“ Where is Adit? Why didn’t you bring him along?? Looks like you are trying to hide him from everyone!”
And here I’d be lying on the bed, my back against the wall, shoulders drooping, the TV remote in my hand, a constant channel search in progress, starting from Ten Sports to ESPN and back to Ten sports via the same ‘sports channel route’, and after having clearly heard the questions mum was confronted with at the wedding, continued with the channel surf with no intention of a channel halt.
It’s not that I hate attending weddings and nor is it that I consider weddings a scourge. It’s just that I’ve been a little lazy to push my duvet aside, stand underneath the showerhead for ten minutes, comb my hair, put a blazer on and arrive at the venue. Happy..Happier..Happiest.
And all this to me, somehow, seems too much of an effort to make.
Which is surprising. Coz the above effort would still be far lesser than the effort required by me to convince myself to leave…
1) Sleeping at friend’s basement, 3AM in the morning, with the aroma of irish cream occupying the empty space and not to mention, the long expired mango juice.
2) Overwhelmingly cheering the hockey team from the stands and seeing them loose every time. With friends calling their beloved Prabhjot by his name…”Prabhjot! Bas ki hai tere kuch”
3) Placing a heavy mass of human body underneath the bed, close to midnight, to scare the shit out of my cousin whose home had been robbed a week back then.
…so as to join the ship.
So therefore, with such a kind of lazy behaviour, questions were bound to be raised. Which is like straight out of this year’s IPL’s non-performing textbook. Quote- ‘You may be Yuvraj Singh, but if you don’t perform, questions are bound to be raised.’ The difference being that in my case, the questions asked never directly reached me. They would invariably find mum and dad on their way before closing in on me. So never being in the position of having to answer, it did not matter and gave me the luxury of continuing to be lazy.
But it’s not that I haven’t been a part of even a single wedding. Sure, my attendance has been poor, (partial blame shall rest with my sailing duties) I have still managed to attend weddings of some of my first cousins whom I have sort of grown up seeing them as ‘big brothers’ or ‘big sisters’.
And of these, my attendance at Nish di’s (bhua’s daughter) wedding would make for an interesting write up for a) unlike other weddings, I was available for whole of the wedding and b) I was still a school going kid and therefore my inane mulling over things around me, with Ankit as my deputy was unavoidable.
But before I do that, it’s imperative that I mention, not the entire cast coz that shall be way too long, but few of the important cast of the wedding.
Geeta- Nish di’s mother and my bhua
Naresh- Nish di’s father and my fufaji.
Shruti- Nish di’s younger sister and my elder cousin.
Arvin-Would be Dida (The origination of this phrase is another story which I shall come to a little later)
Nishtha- a.k.a Nish di, Bhua’s daughter, and whose wedding I shall be at (well, in case you didn’t know her by now!)
The day-1 would belong to the day we received the wedding card. Everyone was present at home then. A visible elation was quite evident. After everyone’s sifting of the wedding card, I finally got hold of it. The card looked elegant and simple and not like a lot of other garish cards I had seen my parents accepting gracefully on a numerous occasions earlier. The sequence of events was tabled as is normally found on any other card. And so was this last piece of information at the bottom left corner of the card, which read:
R.S.V.P
Naresh Devgan
Geeta Devgan
Shruti Devgan
and may be another couple of family names I can’t clearly remember. I expectedly did not know what it meant and I also do not remember whom I asked for what it meant, but the answer I got was certainly not even close to what it actually must have meant. I was told that R.S.V.P meant..
“Royein Saare Vyaa de Pichon!”
Which meant that below named are the ones who would all be crying once the wedding is over. So incase you have gate crashed a wedding, it will assist you in spotting the parents and the siblings of the bride on whose account you have just fed your stomach with the evening’s delicacies.
Neways, moving on, it was the day of another pre-marriage ceremony. The venue-i still remember.. Dabur farms.
As per the pre arrival venue information, it was supposedly a huge area with a lot of empty space around. Which meant we (Ankit and me) could carry our cricketing bats, stumps, half a dozen cricket balls and with other cousins, second cousins, and cousins whom we knew existed but whom we had never heard from earlier or seen them, expected to come over, a nice afternoon tee-off session was being foreseen.
But here lied the catch. Being caught by dad or chachu while slipping the cricket gear inside the boot of the car, could be inviting trouble.
“When will you guys start behaving as grown ups? You are not going there to showcase your cricketing skills, are you?”
Worse still would have been to be caught by fufaji, who’s threat issued some forty eight hours earlier, was still looming large over us. “ I don’t see you guys dancing the day after, be ready to face the consequences.”
So with some exquisite timing and coordination, we did manage to slip in our stuff into the boot. And I ‘am glad we did that, coz not only did we manage to heave the bat around for a while but also intermittently displayed our inept dancing in plenitude.
So after the week stuffed with pre-marriage ceremonies and late night get togethers ended, the wedding day finally arrived. And as it used to happen on most occasions, we were the one of the first ones to arrive.
The whole setup looked pretty. Since it was the first week of Feb, there was slight chillness in the air, combined with the lovely unsettled aroma of flowers, it had all the makings of a great evening.
But this was when we looked around at things. By we here, I mean strictly me and Ankit. But the same could not have been said when others would have looked at us. Standing somewhere away from the limelight and the glitters, we were wearing the same coloured silk kurta, same coloured churidar pyjama and would you believe it, our footwear was exactly the same too! Standing alongside each other, we had all the makings of looking as perfect jokers. (I know our parents would disagree with that)
I, stood tall and as skinny as I am now, if not more and Ankit…
Well there can be a lot of ways to describe Ankit the way he is now. Tall, handsome, well spoken. But back then there was only one word he perfectly matched with…’Round’
I remember the first time when me, Ankit and our other cousins (whom we knew existed but whom we had never heard from earlier)were introduced to dida.Both of those cousins were often called by their nicknames, Mithoo and Laddoo. As must have been told to him before hand by di, dida knew our names, including the nickname laddoo, but obviously did not know whose it was. So when he met Ankit he said, “You must be laddoo”
Dida- a synonym for the abusrd sounding ‘jijaji’ or even absurder ‘jiju’. We had been wondering on how to address dida as we didn’t wish to use those wrong choice of words, when Shruti di came to our rescue. She has this uncanny knack of coming up with words or phrases which fit perfectly into the scheme of things and which I and a lot of others, can never think of, or at times, they are just too good to understand.So here again, her suggestion on the use of dida sounded more apposite than its other siblings.
Quite sometime had passed since we had arrived. While scanning the entire area, i spotted bhua, who looked busy but was calm and relaxed. She was surrounded by relatives whom we knew, relatives whom we didn’t know and some of her own friends presumably. She had a wide smile on her face, which was accompanied by an occasional laugh, which reminded me of her name in the list of the ‘R.S.V.P’
On looking around further, dad, chachu and others, neatly dressed( striking similarities to a diplomat’s attire), were spotted having some serious discussion.
In today’s post 9/11 or 26/11 era, the seriousness of the discussion could be attributed to India’s foreign policy in Afghanistan, the rise of inflation or the resumption of India-Pakistan dialogue.
Back then, it seemed hard to crack the conversation from a distance of about fifty metres, and it really could have been anybody’s guess.
By now, a lot more people had arrived, a lot more waiters serving, the shehnai being played was a lot more prominent and there were a lot more relatives now.
On weddings you get to meet a lot of different kinds of relatives, in a very short span of time.
1) Relatives, who on a numerous occasions earlier, have been introduced and reintroduced as someone coming all the way from Bombay and Bikaner., but you still won’t be able to recollect their faces.
2) Relatives, whom you had mistaken to be as someone from dida’s side until they said to you, “Aye Arvind da munda hai?? Inha jya si jadon main pehlan vekhya siga!”
3) Relatives, whom you would always want to escape meeting. For having been caught by them, even with the slightest possible eye contact, would invite a flury of dreaded questions coming your way. “How are your studies going on? What subjects are you planning for after your board exams? What was your percentage in your previous exam?”
After having met most of the relatives, friends and in the midst of wandering around with Mr. Mithoo and Mr. Laddoo, we realised that the garlands had been exchanged and the wedding was heading towards the final ceremony.
Worn out and enervated, I was barely awake to see what followed. The little that I remember is that me and Ankit were dropped back home where we crashed onto the bed where I was fast asleep in no time.
That was perhaps that. The wedding ended there for me. The wedding which back then, as a child seemed a little strange initially. Marriage was something that until then, had only happened to people less known to me. But here, it was Nish di, at who’s home an overnight stay was something I always loved, along with whom, we used to sing songs, with them singing the female verses and us the male, whom we used to forcibly push out, of her own comfort zone and make her play some silly catching games with us, on the terrace.Today, it has been the wedding I have loved to talk about, when I know that before it was to happen, it was never a wedding that existed, ever in my mind.
