wedding culture

One of the houses above mine on the hillside had a wedding recently and I want to write a little about my observations. They are limited and by no means conclusive of the Indian marriage culture, but some of the events I observed are worth describing here.
I first noticed that some event was taking place when the drummers arrived with loud percussion for several hours one morning a few weeks ago. Even from within our stone-walled house, the reverberations of the two drummers reached my ears clearly (and forced me out of bed). Sometimes, the drummers had a good sequence together, wailing on their instruments as one. And then they would slip out of sequence and both be flailing all over the place, each dreaming up their own rhythm (or lacking any rhythm whatsoever) and audibly trying to pull the other drummer into their sequence. It was over the course of several hours I perceived this happening. During the whole event, there was no more than a few moments silence across the hillside. When I began my walk up to the office, I passed by the house where the drummers were performing. They were standing on the verandah while a teenage girl from the family, dressed in a fancy blue and green outfit that sparkled and shimmered, danced around them and into some of the rooms. Interestingly, others in the family, mostly men, just sat stoic on the same verandah, unmoved by the catchy beats nor showing any sympathy toward the girl’s dancing. I thought it odd, as it seemed only the two drummers and the one girl had anything to celebrate.
A few days later, on my walk up to the office, I noticed a pandal (cloth tent) raised outside the house tied to three trees and one corner of the roof. It was red and yellow and was square shaped and hung about fifteen feet above the ground. Unlike other wedding pandals I have seen before, this one had no sides, and was simply a twenty-foot-square cloth suspended above the ground. A few days later, as family guests arrived in town, they would sleep underneath this yellow and red pandal and perhaps also the wedding itself took place underneath it? Who knows, I did not see that part.
One evening, on my way home from the office, I noticed a jeep parked on the road at Redburn curve and a crowd of people around it. The jeep was stuffed full of simple coir mattresses and also comforters called resai and the crowd of people were from the wedding family who had come up to the road to collect the mattresses and carry them down to the house and place them under the pandal so people could sleep there. It was at that time that I realized the groom’s family had arrived on the scene to participate in the wedding ceremony. Typically, the groom’s family comes to the bride’s home and stays there for several days prior to the ceremony. It is the bride’s family that must take care of all their needs while they wait for the wedding, including cooking extravagant meals for them.
For the next few days, on my way to work I walked by the small crowd of grayish lumps which were actually people tucked under the resais underneath the pandal in front of the bride-to-be’s home. There were some fifteen or more lumps of faded, rented resai stirring in the early morning and I thought it must be quite cold for them each night, considering I am still shivering at night under the several wool blankets I have in my room inside.
[[This final observation is a bit graphic, but I feel the need to write about it, as it is particularly unusual and a first-time experience for me here.]] A few nights ago, I was walking home from the office again and it was about seven in the evening. I was walking on the jungle-path that I walk every day, which passes above the house where the wedding was happening and curves around to the side of it. When I was still above the house, making my way down the path, I heard a loud squeal pierce the stillness of the jungle in the fading light of evening. A second squeal and more followed, and I quickly realized that the wedding group had a pig at their gathering. As I rounded the curve of the path and looked down at the front of the house, three men were wrestling a medium-sized pig. A short distance away, a few others were tending a fire and wielding cooking utensils of various types. The pig was really struggling to free itself from the grip of the men. I realized they were planning to have a pig roast, and the squealing, struggling pig was on the menu. In Hindi, the word for pig is suer which means just what it sounds like: sewer. Why were they going to cook a pig? Hindus don’t eat them, Muslim’s of course don’t, so who would be doing it? Maybe Sikhs or Christians? I stood rooted to the trail as I watched the men flip the pig onto it’s side. I actually caught myself thinking: “Here it goes” as they held it fast and one man stabbed something into the pig’s neck. (I thought they would slit the throat or something, and the squealing and struggling would quickly end, but no.) After it had been pierced, the pig squealed all the more and violently struggled under the firm grip of the three men holding it to the ground. I could not move; I could not look away. The squealing was loud and disturbing in the otherwise still evening air as the pig gurgled and slowly died over the course of what seemed like many minutes. It was pretty terrible and I involuntarily shivered as I turned to continue down the path to my house.
The next morning, the pandal was gone, the coir mattresses gone and only a few people lingering around in the early morning sunlight. Apparently, it was all over. I suppose the wedding ceremony happened somewhere else, and I only saw a portion of the bigger events. Keep in mind, the sum total of my perception consists of a few moments on a few days as I walked past the house where everything took place.
I write about these few observations because they are unique experiences in my life here, and they point to some quirks about and aspects of the culture and place in which I live.

green with hope

I saw something unusual happening in the jungle on the side of the mountain below the road on my way to work last week: a team of men with sacks and rakes were cleaning up the garbage that has been dumped over the edge of the wall for a long time. I thought this was remarkable because I have never seen anyone doing this activity in the five years I have lived in Mussoorie. There is no municipal infrastructure for garbage collection here, but there is an Eco Task Force (whom I presume has undertaken the cleanup of the hillside). It was so good to see the greening hillside relieved of the blemish of garbage! Shortly after taking note of the good activity of cleaning up the mess, I was inspired to shout down to the crew with the rakes and bags and say “Thank you!” because I was so happy that someone was doing something positive. I thought of putting up a sign that read:
do not litter here or maybe something more forceful, in hopes that the people responsible for the trashing of the jungle would think twice before emptying their garbage cans over the wall. Almost immediately after, I felt the urge to go and grab the people living above the place where the cleanup was happening and show them the result and ask them to keep it this way, and not continue dumping their refuse over the wall. But I realized the futility of such an urge, because my reasoning for why not to litter and why to keep the hillside free from garbage is an alien concept. I could almost hear the response of a person shown the cleaned jungle: “Well of course, they should be cleaning it. What would they have to do for work if I did not dump my garbage over the wall for them to clean up?” So instead, I just tried to enjoy the knowledge that someone had issued a decree that the jungle in that place should be cleaned up and that is was actually happening. Who knows how long it will last.
I was walking with two of our interns later in the day, after lunch, to a nearby shop to get ice cream (because it is finally warm enough to allow for such an activity) and we noticed another phenomenon: two Indian men were installing a stainless steel public trash can on the roadside at another notorious place for garbage dumping! What a concept! The reason people chuck their trash over the wall into the jungle is because they do not have any other convenient way to dispose of it. Again, visions of a sign in lights that reads: do not litter here – use me mounted above the new trash can came to mind. We bought our ice creams and we walking back from the shop, peeling the wrappers of the cones and oh, how I longed for the new trash can to be ready so I could joyfully place my wrapper in it. Alas, I held the sticky wrapper in my hand all the way back to the office and deposited it in the trash bin there. Someday soon, though, I will gladly use the new one.