, would have suited me just fine and would not have suited my family at all. Naturally, they declined to elucidate this particular point. As a negotiating point, four months was preferable to next week, so I agreed.

Hindu weddings take place on certain auspicious days, which for weddings cluster together about twice or thrice a year. After we had settled on a date, Ma let it slip that four months is the minimum time she needed to conduct a successful campaign. I needed more data to be successful at this marriage negotiation business.

Leave
Next came the question of duration of the marriage. Being slightly naive, I volunteered that I thought it was permanent, for life, as it were. Ma told me not be facetious. The question she wanted answered was for how many weeks would I be home in order to get married? How many days was I intending to take leave from work?

I was thinking in terms of a week rather than weeks. My cousin, Don, the self appointed consigliere to my mother had me know that the minimum acceptable or required was four weeks. Less than that and the implicit understanding was that the ceremony might not be completed.

I let him know that four weeks was impossible. It would be hard to explain to my company that I wanted to take a month off in three months' time. A mournful silence followed.

"What if you broke a leg or were medically unfit?" he asked.

"In that case, I would not be able to go to office."

"That can be arranged," he said.

We grew up together as kids, and had our odd fights and disagreements, but breaking my leg before my marriage was going a bit too far I thought. I told him it would look pretty bad if I had a broken leg and had to hobble around in my wedding.

He said that he was thinking more on lines of typhoid or jaundice. I thought it would hardly be a good advertisement for a wedding dinner. "Oh and by the way the groom has typhoid. Did you try the dessert?" And besides, I didn't think it possible to get married while inflicted with these diseases and I did not see how or why I should risk it anyway.

He said I was missing the point. He would have it arranged. I graciously declined the munificent offer.

We settled on 16 days, for that was the maximum period that would ensure I still had a job when I returned duly married. 

Invitations
Indian weddings are a spectacle. The chief item on display is the couple getting hitched. Convention dictates that all guests need to leave their mark, so their "Kilroy was here moment" is captured by getting a picture taken with the newly married couple. So as many pictures as there are invitees is the thumb rule. There are also smug, busybody, failed movie-director, pompous photographers to deal with.

"No Sir! This way, look this way, drop your shoulder...yes face her...madam please look up...into the distance, left hand here on her shoulder...both of you look into the sky...look up and yes...now once more...from this angle." And the perennial "Once more please" for anything that has just been done, like a smile, a handshake, an exchange of presents, a hug, an exchange of garlands...anything at all. Worst of all "Smile Please!" The 'Please' there is just to add a syllable. By no stretch of imagination is it a request. That is why weddings nowadays take so long - everything needs to be done twice for photographers.

I hate getting pictures taken and I hate being told to do stuff by pesky photographers. Yet, I could not get rid of this hazard in my wedding. The only way to reduce the suffering was to reduce the number of people invited.

My mother wanted to invite everyone she knew, or had ever known. About an equal number of people seemed to be on the initial invitation list from my Bride's side. All told, it seemed to be a significant percentage of the population of the country, since in India guests are not invited by person. They are invited by family. The family is an accepted extension of an individual at a wedding or any social occasion.

I came across some information that I thought might be useful to my cause - the state we lived in had a little known and less implemented law that stated marriage parties could not be more than 25 people. Unfortunately it turned out that the venue was about three inches on the wrong side of the state border.

All my efforts came to nought. I am left with a wedding album that runs into six volumes and weighs more than my three year old son does.


The Preparation
A general feeling of excitement masquerades as a part of the ceremonies months in advance. Actual ceremonies begin in the household only about a week before the day of the wedding. First, guests arrive en masse. People you know, people you don't, people you hope don't know you, people you get along with, people you don't get along with. All available space is taken up by mattresses. It becomes like a big camping exercise. To be fair even if it does make things a bit inconvenient (especially to folks used to the western concept of 'space'), it is a bit exciting.

Responsibilities are assigned on the basis of role (maternal uncle: clothes; sisters: tie the turban etc.) and skill (driving license: designated driver, pick up and drop guests, get stuff; sociable: drop off invitations etc.)

My bride-to-be had very conveniently switched sides on the matter of making the wedding a low-key affair and even declined my suggestion of elopement. She evidently likes to have her pictures taken.


The Clothes
Getting clothes is an event in itself. Apparently the thumb rule for wedding attire is that you have to buy something horribly expensive that you cannot hope to wear again in public in your life and you have to go to about seven places (for men) and seventeen places (for women) before you decide to buy something.  And you have to do all of this with a small entourage to help you. Everyone has an opinion. And five people do not have five opinions. They have thirty seven. My offer of buying a suit that would be useful later in life was deemed 'outlandish'.

In addition, my bride said she didn't feel I was too involved in the wedding, so I had to accompany her entourage with a small entourage of mine to look at what she proposed to wear. We criss-crossed the city in about three cars hopping between places, markets and colours. I learnt that there are infinitely more shades of red that there were all the colours in my ken.

I was getting desperate and my bride rejected another plea for elopement.

We did manage to buy something to wear. I wasn't sure what purpose it would serve for the rest of my life, but I was the proud (?) owner of a cream coloured sherwani. Clothing had finally been struck off the list.

The Ceremony
North Indian weddings are either held on sweltering hot days or on bitterly cold nights. And they have to last till pretty much when the Sun is getting ready to start the next day. This also has been the cause of dispute with my wife. Our wedding invitation asked people to be at a venue on the third day of February, while in fact we did not manage to get married till it was pretty much the fourth day. So technically, the third is the anniversary of our wedding invitation while the fourth is for the actual wedding. As history is written by the winners, the date she puts forward - the one on the invitation - stands.

The ceremony itself is clouded by the fact that one is hungry, thirsty, cold and uncomfortable (they made me take off my sweater and muffler on the flimsy grounds that no one wore them on a sherwani) with people milling about, eating and drinking, trying to pull your leg, getting pictures taken, and photographers asking you to smile. A few cousins and friends gamely try to keep you company but after a while the monotony and photographers manage to drive them off.

After a few hours of blinking-into-flashes later the actual ceremony began. From what little I have seen of Church weddings on screen, the activity taking the longest time seems to be the bride walking down the aisle. The actual wedding seems to get over really fast. We had nothing like it.

Our priest started at the beginning. Of everything. He worked his way from the big bang to the birth of civilization, counting along the way various miracles God had wrought, including among others, the various apocalyptic events that have shaken the earth. After what seemed like an eternity, he came to the householders duty-book and proceeded to take us through it word-by-word. Apparently there are separate chapters for husbands and wives. Once and only once I have completely agreed to each clause, to uphold my part in the marriage does the bride make an appearance, whereupon the process seems to start again, this time assuring her that I have agreed to do my bit.

Then we started on the exhaustive list of her duties.

Since the book was in Sanskrit, the priest would first say/read it out as is (no one understood), then do a live translation into Hindi and then to make sure we got the gist of it, illustrate it by an example or two.

Sitting cross-legged for such a long time, I couldn't feel my toes any longer.

I had heard of priests being open to "influence" and who had, upon receiving such influence, completed the ceremony in a tenth of the time, but our family priest was the sort of character to whom it was impossible to make such advances.

Finally after an age came the time when we were to go round the sacred fire and be pronounced married. I think the revolutions around the sacred fire was essential to normalize the blood flow in my legs. All we were to do now was to take everyone's blessings. Everyone meaning everyone brave enough to still be at the ceremony. Since both of us come from fairly large families it meant a further three quarters of an hour before we could finally be on our way, cold, aching and married.

The ceremonies started a week earlier. On the day itself, we left for the venue at seven in the evening and arrived back home at five in the morning. 

Addendum

The crude divorce rate in India (according to the page on Wikipedia) is 0.11 on 1000. It means that for every 100,000 people, 11 get divorced. This is an extremely low figure. To illustrate how low a figure it is, the same figures for a few other countries are: the United States 360; United Kingdom 280; Singapore 78; China 128; Russia 442; Australia 267; Germany 259; Japan 211. The only other country in the same vicinity is Sri Lanka with 15.

The extremely low rate of divorce coupled with the fact that India has 1.2 billion people, which is 412 million people more than all the countries listed above barring China is what makes it astonishing. All these people stay married or at least those that end up getting married, do stay married, mostly. 
The theory is no one wants to do it twice.

The Houseguest

I figured when my wife went off for a couple of weeks with our newborn son on a meet-greet-recuperate-gain-lose-weight visit home, I would be back to the joys of bachelorhood. The days would be cool and short. The evenings would be long and loud. I would renew acquaintance with sundry bar-tenders and sidewalks from whom domesticity had sundered me.

Needless to say, things did not quite materialize as I had visualized. The drinking buddies were married and settled. For them (too) it was no longer booze-bottle, pub crawls and occasional skirt, rather the milk-bottle, night-changes and occasional burp. The bar-tenders had new winos. The sidewalks were paved over, or had new squatters – teens whose folks ought to know what they are up to (Really! In my day, the youth showed a bit more restraint and a lot more responsibility).

My wife was off for three weeks. She left late on Thursday evening. Friday morning I jumped out of bed and headed to work, looking forward to a good evening ahead. By Friday afternoon when I had made a few phone calls, my spirits were dampened. Folks were busy - kids needed to go to piano or swimming lessons, bills needed to be paid, siestas needed to be taken...in short the folks I used to paint the town red with in my youth had plain run out of paint.

A fruitless weekend loomed large. Beaten, I rented movies. Friday morphed into Saturday and I had revisited such Buster Keaton classics as The General and Battling Butler, when I decided to look at the things-to-do list my wife had left behind. 

She is awesome! She had even catalogued it A through Z to make it easier for me. I started at the back - Washing, clothes as opposed to Washing, drapes and Washing, dishes (ongoing). I was eating off a newspaper so the third was off. I decided to chuck the list (for the time being).

The apartment we lived in came with a front-loading washing machine, on which was mounted a front-loading clothes drier. Both were fitted outside the kitchen in a small utility area, just across the refrigerator. As I walked over to the fridge to get a drink, I saw that the door of the drier (atop the washer) was ajar. I went to close it. I saw then that there was a pigeon in it.

The fellow was probably taking shelter from the storm. It had rained in the morning. "It was a pity the pigeon was there, Sweets," I imagined myself saying, "I thought I would wait for the pigeon to leave before doing the Washing, clothes. Unfortunately this also prevented me from doing the Iron, clothes as well." A likely story, fortunately true. I decided to do Eating, ice-cream and Watching, movies instead.

Sunday morning saw the bird firmly lodged in the same place. I decided I had to at least try to get it off the premises (Time was on my side - there were several days for me to make the apartment bird free). I put some rice on the ledge opposite the drier. This didn't tempt the dove. Some research was needed, since I wasn't too familiar with the culinary habits of pigeons. Maybe I had the wrong stuff. The wikipedia page on pigeons showed a photograph with the caption "Pigeons selectively eating wheat instead of rice grains." I had the wrong cereal. Wheat posed a slight problem. While we did consume wheat, it wasn't in the grain form. I tried cornflakes with no result. In fact he ignored all of the breakfast cereals I had at home except he gurgled a bit at fruit loops. Maybe this was it. I deposited a small pile of the coloured loops on the ledge and waited. The pigeon looked at me, cooed throatily and bobbed up and down. It seemed he wanted privacy to eat. I wanted him to eat with me present so I could close the door to the drier and evict him. I think he figured out this Machiavellian plan of mine since he waited where he was. Patience was his strong suit. Ten minutes of squatting on the kitchen floor peering from behind the door broke my resistance and I decided to go out for breakfast. When I returned that night after a particularly long repast involving three restaurants, two bookstores and one bar, the cereal had disappeared, the pigeon had not.

As I left for work next morning, I felt certain he would push off by evening (cars to re-decorate, friends to meet).

The next three days were a blur for me, what with meetings and planning and conference calls and eating out. Thursday night as I entered home, I remembered I had a houseguest. I went over to the drier with some trepidation. The pigeon was cooing contentedly inside. I wondered why it was called cooing. It seemed more like burbling. Maybe the pigeon and the Jabberwock were related.

The unwanted houseguest was still there. I needed to take care of it, before wife and child returned, lest I be accused of turning the apartment into a menagerie. I decided to give it one more day. The weekend was almost upon us. I'd take care of the dove infestation then.

Saturday morning came and I put my plan into action. I would do Washing, clothes, the drier was not needed in the washing part of the exercise and the washing machine made a hell of a racket and shook and really hard. It would be like staying on a bucking horse for our pigeon. He was sure to be scared off.

I loaded the machine and made myself scarce. I was sure in the ninety minutes it took for the washing machine to run the clothes through the customized obstacle course would be enough to get rid of the pigeon. I had nothing better to do at home, so I pushed off to have breakfast. I came back in a couple of hours. The house was silent. The machine had finished its program.

The bird was still there. Looking rather smug, I must admit. The only explanation I could think of was that it must have flown back in once the bucking washer stopped, and I had not been around to close the door to prevent it entering the drier again.

I hung out the washing to dry inside the apartment on the dining table, the chairs, the living room coffee table, the fridge. I had washed a big load because that is when the machine rocks the most. The apartment got a bit damp inside.

I had to get the infernal bird out. I needed another load of clothes. I stripped off all the bedsheets, clothes that needed to be aired (if they needed to be aired, they could be washed too, I checked off Air, winter clothes from the list), the drapes - anything in remote need of a wash.

I put in the second load for washing. I thought I saw the pigeon look a trifle alarmed. Must be like an earthquake for him. This time, I braved the damp, cold, hunger and other depredations to wait out the ninety minutes. The washing machine started humming, slowly gaining volume. The initial part of the cycles were more stop and start. It was at the end of eighty minutes that the real action started when the machine tried to get every last bit of moisture from the washed clothes by spinning madly. It rocked and jumped and hopped furiously making loud thumping noises. There was no sign of the pigeon. It retreated further inside. No one told the dumb bird that during an earthquake you should leave buildings and confined places.

I now had another massive washing load to dry with no place to dry it on.

I cleaned the kitchen counters and the window sills and the bay windows and draped all these newly created clean spaces with the washing. Basically any space I could find. By the evening I was pooped.

It was time to call in for external help. I called up Bur. He was an old pal of mine - we went to college together. He was a resourceful person. I met him for dinner and took him through the problem over a few drinks. He understood the gravity of the situation and said he would come over the following morning.

Bur came over on Sunday morning, all business-like and reviewed the situation. "Do you have beer?" I nodded. 

"Ok, lets get to work. I suggest we put the drier on - the heat and rotation will drive the pigeon out."

"What if it doesn't?" The last thing I wanted was to have to clean a dead bird out of the drier.

"It will. It's not stupid."

I reminded him that pigeons were the family of birds that gave us such stalwarts as the the Dodo.

He asked me to open a couple of beers to help him think. We had a couple of beers and after a while he announced grandly, "The pigeon problem has been solved!" We went out to take a look inside the drier. The problem hadn't been solved. Our friend had surreptitiously turned on the power to the drier. We discovered that the machine's safety mechanism did not allow it to be switched on while the door was open. Bur didn't take too kindly to failure.

I shot down his suggestion of closing the door and trying for roast pigeon. And if it works, you can market these as ovens - it is big enough to do a turkey in.

He clapped his hands and made hissing and shooing noises outside the drier. Apart from amusing the pigeon, they did nothing much.

"How about we get a cat?"

I told him that I when I said I did not want to remove a dead bird from the drier, I meant the statement to include not having to clean out feathers and blood as well, just in case he thought otherwise.

I think he got the drift. We had also run out of beer by this time, so Bur decided to push off. 

"I'll think about this and let you know," he added helpfully at the door.

I was on my own again. Me and the pigeon.

There were under two weeks left for my wife to return. And there there were a good six months remaining in the lease of the apartment. I had to get rid of the pigeon.

At office the next day I asked a colleague what to do for animal infestations. "What do you want to get rid of? Cockroaches?" I told her the animal in question was a bit bigger. "Rats?" She asked me. "Still bigger," I told her. She gave me the phone number of a company that got rid of monkeys. I decided I would feel pretty stupid calling them to remove a pigeon from the house and threw the number away.

That night, I thought desperate times call for desperate measures. I set an alarm for two in the morning. I selected Sweet Child of Mine as the song to shake the pigeon out of its slumber. If it didn't want to go the easy way, I would just need to make life a little less comfortable.

I managed to crawl out of bed by about a half past two carrying my music box. The darned bird was awake. I played Sweet Child of Mine on full volume in front of the it anyway. It bobbed in a manner that seemed to me to be keeping time to the music. I played some more loud music going from Pearl Jam to Metallica to Deep Purple. I even tried Louis Armstrong and his horn. I stopped when I was positive the pigeon was enjoying the songs. I couldn't sleep the rest of the night and consequently, getting through office the next day required immense doses of fortitude, a bad temper and caffeine.

Things did not get better when I found a letter from the building's management office asking me to explain the "Sustained loud music that was played from 2.35 am to 3.05 am". They also told me that this was a residential building (Sorry! I thought this was where the Rock DJ auditions were held) and that next time they would take a much stricter view of this. I bumbled through an apology mentioning 'short-circuit', 'electronic malfunction', 'won't happen again', 'very unfortunate', 'irresponsible machines' 'will get to bottom of this technology malfunction' etc. The lady at the office was kind enough not to press the matter. 

I had run out of options. Things got so bad that the next couple of days I caught myself making mewing sounds crawling under the drier hoping to scare the damn bird off.

I didn't know when it ate, if at all it did or if was some sort of mystical pigeon that survived only on the karmic forces flowing through the earth for it never seemed to step out of the drier.

By the time the last weekend before wife returned rolled by, I was ready to have a drink with the pigeon. I took my beer to the utility area. I talked to the pigeon and told him in no uncertain terms, that while his stay had been most enjoyable, there comes a time when to maintain friendship you have to ensure that boundaries are maintained. I think he understood.

The next day I came back from work to find him on the ledge opposite the drier. I made no sudden movements. I curbed the instinct to rush outside and slam the drier door shut. I just went to the fridge and got a beer and had another chat with the pigeon. After my next beer I even got him some fruit loops (he didn't have any though).

The next day, he left. The drier was empty.

I went through the events in my head. I now had all the possible washing done, including clothes and drapes. I had cleaned almost every visible area of the house to dry the clothes on, had managed to get rid of most of the beer and old cereal, had even aired clothes (okay, washed 'em too) and reorganized the cabinets looking for stuff to entice the pigeon. It seemed to me the pigeon was in league with my wife to get me to work. It was fortunate the beer diplomacy worked. One man to another, the pigeon understood the perils of being a husband. Only the other day I found it puffing, cooing and stamping in front of a very disinterested female pigeon. I can only wish him the best.

As for the remainder of the list my wife left for me to do: I went through the rest of the apartment to make sure there were no other lurking creatures to make me work.

The Bill Run

I sprinted down the road as fast as my busted knees would allow me to. I was winded. I had been running for ten minutes. I checked my watch - 12 minutes to go to H-hour. Couldn't afford to stop, I had just a couple of hundred yards to go. I jogged, wending my way through the parked cars and turned round the corner. Luckily, there was no one there. I inserted my card in the machine and started paying the bills. With three minutes to midnight, I printed the receipt. All well till next month, when I would need to undertake the bill-run again.

When I got home, my wife was waiting.

"Where did you go?"

"Couldn't sleep. Went for a walk." Not a complete lie. I could not sleep, technically, since the time I woke up with a start, realizing there were bills to be paid and that I had about half an hour to pay them in, before fines kicked in. I stuffed the bills into my pocket, wore my shoes and sneaked out. I was hoping she'd be still be asleep by the time I returned. That way she'd never know of the last-minute payments. 

This bill payment is a bone of contention between us.

We have two types of bills to be paid: Those that can be paid online, requiring me to be at an internet connection with bank login devices handy before midnight on certain dates and those that need me to hare down to a machine with the deadline fast approaching.

For some undefined reason, I cannot pay bills in advance. I have tried, and I have failed. A number of times.

It just doesn't feel right to pay the money when it doesn't need to be paid for another two weeks. Or ten days. Or seven days. Or three days. Or till tomorrow.

I feel the temporal gap between me receiving the bill and the last day for payment written in it as such a vast chasm as to be unbridgeable by the mere passing of time. I can't put the reason why I do not want to pay the credit card company or the gas company say, two days in advance.

It is definitely not the interest I earn with the bank. The princely rate that my bank pays me, compounded by the relative penury of my account deems this monthly addition to my savings to be equal to an amount, more or less, that if I were to convert to specie, I would require about half a minute's worth of work with sandpaper on a coin of any denomination. And then save the shavings, not the remnants of the coin.

Is it pride in the fact that I remember these deadlines (self-created issues, as my in-house therapist calls them)? Maybe.

Do I like being jolted awake to remember looming last dates (with me it almost always boils  down to last hours and minutes) and then undertaking a sprint? Not really.

Occasionally I miss the cushion and hit the hard ground. There have been a number of reasons for that - such as the machine would not work (that one time I did not leave enough time to go to another machine), the website was under maintenance (can you believe it! that too in this day and age), the internet connection was down (these last two should actually be accepted for a deadline extension), there was a queue at the machine (three morons who could not manage their time better).
Only twice was I forced to admit that I had forgotten.

In the past my in-house therapist used to have a fit then and still does occasionally, but time and tide have mellowed her. She knows I hate all forms of exercise so if I am leaving the home and giving evasive answers, it must be a bill that needs paying.

Each time after dinner I busily and in as low key manner as possible open my laptop or wear my keds and try and push off, my wife wants to know if I am paying bills.

I nod.
Next she wants to know why I don't pay them when they come in or since I am perfectly aware of when the bills come in, why don't I set a date for paying them and make my life easier.

I nod again. This time to acknowledge the truth in the statement.

All this makes sense. Her suggestions are eminently sensible and sustainable and that is why she got to be the in-house therapist that I needed most in my life.

But it is not implementable.

I do not know why it is so.

I have tried - I once sat down a week early to pay bills. I opened my laptop and went to the web. Next thing I know the deadline was a few hours away and I was collecting pieces of paper and logging in to the bank's website.

I paid the bills that time and then I called for help to find the lost memories of the intervening six days.

I lay down on the couch. I tried to remember what had happened - at first the memories were sketchy - but my therapist is good.

Yes, a cricket game was on. I had missed most of the match but had to catch up on what happened.

No, I did not watch the highlights - I read the ball-by-ball commentary on cricinfo to get a quick view of what happened - 90 overs with comments, plays, scorecard, statistics analysis and other news, via of course, the quick check of scorecard links of past matches somehow connected to this one that are liberally sprinkled in the commentary.

Then I went to the news sites - figured out what was happening in the world in general, beyond the cricket ground.

Then I checked my e-mail and office e-mail. I wrote some replies and finally added half a cent's worth of stuff to my blog.

By this time the day was over. It was time to catch the highlights on TV and then to sleep - the peaceful sleep of one who had achieved something - I had managed to read the commentary of an entire day's play and had even managed to re-play the key moments of the test in my head.

The bills were forgotten.

They had lost the age-old battle between the important and the urgent.

This same went on for the next six days: office during the day, 'randomizer initializing' at night, till forsaking the mantle of 'important' that the bills habitually wore, they became at once, URGENT.

And then I paid them.