Decades ago, a hastily written American paperback memoir provided
good company on a train from Kokrajhar in Assam to Howrah. I had picked it up
in a dusty bookshop near the train station and the author was a mid-tier
Providence hoodlum by the name of Vincent Teresa. In my “Life in the Mafia”, Vinnie espoused the theory
that—in a case of life imitating art—all the wiseguys in the mob began speaking
like Brando did in his role as Don Corleone, after seeing the movie The
Godfather. Decades later one can
make a similar argument about Indian marriages. They have changed in style, across the country, to conform
to their representation in Bollywood movies. At some point, as the evening wears on, these ceremonies end
up with groups of men and women dancing indiscriminately to non-descript Hindi
film music wearing the sort of uni-culturally Indian formal clothing that takes
its gaudy colors straight from celluloid.
Yet, striking differences
remain in the philosophy with which different cultures approach a marriage, and
I saw no better example of this than in a recent marriage between a Bengali and
a Punjabi family that I attended.
In the early evening of the reception, hosted by the
Bengalis, the entire Bengali contingent waited (I being part of it) in the
portico of a stately hotel for the Punjabi groom’s party to arrive. It was a handsome Federal style
building that looked onto a circular brick driveway with manicured grounds
beyond. And arrive they did. A large BMW swooshed by. Two large buses drew up. A horse materialized in the distance. Guests poured out of the buses and the
groom alighted and mounted the waiting horse. Under skies that had darkened to a thunderous gray, the
empty courtyard now filled with men in ceremonial turbans, women in bedecked
splendour, and a groom who stood ready for action poised upon a horse. As the party began its fifty-meter walk
to the hotel, on cue, the air cracked with the rhythm of a Punjabi beat belted
out by a tall drummer in a virile lungi. A troupe of Americans in headdress struck
up baraat music with their wind instruments. A couple of young dancing women in green led the convoy like
whirling dervishes and the men and women followed, shoulders snapping to the
rhythm, a bubbly, joyous, precious stone laden mass ebbing and flowing like a
viscous melt as they made their progress to the lobby. Photographers swarmed
and in a sign of the times a drone took to the air angling for camera position. In the meantime, the gathered Bengalis--themselves
representative of a culture whose celebration of even the most joyful of events
will strike melancholia into the heart of any normal human being--waited by the
entrance, three deep in rows, largely silent, taking in the ebullience of the
Punjabis with wide-eyed bewilderment.
And what instruments of sadness they offer for such a celebration! Slow, delicate, lilting songs that will
have you close your eyes in concentration, the heart wrenching note of the
conch, the eyes of a bride who you know will cry as she leaves the house. All this for a marriage. Imagine their activities during a
funeral. And so as the joyous, swaying Punjabi morass met the gathered
Bengalis, the two fronts of these poles-apart cultures merged at the seam between
the portico and the brick driveway like two muddy rivers, each carrying the fine
sand of their differently colored lands. They had two things in common today—no
shortage of jewelry and no shortage of warmth.
