weddings, varanasi, lucknow and nepal

after the wedding in noida, i met up with my friend rachna, who grew up in delhi but who i've known in the states for about 6 years. she was back in india for her brother paras' wedding, which i told her i'd attend.

so i stayed with rachna's parents in their apartment, in the aptly named "andrew's ganj," for about 7 days. i bought a really nice kurta/sherwani for the wedding, which i was excited to wear.

on december 5th we left for varanasi, the holiest city in india, where the wedding was to take place. there we took a boat out on the ganges (by this time our group was pretty big, like 15 people, all family), watched the religious ceremony being performed on the banks of the river, from a sort of large private bed that we rented. it was funny - confused white people kept coming over and sitting on the bed, assuming i had just sat there and didn't know anyone on it, and i had to tell them it was a private thing and to please get off, but eventually we let three girls from argentina just stay because we were tired of shooing westerners away.

more tourist stuff. all these things...boat trips on the ganges in india's holiest city, religious ceremonies...it sounds like the most exotic, authentic adventure you can have, torn from the pages of national geographic, but i'm sorry to say they all come off as disappointingly tacky. again - find your own adventures here...throw away your lonely planet and the authentic stuff will find you. i was a little more interested in the private ceremonies we've done, visiting temples, having hindu priests chanting around us, engaging in bizarre rituals that fascinate and mystify at the same time. i'll explain shortly.

weddings are LONG affairs here. this will be my 3rd i've witnessed, but the first that i've seen from beginning to end. after the religious stuff we did on the ganges, i went to see a ceremony just for the bride (the groom, paras, wasn't with us), where a crowd of girls were seated on the ground, inside a decorated open tent, at the front of which was an indian woman singing traditional songs. a drummer and another singer were accompanying her. sometimes the music was slow, sometimes the drummer would get worked up into a fever pitch, and the woman would keep pace, creating a very dancable rhythm, and i was constantly encouraged, against my embarrassed protests, to come up front and dance, which i think i did in a way that wasn't completely inadequate. i'm at a loss to even recall all the things we did in preparation for the wedding. the other day we went temple hopping. that's the best way i can think of to describe it - getting into the car, going from temple to temple to temple. actually the temples were buddhist, a minority in india i think, but interesting to see, especially because the only buddhist temples i've seen here are tibetan, not indian. the first temple was funny - we had a private ceremony booked, i guess. so we stepped past the people just looking at the buddha shrine and priest, and were allowed to pass through the small wooden gate. however, the guard thought i was just trying to follow an indian family in, and didn't let me in until he saw them waving for me to follow. the priest indicated we had almost used up the time we booked, which was fine, but we wanted just another minute so that everyone could be blessed with the holy water, offerings, whatever - the religious practices here are in such a tangle that i don't even try to decipher them anymore - i never thought of holy water having a place in buddhism, but there you are. however, the priest just shut the lights off, indicating we had to leave. i've never seen such strict punctuality in india, where everyone operates on a chronology affectionately known as "indian time"; where "ache minute" (one minute) usually equals about half an hour. god forbid anyone ever tell you to wait "pach minute" (five) - that's when it's best to go get something to eat, walk around a bit, and maybe come back later.

i just want to say one more thing about these religious rituals...pooja...yesterday, after the wedding, we were all seated on the floor of a temple, in a private ceremony, with hindu priests chanting what was actually a very soothing, multi-toned, atmospheric hymn. these things mystify me. we were all seated around a plate, which had a sort of small structure around it, like a gazebo-shaped thing made of flowers. on the plate were a bunch of leaves, some fruit, and an egg-shaped thing in the middle. two or three people were holding these horn-shaped instruments, hollow, with a large hole at the top and a small hole in the bottom. the priests were pouring milk into the top hole, and a thin stream would be ejected from the bottom, out towards the plate, where it was imperative that you aim directly at the egg-shaped thing. i was encouraged to take part in this. the priest smeared three lines of some pasty white substance on my forehead, handed me the horn, and poured milk in. i understand now that the egg is a form of shiva, a god, and the milk is an offering to him, but still...what an absolutely foreign practice to me. after i was done he handed me a banana and tied a string around my wrist, which i now have in abundance since almost every temple we've been to has done this. i don't want to give the impression that this is the first strange ritual i've encountered in india; obviously it is far from it, but it's the one i've felt most compelled to write about, the one that i found most perplexing.

the day of the wedding was extremely anticlimactic. i had a mild stomach thing going on - so did a couple of the indians, so i didn't feel so bad and chalked it up to something we had eaten the night before - which by the night had actually made me feel pretty bad, and i was pretty tired and light-headed...so even though i was looking awesome in my new sherwani and getting lots of compliments, and even though the reception area outside the hotel was really nice, and even though i had lots of fun in the groom's parade, i ended up going to bed extremely early, like 11:30pm, with the intention of taking a rest and waking up an hour later. when i woke up the sun was up.

all this requires a little explanation. first of all, indian weddings take place at night. at least i've never heard of one happening during the day. i've also never heard of a wedding taking place earlier than midnight. for example, even though the reception started at about 7:00 or 8:00pm, paras' wedding to his wife chaitali was scheduled for 1:00am. everyone ended up staying up until 5:00 or 6:00am that night. for myself, i took part in what i believe is called the bharat, a moving jubilee of fireworks and lights that moved through the varanasi streets, paras following behind in a car decorated with flowers, the rest of us leading the procession with a full marching band in front, jettisoning huge fireworks into the sky (this is legal anywhere, anytime in india), dancing without inhibition, and singing traditional songs. what i found extremely interesting is that there were lines of children on either side of us, holding huge florescent tube lights (the same you find in any office) above their head, electrical wires stringing all the children together. it was like a moving carnival. once we arrived in the wedding, i was checking out the dancefloor - a colorful, checkered thing, illuminated from below in alternating colors, and inhabited by a slew of exclusively young female indians. this, i naturally thought, was a good place for me to relocate myself to, but rachna forbade me to go, saying that if i wanted to dance i'd have to find a male partner, and stay away from the girls. it's at times like this that my attitude of extreme cultural acceptance and tolerance breaks down, when i'm completely ready to condemn such social prudishness as jurasically backwards and unenlightened. really, it's just my childish reaction to being told i can't do whatever i want. why can't i dance with the cute indian girls?

anyway, sometime after that, around 11:30pm, i went into my room intending to sleep for an hour and missed absolutely everything. but whatever, i had had my fill of ceremony and wasn't feeling well, so the sleep did me a lot of good and the next day i was fine, and of course the wedding isn't over just because it has taken place. now i'm in lucknow, a city somewhat west of varanasi. i had a lot of good conversations with everyone on the train ride over - we talked about religion, politics, economics, both in india and the US.

tonight is the last reception, here at rachna's side of the family's hometown...they have a stage and a performer, and want me to play a song if they can procure a guitar, which should be fun. actually, rachna's family are interesting - specifically, they are "sindthis," a group of hindus that were displaced from their homes in 1947 (i believe), when what is now pakistan was still a part of india. they lost all their money, absolutely everything, and started a new life in what was now a new country for them. so they have their own language, and different ceremonies and the such.

last thing - i know i said in a previous post that i wasn't going to nepal, but i've decided to go anyway (heading out tomorrow morning), especially because i may run into some friends from mussoorie there. for some reason i'm not overly excited about trekking in the everest region, my current plan, because my tourist-trap sense tingles terribly whenever i picture it (i've become wary of these stereotypically exotic destinations), but i'll try to withhold judgment until i actually get there. like india, i'm sure it has its touristy parts and its sublime parts.

really, i miss mussoorie, and hope to find something on that level again soon. still having fun, a little run down by all this family stuff, but really they've been nothing but extremely hospitable and accomodating to me, and i haven't spent a rupee in almost 2 weeks.

i won't even try to hook up my camera to this computer, which looks to have been excavated from the pleistocene. i'll try to find something better and hook you up with pics later.