Travel Blog: An Indian Wedding
India, Day 9
A wedding? In India? I was excited when my host informed me that we would be in attendance at a wedding after our morning outreach on day nine. Staying at a home in most areas of India means that you surrender your ability to plan anything longer than eight hours ahead of time. It's just the way the culture operates. In Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart's Rick has a great exchange with a woman in his cafe:
Yvonne: Where were you last night? Rick: That's so long ago, I don't remember. Yvonne: Will I see you tonight? Rick: I never make plans that far ahead.
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Those lines are snappy and witty to hear in a film, but in India, that attitude is more often than not a region-wide reality. By this point, I was accustomed to surprises in my daily itinerary, and I was happy to learn that this surprise in particular was going to be a lot of fun.
Getting to the wedding took some doing; there hadn't been much rain in our area, but there hadn't been a lot of direct sunlight either. As such, the roads were still slurries of muck, always at least five inches deep. To make travel even more fun, we had a little competition for road space as we pulled up to the group of houses in the village where the wedding was to take place. There was a bus parked on one side of the road and several tractors and ox carts going back and forth, and our faithful Bolero had to take the outer edge of the road to get into the village complex. The truck got stuck for a minute or so, but our intrepid Driver was able to negotiate his way through it.
We disembarked and I took in the scene. I've photographed a lot of weddings, but I've never photographed an Indian wedding ceremony. I've always wanted to, but the opportunity never presented itself back home. And now, I was at an Indian wedding, in India. A Christian Indian wedding, no less. Life is funny like that.
An impromptu wedding venue had been constructed in the courtyard between some houses. An immense tent hung from poles on two sides, with the other two sides attached to the houses. Inside, sunlight filtered through the fabric to wash everything and everyone beneath it in an electric, technicolor glow. Musical instruments were held in readiness for the ceremony, while the pre-ceremony environment was supercharged with music from a boombox connected to a set of speakers that blared chants and songs for a good quarter-mile.
The ceremony began about an hour after we arrived, and the girls raised their voices in a chanted refrain as the musicians began making live music. The groom entered from stage right. He was dressed entirely in white, except for his bright ride Puma sneakers. The bride emerged after nearly another hour of music. The music had died down and the ceremony was underway, with a short "homily" from the officiant preceding the vows proper. The content, all delivered in Hindi, was entirely lost on me of course, but I was content to observe the goings-on and assume that the message wasn't too different than the wedding messages I hear back home.
We had to leave before the end of the ceremony, sadly. The wedding began a full two hours behind schedule (even in India, that seemed pretty extreme to me), and Driver had appeared at our elbows to whisper that he was only on the clock for a little while longer, and we needed to move on if we wanted him to drive us home. So, we left early.
I was intrigued by the expressions on the bride and groom's faces. Unlike the weddings I've attended and photographed for years back home, I saw no signs of emotion in the couple. There are usually some hints of shyness or happiness on one or both faces, but on these two, I saw only stoicism. I asked one of my host's colleagues about this.
"Why did the bride and groom look like that?"
"Like what?" He seemed surprised.
"They looked sad."
He nodded. "Ah, yes. They are actually very happy, but they are leaving their families now, so for that reason they are looking sad."
Intriguing.
Travel Blog: India, Day 9 - More village outreach.
In my recaps of India, day eight, I began to wonder if my journal entries and camera date stamps were both out of step with the true chronology of how events transpired. It seemed impossible that so much could have occurred in a single twenty-four hour span of time. I checked and double-checked, but as best as I can tell, the day really was that packed. I have said before that my second host's primary goal, outside of the matters pertaining to his orphanage, is village outreach. In that vein, we continued on with our projects, speaking to a large group of women and children the day after our race back to the village. This was a special place for my host, as we spoke from the courtyard of his sister's house.
This project actually brought with it a pleasant surprise; that of seeing a colleague of my host's whom I had met on my first trip to India three years previous. Seeing both him and his family was an unexpected treat, and I was happy to find that they fared well.
Travel Blog: India, Day 8 - The Market
You ever watch a travel show on TV and watch the likes of Anthony Bourdain stroll through an obscure street market in Southeast Asia? Sitting at home in Pensacola, Florida, by far one of the most sensible conservative shopping environments one could find in the continental US, I always wondered if the markets in other countries were really that busy and colorful in other places, or if the TV crews purposefully shot them to look as exotic and non-Western as possible. Well, on this last trip to India, I found out. The markets really are that incredible.
After our harrowing race back to town, I accompanied my host through the back streets of the neighborhood to emerge in a brightly lit square, where the town market was in full swing. Again, my presence caused a bit of a splash. Several people followed me around to observe me in the most transparent way possible, eyes narrowed and mirroring my movements. I'm usually okay with the Indian street stare-downs, but I have to confess that it got a little old by this point; I actually started to wish that one unpleasant-looking codger in particular would make a move on me just so I could knock him down. But no harm was done on either side.
In most of India, meals are curried or fried. If the meal is an Indian fry-up, it's a pretty simple affair: chicken and oil, plus whichever vegetables are going to be served with the rice. Curry, however, requires quite a few ingredients, and they are usually bought fresh that day. The staple shopping list for a full curry meal, assuming that you don't have any herbs laying around, includes:
- Meat (usually chicken, sometimes goat or mutton)
- Onions
- Garlic
- Ginger
- Chiles
- Assorted vegetables
The above ingredients are simmered in a particular order in a bit of oil, spiced with turmeric and a few other seasonings, and eventually become a curry whose base ingredients are cooked down so as to be barely recognizable, but still incredibly tasty. My hosts all over the country were desperately hoping that I wouldn't be able to handle the spiciness of their curries--"is it too spicy for you?" seems to be the country's national motto--but I am proud to say that I was always able to eat Indian curry. The cumulative effect was less than optimal after a month, but I definitely enjoyed the the individual meals.
India, Day 8 - A Race.
I've written before about Indian traffic, an ongoing and constant phenomenon that would initiate wetting of the pants in most Western drivers. Lest you think that the highways in India always operates on a basis of "just the way it is," think again. Our driver, simply called "Driver" by my host, has been driving for twenty years. He is good. Very, very good. He can nudge cattle out of the way with a fender with less effort than it takes for most US drivers to coax sparks out of their cigarette lighters. Every now and again he would execute a particularly daring lane change and throw a grin in my direction, just to let me know that he drove to impress. Even in our language-barriered relationship, we became friends with a few common gestures and the phrase "no problem." And, at the end of this afternoon, I discovered that he takes it very personally when he is not allowed to rule the road uncontested.
We were on our way home, passing all other vehicles as per the norm, when a motorcyclist stubbornly refused to let Driver pass. Driver's eyes narrowed into a determined squint, and it was on like Donkey Kong. The Bolero revved, my host laughed in the backseat, and our afternoon turned into a Bollywood remake of Bullitt. Driver attempted pass after pass, but the canny motorcyclist cut him off every time, his purple plaid shirt flapping in the wind around his slender frame. A hint of peevishness played over Driver's face, but it was obvious that he was enjoying the race immensely.
I pride myself on my ability to relax in Indian traffic. I mean, when you're not the one driving, what can you do? Indian roads are best driven by resident Indians, and if I spend all my time second-guessing their every move, I would be wrinkled and gray-haired long before my time. However, as the race escalated and we roared through tiny villages, careening around women, children and animals in a series of closer and closer calls, I was forced to confront the true bounds of my comfort zone. I decided to remain silent and see if Driver was as good as he always seemed to be. And, to his credit, Driver may have caused a few people to drive out of the way, but he didn't hurt a soul. He still ranks as the only person I've ever seen who could drive 40km through a crowded street market without causing any damage to person or property.
Driver never did overtake the motorcycling son'v'gun. The cyclist drove on past our own final destination, and Driver was forced to pull up to a sharp stop. If he hadn't been a consummate professional under a verbal agreement to stop at the appointed coordinates, we might have chased the motorcycle until the Bolero coughed on its last fume of petrol and ground to a halt in the grey space between somewhere and nowhere.
India, Day 8 - The Village Sunday School Class
In the last of many, many stops on my busy eighth day in India, my host and I visited a friend of his who teaches children out of his home every day. The kids had some pretty unforgettable faces.
