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.