Bling, shimmer and grandeur at big fat Gujju weddings

I've turned into a butterfly of sorts these days, of the social kind that is. In this winter season of weddings (Kamurta notwithstanding) I have blessed about a dozen couples as they embark on happy matrimony. My boss is amazed (and frustrated) at my capacity to attend so many weddings and he actually feels I am bluffing when I say there are some five days of pre-wedding dos before a single traditional ceremony starts!

"Are they out of their mind? What the hell do they do all these days?" he invariably asks me with that 'c'mon now go fool someone else' look when I have to sheepishly request him to allow me to leave office a tad early, sometimes back-to-back for days.

So here I am, as an ode to my unbelieving boss, recounting incidents — some very interesting, shocking, entertaining and most importantly which are a mirror of Amdavad's diverse haute couture society.

By mid-November, I brought out my wedding fineries (read arsenal) as we embarked on a week of pre-wedding functions. I'd been out of touch a bit so the first couple of parties were slow to start with. But I soon caught up as I realised that what I was missing on is the 'bling quotient'.  I'll just explain. Wordweb (some traditional dictionaries do not take cognizance of this word) defines bling as 'ostentatious, flashy jewellery'. But in recent times, its usage is in spirit; applied to pretty much everything - like clothes, decor, people's behaviour (if I may) and of course women's jewellery.

In the first six hours (three hours to each party), my faculties registered the bling quotient has increased several notches this season. Subtle was passé. So I re-engineered my approach (and of course, my look) to join the bandwagon. Bingo! My popularity at parties picked up, for the women had something to look at when they covertly glanced at my neck for a 'blingy' necklace, and relieved when they would realise mine was not more expensive than theirs!

Now, lemme answer one of my Boss's several questions. "What exactly happens at these parties?" I compare pre-wedding parties to an African dance with an ascending tempo. As the wedding gets closer, bling in apparels, number of people, food, decibel levels of laughter and of course jewellery, gets more intense.
Typical countdown to a wedding day. Six days before D-day, the gathering would be in ummm… languid merriment with two course meal around a fireplace with silk apparels already in place, light gossip and business networking. Ditto for next two days.

Two days to go — DJ night. Here come out some veiled facets of the society. This is not a family wedding, so I am an obtuse bystander. Grey beards and bouffants gyrate with 20-somethings with unusual abandon, strutting on chikni chameli in simmering sarees themselves! Ahh… the sight! Two chamelis can hide behind the rear of one simmering saree, but the gyrations continue even as several pairs of eyes mockingly follow them. As the music gets louder and gyrations more fervent, I realise that the simmering sarees are conscious that they are being watched. Are they enjoying the attention?

And finally, today is the wedding (exhale). I had almost given up hope on how these families can put up with each other after so many days of hectic socialising. But well, they did.

Frankly, for me, conversations invariably run dry and are often rather uninspired. In one wedding for instance, men were huddled in well-mannered hushed conversations generally revolving around the stock market or other means to make money. The women conversations hovered around food recipes, some religion and Bai problems. I remember this particular pre-wedding do where I was stuck in the middle of a serious Bai counselling session and I found myself studiously examining the well-manicured lawn for about a quarter of an hour.

At weddings, our social niceties are somehow all just bundled up into food. The first question the host would ask all the guests after the 'kem chho' rigour, would be "Jamya (Did you have food)?" In yet another party, (remember I went to about half a dozen of them), there was a long argument with the hostess over my not having some ghee oozing sweets — after I was heaped with oily vegetables and patties! She actually had the nerve to tell me I have put on some weight, but it was all right to hog at weddings! Now you know why pseudo-dieticians are thriving in Amdavad!

And then there was this dear friend of mine, whose brother-in-law got married earlier this month. It was the first of the three wedding receptions and perhaps the seventh party including the pre-wedding ones that she'd been hosting. Dolled up in an expensive glittering Amdavai saree and oodles of yellow metal, at 7pm, the lady is partially inebriated! Contraband is camouflaged in a transparent little plastic bottle of water. "I am bored," the bridegroom's bhabhi nonchalantly shrugs, making absolutely no effort to hide her tipsy state. "I can't run the charade of meeting strangers with smiles anymore," she says derisively looking at at least a thousand guests teeming around.

So just to kill the boredom, we resorted to checking out attires and jewellery of strangers around us. And suddenly, there was this discovery....eureka! Perhaps I could now understand the earlier covert glances that came my way?