Desi girl: Essential fun, fuss and frolic in the lead up to desi weddings

After last week’s introduction to desi wedding wardrobe essentials and in the run-up to the post-Ramadan start of the desi wedding season, I am going to attempt to deconstruct the desi wedding calendar.

A far cry from western weddings, which involve a church ceremony and reception on the same day (with an optional pre-wedding stag or hen night for the groom and bride), desi weddings have more events than the fingers on your hands.

It starts with a pre-wedding celebration – called dholki in Pakistan and sangeet in India – where the younger relatives of the families sing and dance the night away. Dholki is named after the dhol, the double-headed drum native to the Indian subcontinent, while sangeet is the Hindi word for “song”. This is also when everybody practises any dances they have planned for the wedding. It is not unheard of to have weekly dholkis as early as two months before the wedding.

Despite all the fanfare, these are the informal pre-wedding celebrations. The first actual formal pre-wedding celebrations are the mayun or mehendi. The dress code is bright and brash: yellows, oranges, reds, shocking pinks and bright greens, with lots and lots of flowers. Traditionally, there will be a sing-song showdown, where the bride’s side of the family and the groom’s side of the family will each form a team and battle it out, singing as loudly and enthusiastically as possible. One person on each side will be designated the dholi and will take charge of beating the drum. A junior dholi holds a dinner spoon to follow the beat by tapping the spoon on the drum’s wooden barrel. A tambourine is optional these days, but was a must until about a decade ago. The singing is followed by the dance performances that have been practised.

This is also where relatives are on the lookout for eligible brides and grooms for singletons. Rishta aunties – older female relatives playing matchmaker – keep their eyes and ears open for potential names to add to their little black book. There is a huge surge in marriages post-wedding season, when the aunties have done their window shopping, paired up potential matches and put the respective parents in touch.

Concluding the day’s celebration are the various traditional wedding rituals: the ladies from both sides apply dots of henna on the palms of the bride and groom and offer them gifts, or sadqa (tribute money), to be distributed to the needy after the wedding.

At a time when culture or religion required the genders to be segregated, the bride’s family and the groom’s family would host separate mehndi and mayun events. With segregation now a thing of the past, most families get together to host one big event, but there are still a few who prefer to go about it the old-fashioned way. Whether they are mixed or segregated, these events are the highlights of weddings. They are pure fun, song and dance, and free of any of the emotional overtones that weddings and receptions are fraught with.

The writer is an honest-to-goodness desi living in Dubai