Skip to main content

Getting Wed

For reasons unknown to me and most of our extended family, one of our relatives is determined to have a big fat Indian wedding for his only son early last month. Just about everyone was begging off for understandable reasons. The more people that didn't or couldn't be there the greater the pressure of the inner circle to been seen and be counted. Postponing weddings seems to be just as hard now as it was back in my day. The bride's family was getting super-skittish and seeing these pandemic driven postponements as lack of firm commitment from the other side. When I found out my parents were being counted  upon to show up in person at this event, I had to intervene. Saying a hard no would be easy but that is what you do to burn bridges with relatives for good. This is their only child and if all goes well the only marriage there will be in their family. So they want it to count, show off their prosperity which was hard fought and earned. I get all that. 

This is the moment they have been preparing for a couple of decades and now no one is excited about showing up. Having lived away and apart from all this, I have forgotten a lot about the level of stress a wedding in the family can produce. How what we do or choose not to do on the occasion is remembered to death. Some of the grudges can transit generations "The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interrèd with their bones". 

The maneuvering it took for days and weeks to keep my parents out of harm's way while keeping their connections undisturbed in the family completely wore me out. Yet again, it made me wonder what people hope to accomplish with these grandiose weddings that are meant to be the axis upon which their life turns. Just a year out none of this will matter. I wish there was more emphasis on teaching the young couple how to make and keep a strong marriage, help them understand the importance of giving to each without reservation. 

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha...
5 comments
Read more

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t...
111 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques...
6 comments
Read more