The laughing bride!

 

My childhood friend on her big day

A few days ago, I read an article by Taslima Nasreen, saying that Deepika Padukone had shattered an age-old custom and set a precedent for Indian brides, by posting pictures of herself laughing at her wedding.

And though I’m very happy for Deepika and Ranveer, and unequivocally in favour of the laughing bride, I am inclined to disagree with Ms Nasreen a bit. Just a little.

Deepika isn’t the first to shatter the custom. She’s just part of the changing fabric of Indian society, although by virtue of being a super star, she has the ability to grab eyeballs and influence millions, which amplifies manifold the significance of her laughter. However, that said, she is in no way the first.

At the risk of sounding hugely conceited and raising smirks and snickers, I will now give myself a pat on the back and declare that I was the one to break the custom, not Padukone. And I’m not a movie star either. (What the heck—this is my blog, where else can I indulge in such unrestrained narcissism?)

So here’s how it was. I was chit chatting with my friends and grinning away to glory, perched proudly on the bridal stage at my wedding in 2010—eight years before Padukone. I’m the trendsetter here—by a long decade.

The elderly ladies at my wedding would whisper to each other, scandalised at this brazen display of happiness, and one of them was later known to remark, with some displeasure, that the bride looks very contented. “Dulhan badi mutmayeen lag rahi hai!” she would declare with disdain. One of my best friends from school put it very succinctly, sometime later: “Well, you’re the girl who’s never been silent on stage, all through school and college. No one could have expected you to be silent on the grandest stage of your life!”

Touché!

(The funniest, or perhaps saddest, part in all of this is that when the wedding videos came, I realised that the videographer had deliberately edited out all the scenes where I’m laughing, with my teeth on display. Drat the world!)

However, I must give Nasreen credit for one thing: she hit the nail on the head. Mine was a love marriage. The road to wedding tears is often paved with arranged marriage apprehensions. Not just the evil paraphernalia that marriages in our side of the world have become associated with, but the very nature of arranged matches where you step into a life with a complete stranger.  That’s not to say that all arranged marriages are doomed or loveless—my parents were an excellent example of one such match that was always mistaken for a love marriage, by everyone who met this happy couple. But it does bring its fair share of fears, which, at least at the outset, aren’t present in the love marriage scenario.

So it was with me. I knew exactly who it was that I was marrying. I knew his family, I was comfortable with what I’d chosen. We’d been waiting for this day; it was a moment of joyous culmination. No nervous apprehensions of what lay ahead. (That does not, in any way, mean that what lay ahead could have been predicted. What lay ahead was perhaps equally torturous— tears or no tears. But ignorance is bliss, as they say.)

And that moment on stage was preserved perfectly in time, untouched by any sombreness or grief.

However, this would be a very one-dimensional view of the bride’s tears at her wedding if I did not also take into account several other factors—separation from the parents being one of the biggest. Most girls have never lived away from their parents before they get married, and it is a poignant moment when you know that now you shall be leaving the nest, making a new and separate life for yourself. For the parents as well, this brings a wave of mixed feelings—letting go of the precious creature they’d been nurturing all this while. Watching her step fully into a distinct life.

For the boy’s parents, this moment might come at places other than the wedding. I’ve seen boys’ mothers cry softly when their sons leave the nest to go out into the world and make an independent life for themselves. It’s just that for girls, at least in our side of the world, this usually doesn’t happen before the wedding.

For me, though, it did. I’d already been living in Delhi, away from my family, for over a year before I got married. My moment of realisation that I was finally leaving it all had come a year before my wedding, an overwhelming feeling punctuated by silent tears. There’s more to crying than just grief, or fear.

And thus it came to pass that my wedding ceremony went by without me shedding a single tear—not even at the rukhsati, the sending off of the bride.

I was far too busy murmuring rapid instructions to my sister to hold me properly, and heaven help her if she let me fall to the floor clumsily in all my wedding regalia. All this while my uncle stood by me, chuckling softly.

In my family, as is the custom, a sehra is tied to the bride’s forehead (a bit like the groom’s sehra but shorter) before she is sent off. I’ve no clue about the origins or reasons for this ritual, and I’d gladly do away with it when it’s time to marry off my son, if my future daughter-in-law so wishes. The result of all this sehra-tying is that the bride is momentarily robbed of her vision and has to be led away by family members into the groom’s car, entirely blind.  Now I couldn’t even control where I stepped, when I’d controlled half the wedding ceremony and rushed about from banks to tailors’ shops one day before my wedding—complete with henna painted hands.

So it came to pass that beneath my blinding sehra I was fiercely whispering instructions to my sister. “Where’s my vanity box? I hope it’s being kept in the car and not being left behind.”

“Where’s my purse? Did you pick it up? It’s got money in it! For heaven’s sake don’t leave it at the stage.”

“Who has my jewelry case? One set of keys is in my purse. Who’s been handed over the other set? Just make sure it’s sent to my room and not misplaced!”

So on and so forth.

Control freaks don’t cry. They instruct.

But then a few years later, one of my former classmates did me one better, for she posted a picture of herself pinching her husband’s cheek on her D-Day — complete in wedding attire. I’ll have to admit I rued not having done that with mine!

However, now that I think of it, my family brought in the laughing tradition 20 years ago at my uncle’s wedding. I was about 10 years old, and had been officially stationed by the bride’s side to make her laugh.

My grandma, the bride’s mother-in-law, would keep coming up to her and telling her, “Darling! You can smile! It’s your wedding! No need to bend your head and look demure! Be the happy bride.”

And I, completely smitten by my aunt-bride, kept cracking jokes about family members to make her laugh. We have plenty of pictures in the album with her teeth on full display. I guess it’s in the blood. My family loves laughing brides.

Perhaps these may be exceptions to the norm, but the norm certainly is changing rapidly. We have far more smiling brides— blushing, yes, but smiling too—than crying ones, movie depictions be damned.

Ms Nasreen needs to open her eyes to changing Indian culture. The joyous bride is hardly as big an anomaly now as she was, say, a decade or two ago. Laughing brides are quite in vogue.

The bar was set a decade ago.

My numerous ‘wives’

 

I had never, ever imagined in my life that one day I’d be writing a piece on domestic helps. The ubiquitous and yet elusive maid. The subject of endless angst, animated discussions and innumerable internet memes and videos.

It is very common for Indian homes to have domestic helps—mostly part-time workers, but sometimes also full-time ones, in the form of live-in maids, whose services are generally utilised by working mothers like myself.

Lately, I’ve realised that the relationship between a woman and her help is uncannily like the relationship between the man of the house and his woman, as in the days of yore. In fact, the manner in which most women, including me, speak of our domestic helps is almost exactly the way that patriarchy-infested males speak of women such as me.

Let me explain.

You feel they are upstarts, they are getting too big for their boots, and demanding too many privileges. That they have forgotten their place. That no matter how good you are to them, it is never enough.

Yes it is true that there are domestic workers who swindle and cheat and take advantage of their employers, just as there are women who, when they assume a position of power, become more Evil Queen than good witch Glinda of the South.

And yet, these maids belong to that category of people who’ve been exploited, underpaid, trampled over for centuries. They have not had even a semblance of rights. They’ve been at the mercy of the maai-baap. And now, when they have some bargaining rights, when they have the audacity to demand and talk back to power, the maai baap resents the usurping of centuries-old privilege.

So I have to pay my maid a lot more, accept most of her demands, and complain to my friends how these maids are a necessary evil. You wish you didn’t have to tolerate them, but what can you do, you poor thing, you need them to run your life smoothly. Much like the husband that declares how his wife is a necessary evil, how he wished he hadn’t married her but then she is the one who keeps his household running smoothly.

So yes, while this may feel like an ‘inconvenience’ for us—tolerating demands, paying higher prices—it is definitely a good thing for humanity in general, especially as far as human dignity is concerned. Nobody is a maai baap anymore. It’s a straightforward employer-employee equation.

Now if only I could get some loyalty. Sigh.

Oops, there I go again!

Conditioning takes such a long time to be overcome.

——————

Postscript : This blog post was originally written several months ago. In the time that passed I realised that I have actually had several loyal domestic helps, but had to lose them when they relocated to the villages they had come from, for personal reasons. So I’ve had plenty of loyalty as well. And I’ve absolutely no reason to complain.

There are good people in this world and there are mean ones. There are good maids, and there are mean maids. Lord bless the good ones, for they literally keep our lives from collapsing!

Importantly, they also show us the mirror, giving us a glimpse of what we’d do when we’re in a position of power. As the best parameter for evaluating people is to see what they do with power once they have it.