Fiction: Wedding Invite

(This is a product of the crazy wanderings of my mind during the wedding season last year. This was sent to a couple of friends as a prank with a rather tragic outcome: one of them has stopped writing to me. :( Alas!)

My Dear Friend,

I am pleased to announce the consummation of nearly two years of courtship with Sripriya Sasidharan, Lecturer in Microbiology at Bharathiar University, Coimbatore. Sripriya and I shall enter into wedlock in a little over four months’ time, and we extend a warm invitation to each one of you to grace this happy occasion with your august presence. For Sripriya and I, the wedding is an effort to indulge in a celebration of cultural values and at the same time, display our love and concern for the environment (which, we believe, is a core Indian cultural value, although in a state of emasculation today). We plan to celebrate our wedding in the traditional manner over a period of five days from January 9-13, 2008. The venue is our ancestral village of Kolinjavadi, on the banks of the river Amravathi, at a distance of 45 kilometres from the city of Coimbatore. We strongly urge you to treat the wedding as a vacation in the sylvan retreats of the beautiful Kongu region and partake of the personalised hospitality that our village is famous for. The dates of the wedding have been carefully chosen to dovetail with Pongal, the Tamil harvest festival which commences from January 13, the same day as the wedding ends. (The wedding draws to a close on the morning of the 13th, leaving the day free for the initiation of Pongal celebrations.)

Traditionally, the purpose of a five day wedding has been to allow the bride and the bridegroom to grow out of their coyness and get to know each other, in the process developing the inseparable bonds that shall bind them together for life. Long weddings served as occasions for guests to socialise; middle-aged parents would look for prospective matches for their children-come-of-age; young boys and girls would court and fall in love (perhaps even elope in the next weeks); while the elderly would meet with faraway relatives, engage in family arithmetic (accounting for additions by way of marriage or birth; and subtractions arising from death) before eventually parting with sadness, knowing well that given their age this might well be the final farewell.

We hope to recreate this atmosphere in the course of our wedding.

The highlights of the wedding will be the various traditional ceremonies, particularly the Virudham, Paaligai Thelikkal, Mapillai Azhaippu, Oonjal Paattu, Kasi Yatra, Ammi Mithikkal, Meen Vettai and Nalangu. There is immense scope for guests to participate in many of these ceremonies. Sripriya and I are particularly keen on the last two ceremonies, which are in the nature of games played between the couple with others egging them on, and are most mirthful and entertaining when staged in all fullness. In addition to these ceremonies will be numerous informal events involving traditional music, song and dance. Exponents of the nadaswaram (a musical instrument somewhat akin to the shehnai) and the thavil (a percussion instrument) will purvey strains of music befitting the occasion. Womenfolk will sing wedding songs. Wedding songs can serve to tease and create merriment; some extol the beauty of the bride and bridegroom; some are distinctly risqué, while others are typically sad, marking the separation of the bride from her family. There will be performances of kummi, a traditional folkdance. This is a simple dance in which all are encouraged to join in. Some of Sripriya’s cousins also plan to stage a bharatnatyam performance at the temple grounds.

Living arrangements will be made in the roomy ancestral houses belonging to our families. Guests are urged to sleep on reed mats spread on the floor, in the traditional way. Beds can be arranged in the open for those desiring a particularly close communion with the beautiful night sky. Morning ablutions may be performed along specially earmarked sections of the river bank. We expect the wedding to generate enough nightsoil and organic waste to serve as manure for the next crop in the village that will be sown in late January or early February. Guests will enjoy their morning bath in the cool, crystal-clear waters of the Amravathi, one of the few rivers in our country left undammed. While bathing areas are separately marked out for men and women, it is a common prank for boys to hide the clothes of the bathing girls. (Despite suggestions from some quarters, Sripriya and I decided not to have the song, Tere man ki ganga…, playing in the background, on the grounds that this would be a most jarring external cultural influence.) Adventurous girls, particularly those with a taste for the bucolic, may take potshots at the boys bathing in the river, by climbing up the trees in the mango orchards. Catapults will be made available for this activity.

The food will be South Indian vegetarian with the distinct flavour that is a hallmark of the Kongu region. Some of the special traditional drinks to watch out for are paanagam, a tasty energising drink made out of jaggery, neer mor or seasoned buttermilk, and sanjeevi, a drink made out of crushed ragi and corn. Guests are encouraged to help with the cooking, which will be done on earthen hearths. Food will be served on banana leaves spread on the floor and will be handled entirely by volunteers among the guests. We shall be delighted if you are to step forward and nominate yourself for this task. The serving of food is the highpoint of hospitality and we want this to be marked by conviviality and warmth throughout the five days of the wedding. (Please note that all volunteers will have to be appropriately attired. The right kind of sarees and dhotis will be arranged for.) Guests will be required to burp with pleasure at the end of the meal indicating that they have eaten their fill.

Evenings will be taken up by folk performances. This is also a good time for courting and minor flings. Serenading is possible in the coconut groves, where one can endlessly run around the trees and sing to their heart’s content. Couples can hide in the overgrowth along the river bank (this will be sufficiently thick by early January, thanks to the nourishment of the northeast monsoon) and display their amorous affection for each other. For those who believe in elevated love, there are plenty of asoka and banyan trees with thick foliage. (If you are unable to climb up the trees, ladders can be strategically positioned upon request.) We will be delighted to see as many of you take advantage of these romantic pleasures as possible.

Now to the travel logistics. Bullock carts will be waiting at the Coimbatore railway station (you are urged to take a train to Coimbatore since air travel is highly polluting and contributes greatly to carbon emissions) on the morning of 9 January to ferry guests to Kolinjavadi. This is a non-polluting and truly enjoyable mode of conveyance, which will give you a panoramic view of the lush green fields of the Kongu region. You will draw deep breaths of clean, fresh air, a rare commodity in Indian cities today. (Guests arriving on other days are free to charter their own bullock carts. We request them however, to make arrangements for collecting the bullock-dung that will be dropped on the way. As you are aware, this is an important source of manure.) If some of you wish, we can arrange for a few express horse carts. However, horse-dung is believed to be inferior to cattle-dung in terms of fertiliser quality.

We look forward to hosting all of you at Kolinjavadi and enjoying your company on the occasion of our wedding. Your contribution to both tradition and environment shall be equally momentous. (Since some guests are being invited only for specific ceremonies, kindly take a print-out of this page of the invitation, which shows that you are invited for all of the five days. The print-out will serve as something of a season ticket, not unlike the ones sold at five-day cricket matches. We are sending out only electronic invitations to avoid the use of paper.) Please mark the wedding dates on your calendar. Do let us know if you have any suggestions. Our email address is sriram.wedding@gmail.com

With best regards,

Ramanujam

PS: Sripriya delivered a little bundle of joy in the last week of August. Our bouncing baby daughter, Alai Osai (which is Tamil for ‘resonance of the waves’), will be all of four months at the wedding.

Fiction: Rama came calling

I rose from the bed to find Rama, my eldest brother, ensconced in my wooden chair, reading The Hindu.

"Hullo anujan, good morning ", he nodded at me pleasantly.

"When did you come?" I asked, rubbing the sleep from my eyes, "You should've woken me up."

"You know me better than that. Anyway, today's op-ed page is interesting. Why don't you freshen up? I'm not in a hurry."

I brushed, wondering what brought Rama here today, so early in the morning.

He read my thoughts like he did all the time.

"It's the kumbabhishekam at the temple in Ramnagar today", he said, without looking up from the paper as I entered the kitchen to prepare the decoction. "Oh, it's today, is it?" I exclaimed, reaching for the coffee powder. Putting water on the boil I went back to my room to switch on my laptop and play Venkatesa Suprabhatam. Rama grinned at me, looking up from the sudoku he was solving. He woke up to the Venkatesa Suprabhatam every morning and it was still good time for him to listen to it again.

He was peering into my bookshelf when I emerged with the coffee.

"Thanks, anujan."

"Looking for something?"

"Yes, do you have any Harry Potter?"

"Harry Potter?!"

"Yes, you know, the kids have been pestering me no end."

"Why didn't you bring them and manni along?"

"Your manni is very busy these days. She's launching a heritage walk company, you know", said Rama, settling into the wooden chair again. I pulled up the wooden stool and we sipped coffee silently for a moment, as I let the news of another of my sister-in-law's crazy entrepreneurial ventures sink in.

"You're getting very good at making coffee", he remarked, taking another sip. It was a left-handed compliment. I knew what he was getting at.

We sipped the coffee in silence.

"Did you speak to Urmila again?" he asked gently.

So this is why he had come.

"Yes, I did. It's the same story. She won't come back until I've got a steady job", I replied matter-of-factly. I paused and added, "Until I'm earning more than her".

Rama took in all this thoughtfully.

"She got another pay raise recently. Eighteen lakhs per annum. I can never hope to match that", I said. “She'll never come back", I added bitterly.

"Chha chha, don't say that", my brother interjected.

I glowered silently, thinking angrily of Urmila.

“She’s a demon!” I added, as the train of events in the mind halted at a particularly unpleasant station.

Immediately, I said, “Sorry.” It was wiser to say it than to look into Rama’s face. Not that he would be angry. He would be pained. Extremely pained.

And as I sobered down I indeed grew sorry.

“I don’t know what possessed her to do all this…life was so smooth”, I mused.

Rama cleared his throat. “You know it all began with your habit of keeping the chocolates in the fridge…”

“You know that isn’t true”, I declared hotly, “she made that all up. Don’t tell me you don’t know it. You’re a god. You know it. Of course, you know it.”

I could see Rama wasn’t buying it. He had never bought it.

There was silence again as I began to deflate. “I promised I wouldn’t annoy her again. That I would keep the chocolates in the basket like she wanted.” I paused before concluding. “But she said it was too late now.”

Rama had a half-smile on his face. “So you did get round to talking about it at last.”

I replied in one word. Yes.

“The world is changing”, I remarked bitterly.

“The world is always changing”, said Rama.

“It’s a market, a bazaar, that’s what it is”, I said with asperity.

I took off somewhat on a tangent.

“Do you know what happened to the last girl Natesh Anna spoke to?” I asked. I had no intention of waiting for a reply. “She turned him down because he’s an only son. She didn’t want his parents coming and living with them after marriage. And she wasn’t the only girl to turn him down on that count.”

I went on, “Then there was this lady who was known to them. She called up when she found that her daughter’s horoscope matched with Anna’s. She began to ask all sorts of things – how much Anna’s salary was, how much money he had saved, why he hadn’t bought a car yet. Poor Meenakshi Athai, you know how innocent she is. She answered that Anna was about to take a bank loan for a new house. And you know what the lady said? She said that they were willing to take matters forward only if Anna were to buy the house in her daughter’s name!

But this one really takes the cake. This guy, who was the uncle of a girl whom Anna found on a matrimonial site, came home the other day. And you know what? He was actually carrying a five-page questionnaire. A questionnaire! Can you beat that? It had questions like, 'What are your qualifications? Are your degrees genuine? Please provide Xerox copies' and 'How much money have you invested? How much has been invested in your name and how much in the name of your parents or brothers/sisters? Please provide a break-up of your investments in stocks, mutual funds, real estate, fixed deposits, gold etc.etc.' Anna was so angry! But he kept his cool and politely refused to fill up the questionnaire. Had I been in his place…”

Rama remained unmoved, his face tranquil and the wisp of a smile still playing upon his lips.

I continued, “I know you think I’m responsible for what happened between Urmila and me. But Natesh Anna? He’s as good as gold. Why should all this happen to him?”

There was not even a hint of an emotion crossing Rama’s serene face.

I was heating up again. “Why is all this happening? This isn’t fair. It’s all wrong. Why don’t you do something about this? You’re a god. You can put an end to this. Knock some sense into people’s heads. You’re responsible for all this. Do you hear me? You’re responsible…”

I was angry. Very angry. He had to answer this.

Instead, the only words that came out of him were, “Can you make me another cup of coffee?”

I shrank. The anger, the energy, drained out of me.

“Yes, sure”, I rose timidly and took the cup from his outstretched hand.

When I returned I must have looked miserable. Rama changed the topic.

“Do you know where Shatrughanan is at the moment?”

“There was an email from him yesterday saying he’s in Oslo.”

“That’s right. He’s on a tour of Scandinavia planning a holiday for us. We’re planning to vacation there next month. All four of us – me, your manni, Lava and Kusha.”

“Oh! That’s nice. The whole family together.”

“Yes, it’s so difficult to keep together these days. Either your manni or I are always out of town. Life’s gotten so stressful, you know. It really brings down your productivity. We’re looking forward to a break.”

Stressed out? Rama didn’t look hassled in the least.

“What you see is not what really is.” Rama read my thoughts as usual and stood up, smiling broadly at me.

It was nice to see him smile.

“You’re free to join us on the vacation, you know. You probably need a break as well.”

It was really nice of him to say it although he knew that I wouldn’t take up his offer. A part of my relationship with manni had turned cold since the day in the forest when she had refused to trust me, accusing me of wanting to possess her and forcing me to leave the house in search of Rama. What a rigmarole bringing her back had turned out to be!

“There’s a purpose to everything”, said Rama, reading my thoughts again. It was an enigmatic statement and I sensed that he was responding to something more than my immediate thoughts. I wasn’t convinced and showed it in my wry smile. It sounded more like a cover-up for divine intervention failure.

He did not argue. It was almost time for the ceremony at the temple.

“Ramanuja, my Lakshmana”, he brought his arms down on my shoulders with affection, “let me take your leave.”

“Wait a minute”, I excused myself, returning in a minute with a bundle of Amar Chitra Katha. “I don’t have Harry Potter but I’m sure Lava and Kusha will enjoy this.”

“This is great!” he exclaimed, “they will love it.”

He tucked the bundle under his arm. “Don’t fret over Urmila. I’ll get your manni to speak to her…”

He gave me a pat. The next moment he was gone.