Like most desi girls, one of my favourite things is a wedding.
The sparkly clothes and jewellery, the bangles from wrist to elbow, the sangeet (singing and dancing), the flowers and henna, the food and, of course, meeting up with people you haven’t seen in ages.
Somewhere in there are the bride and groom, but they are just a side plot. The main storyline here is the fun. No wonder we love weddings as much as we do.
Now that Ramadan is almost here, wedding fun is just weeks away, because post-Eid is when the desi wedding season officially kicks off.
The smart ones will tell you that the key to enjoying a wedding is to sidestep all the fuss, which can happen if you’re close enough to the bride or groom to be a part of all the juicy action, but not so close that you end up having to deal with errands and chores.
The weddings of siblings, first cousins and best friends mean work. You don’t just stay up all night at the henna and sangeet parties leading up to the wedding – you stay up several more hours cleaning up afterwards. So, forget about getting your henna painted on your hands. Oh, and here are some more dishes for you to do!
Weddings of second cousins, colleagues and classmates are the ones to attend. No one will ask you to go and pick up last-minute guests from the airport, or chase the florist. You will not have to lift a finger and will, in fact, get waited upon by the poor siblings/cousins/best friends of the bride/groom.
Once you’ve established that the wedding you are invited to is one where you can “have fun”, that is where the next stage begins: the wardrobe planning. Unless it’s the wedding of a very close relation, new clothes are not necessarily called for. So out come the special suitcases from the topmost shelves of wardrobes and from under the bed. Shiny saris and glittery ghararas are dusted, inspected for damage and cleverly put together to ensure you don’t end up wearing one style of clothing throughout the various celebrations. There are several of these, incidentally, and it will take a whole other column to list what they are, so let’s skip that for now and just say that there can be any number of events, from three to 13.
I have been invited to a wedding next month where six events take place over four days. And this is a destination wedding. If you thought deciding what to wear for six different events that are part of a single wedding was tough, try putting together the same wardrobe to pack and take with you. Thankfully, though, the hosts have made it easy by stipulating a dress code for each event. From ethnic for the sangeet to traditional for the pooja, the dress code takes out the potential embarrassment when you show up dressed casually for a poolside event only to find everyone else dressed to the nines.
My bags are packed, but I’m still worried about what I may have forgotten. A missing stick-on bindi has the potential to unravel a carefully planned look. My personal triumph, though, is having convinced my husband – who won’t wear anything except jeans and T-shirts – to wear a traditional salwar-kurta for the sangeet. Apparently, it takes an invitation with the words “Dress code: formal” to convince him to wear something desi.
• Next week: the dozens of events that make up desi weddings, deconstructed
The writer is an honest-to-goodness desi living in Dubai
artslife@thenational.ae
