A while ago now, I told the story of how I got stuck in a
piece of traditional Indian clothing - The Churidar Kurta or How I Got Stuck in a Shirt.
This is part two.
I’m going to try to make this story entertaining. At the
time it was anything but, however I feel like I need to tell it anyway. Some kind
of catharsis maybe, or at the very least a cautionary tale for the rest of you.
After outfitting myself in Indian clothing, I felt ready,
and even excited to experience the larger than life wedding that my coworker
had been planning and talking about for months. She had something insane like
1000 guests attending, and how could that not be amazing to see? The scale
sounded impressive.
And it was impressive, just not in the ways I had imagined.
When Husband and I got there, the first bombshell was that
in the temple men and women could not sit together. There was a men’s side and
a women’s side. This was uncomfortable…..but at least I eventually had my other
coworkers to sit with. My poor, extremely tolerant husband would have to sit by
himself on the other side of the room with 500 men he had never met before, to
share a cultural experience that was surprisingly confusing.
As we stood around waiting to go in, my coworkers arrived. I
was a bit taken aback by their outfits. They had all spent a lot of time
talking about the fancy saris they had purchased for the event, yet no one was
wearing them.
So, stupid me, I asked why not? Most fell silent, but the
oblivious one piped up that the saris were for the reception the next day. Duh.
Why wouldn’t you know that?….oh wait, you didn’t know about the reception?
Well, shit.
We all stood silently for a moment, letting this information
sink in. Ever so carefully, I asked What
reception? Isn’t that part of this event? The question was answered by the sound of crickets and
darting, terrified eye contact between the rest of the group. It wasn’t hard to
deduce the answer on my own.
But seriously, why would I have known that?!? It had not
occurred to me that these two events were on two different days, and the
invitation hadn’t indicated anything. I thought we went from wedding to
reception like every other wedding I had been to, not: oh sorry you’re only invited to the (painfully long) ceremony but you can’t come to the (much
more enjoyable) dinner/dance part. Thanks
asshole.
Trying hard to hide that I was dying inside as I’d realized,
very publically, that I had been excluded from the main event, I grabbed
Husband and staggered off into the parking lot to regain some composure.
I take some solace in the fact that as I left, they were all
at a loss for words, and looked like a collection of flaccid, useless dicks
waiting in the parking lot for something to come along and save them from what
had just happened.
It was very awkward.
No, it was more awkward than that.
These proceedings may have coloured my opinion of the bride
and her event, but I returned to the group, hiked up my big girl panties, and carried
on into the venue to tolerate the rest of the day.
The ceremony itself was strange but interesting, and I lost
myself for a while in the colours and singing going on around me. There were no
chairs and everyone sat on the floor, and as far as I could tell, there was no
definite start point to the ceremony. The singing/chanting was going on when we
walked in and then suddenly the wedding party was walking down the aisle.
I use the term “suddenly”
only to convey that there was no notification to the gathering hoard that she
was coming. We turned around and there was the bride. No preamble, no notice,
just bam! There she is! But don’t interpret that to mean that she came in with
any great speed. I think we sat on the floor for at least an hour listening to
the chanting (which, to be fair, was beautiful) before she made her way in.
I tried very hard not to be mad and hurt during this time,
but the obvious exclusion from the event everyone else was attending made it
hard to really enjoy myself. And then my ass got sore, and I was pretty much
done with the whole sitting-on-the-floor shit. Plus, we had been there for well
over two hours at this point, and it really didn’t look like it was slowing
down. I also had to pee, and there
wasn’t a snowballs chance in hell that I was walking down that aisle in front
of the incredibly large group of people, while the bride and groom were still
up there, possibly committing some irreversible cultural faux pas.
Lucky for us, our group of wedding goers included another woman
who attended the temple. She looked around at our panicked, confused,
white-girl faces, and matter-of-factly got up and said we could go now.
Wait, what? The bride and groom were still up there…should
we really just up and leave? Apparently yes, you do, that’s normal. According
to her, the ceremony would go on for hours, and we could go now. My ass was happy. I waved desperately at Husband who was
sitting on the boy’s side, and pictionaried to him that we could escape.
Husband and I made it through the lunch that was offered…he
likes Indian food, I do not, and eventually hit the magic point in time where
you can leave without appearing to run screaming from the building. Basically, it
was half a day of time and babysitting costs that I can never get back.
Overall, the cultural part of the experience was
interesting, albeit long. (So. Fucking. Long.) I don’t think I’d be overly
inclined to repeat it, however I think it’s important to try new things - even
if those things turn out to be less like the experience you had anticipated,
and more like an unending hell in which you are painfully aware of your social
exclusion.
In the end the part that really irked me was that I had
given the bride money as a wedding gift, which apparently wasn’t required,
given that I hadn’t been invited to the part of the wedding that socially
required a gift. Figures. At least I got a thank you card. Not sure it was
worth it.
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