Cuhrayz$y Wedding

Most of the wedding is now finally over… it’s been exhausting and I’m just helping out. Buji mama (my uncle, the bride’s dad) is on a couple of hours of sleep and could prolly collapse if he had to do much more. So everything started yesterday morning with a bunch of poojas, welcoming the groom and some other ceremonies. There are a lot of traditions throughout your childhood like one for the first time you eat, or putting a baby in a cradle for the first time that they quickly run through again. I’d tell you more but it’s mostly just technical religious stuff most of which I don’t even know. Just a whole lot of Indian wedding music (which is just drums and nasally sounding clarinets) and chanting, both of which I’m so tired of hearing. The constant smell of jasmine flowers has been nice though, and so has the food. By tradition, during big events mostly weddings, you sit in rows where they set out large banana tree leaves. The servers then walk around with small portions of a million different things. And they keep going around as you eat; it’s kinda annoying cuz you’re always having to watch out and tell them to stop or else every time they walk by, they’ll pile on more food. This trip has been a huge turnaround from my food situation last time I came to India. I’ll show you pictures of all this stuff too :)

Last night was the reception which was weird cuz the wedding was this morning. The first half was just people streaming across talking to and taking pictures with the couple which took forever since there were over a 1000 people. I’m getting sick of seeing people. There’s just so many everywhere, I seriously have to leave the compound to get any quiet. India’s a bit crazy :) And I thought my family was a tad loopy but Murali’s is insane. After the parade, we had karaoke and dancing. I stayed as far away as possible but I saw some people doin random Indian dances who were so old they shouldn’t have been able to stand without a walker. The whole thing kinda reminds me of My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

The marriage was finally this morning. There were a lot of poojas again and rituals symbolic of the bride leaving the family. A lot of it is based on the traditional extended family in which marriage means the girl is leaving her family for the groom’s family home. It actually sorta applied this time since Murali’s family all lives together. I would not be able to imagine life like that. Anyways, then they tied the thalli which is just a necklace version of a wedding ring that’s used in most weddings in India, and then wrapped things up. There’s been other stuff and a lot of crying all afternoon and now some traditional songs. I’m sitting in a room with the fam at the moment since my mom’s been really sick. We think it’s food poisoning but she’s been puking and has a fever. My grampa’s younger brother who was a surgeon and still runs a clinic (I swear that man will never retire), is with her now. He’s always been the family doctor. It’s kinda embarrassing but diarrhea left me really dehydrated and in pretty bad shape when I was little and he saw me through. He’s done that at some point or another for every member of the Tetali family so food poisoning or whatever this is should be fine. Plus last I heard, she’s already starting to feel better :)

Also instead of ending on that note, we noticed that the offices for a Tamil match-making website are across the street from the wedding hall… seemed kinda funny. Also to add to car stories, it’s really uncommon to wear seatbelts here since cars go so slowly that accidents that actually injure people are incredible rare. I still don’t get why they don’t wear them, but yesterday I got in my uncles car and tried to put my seatbelt on but saw there wasn’t a buckle. Apparently they got annoyed of those poking them, so they just shoved em behind the seat into the trunk… Well th singing is over now, we should be relaxing and heading back in a bit :)

-Sanj