Wedding Bells II

I apologise for the delay. First there was the wedding, then there was replying to all the mail the previous Fillets have generated (thank you everybody!), and finally there was just sheer laziness.

So, here we are. Wedding Bells II- Part 2 of a three part series- in which I provide the scoop on how my cousin Vishal’s wedding proceeded.

It was very disappointing. The airport girl didn’t gatecrash the sangeet and ask Vishal to marry her, and Vishal doesn’t have a deaf brother who could raise objections to the wedding. Everything proceeded smoothly. Tritely. Boring.

I shaved for the wedding. Before and after photos shall be made available shortly.

As usual, the uniquely defective relatives that we are all cursed with were the items of maximum interest.

Vishal has these aunts or great aunts on his mother’s side. A pair of these toothless old crones fancied themselves as a singing chorus of sorts- Shastriji could hardly do anything without them bursting into some foul folk song or the other. People stared askance at them, but they continued unabated. Since staring didn’t work, these people then just shook their heads silently and sadly, and muttered ‘Had hundi hai, yaar’ to themselves.

Well, if not exactly ‘Had hundi hai, yaar’, at least something equivalent.

But by far the most dysfunctional relative to grace the wedding was the bride’s mamaji.

Mamaji’s overriding achievement in life seems to be the fact that he befriended LK Advani and Atal Bahari Vajpayee back when they were all young. The very fact that he knew them when they were young itself suggests that he is slightly over two hundred years old, and, in all decency, should have died long ago, but some people just refuse to show consideration to others.

Mamaji, in fact, went out of his way to be inconsiderate. He invited Advani and Vajpayee to the wedding. And Advani actually accepted.

Consequently, the baraat route was lined by submachine gun wielding police officers intent on making nuisances of themselves. During the course of the pre-dinner period, I was accosted brusquely by a plainclothesman who demanded to know who I was. This was very galling- if policemen are going to look at me suspiciously even when I’m clean-shaven- why not have a beard after all? The situation is similar to my Class XII English board, where I resisted the temptation to submit my answers in geek rap- and received 58 nevertheless.

Anyway, Advani came for a grand total of about five minutes. We were all quite relieved as he, and the police contingent, left.

My parents inform me that Mamaji is a namedropper of the worst sort- when asked his views on the Iraqi situation he claimed that Bush would be calling Vajpayee that night, after which Vajpayee would seek his, and the German ambassadors advice.

Clovis Sangrail would know what to do with Mamaji. If you don’t know who Clovis Sangrail is, buy the collected works of Saki.

Moving along to the bride. While I can’t comment on her actual intelligence, she certainly looks very dumb. However, as far as her relatives are concerned, they live up to their looks- they seem to posses the IQ of a dull-witted slime mould.

They attempted to steal Vishal’s juttis. All well and good- you could expect nothing less of them than to carry on a time honoured tradition. Where one finds fault with them is in their mode of execution. They not only neglected Vishal’s juttis altogether, but what they eventually purloined was my brother Bhavya’s right jutti, Vishal’s father’s left black shoe, and my father’s right brown shoe. How they managed to mistake these three diverse items for a pair of juttis I shall never know, but I strongly suspect either sensory or cognitive retardation.

Um yeah, that’s it for this Fillet. Stick around for the next part.

Leave a Reply