ITS RAJASTHAN! YOU KNOW WHY!!
I did not.
“Desire for approval fuels absurdity”
I can never forget these wise words, written by my own humble self. Inebriated and with my self-worth touching new highs, I still remember that wild, stormy night when I accidentally landed on a Thesaurus website while rummaging about for Jurassic porn (don’t ask!) on the Internet and it’s been preposterous ever since.
That’s right,
P-R-E-P-O-S-T-E-R-O-U-S. (Thesaurus five!!)
[turns around and swaggers away in slow motion as things explode in the background]
My point is, humans’ yearning for approval drives everything. Yet, the most unreasonable cry for approval, something that’s not evident in any other species, something that is physically, mentally, financially, politically, arithmetically, asthmatically and metabolically drenching — is a wedding. When two people want to share their lives, bills and venereal diseases together — they should just go ahead and do it. Like, when I want to eat fried chicken, I fuckin’ (pardon my French) go out there and eat the damn fried chicken and not instead hold a ceremony around it where five hundred people eat my food, drink my alcohol, dance like savages and fire celebratory rounds in the air.
When I go to a wedding and sip, quite shamelessly, five servings of the ridiculously tasteless welcome drink and jump lines for the chaat counter in the buffet lineup — I am inclusively acknowledging the fact that, in a few hours or days or weeks, the bride and groom are going to be naked in a room doing unmentionable acts of procreating and I — Peeyush, of the house Kumar, First of his name, Owner of a Twitter Handle and a Swipe Right activist, consciously approve of all their carnal actions.
But this is NOT an open letter against the institution of marriage. This is a true, riveting, gut wrenching account of
HOW I ATTENDED MY FRIEND’S WEDDING IN RAJASTHAN AGAINST ALL ODDS AND GOT RUN OVER BY A BULL… ALMOST!!
[turns around and swaggers away in slow motion as things explode in the background]
[Okay, I’ll stop doing that]
I got invited to a wedding in Rajasthan this past winter. The groom was a close friend of mine who had lived his entire life in Bangalore and so had the girl. When I inquired about why they were going through the trouble of traveling all the way to Rajasthan for this, he said and I quote,
“Its Rajasthan. You know why!”
I didn’t.
The real shocker was the address of the wedding location. Imagine the remotest godforsaken village in the most arid part of Rajasthan, where if aliens ever land, would just look around with profound confusion and exclaim, “@!#$%$%^&##$%%556!sdfaww232!!!##$$$”, which roughly translates to “Oh! Crap!!!!!”.
The situation demanded of me to turn reluctantly to the cruel joke I call my savings. Back-to-back purchases of flight tickets, train tickets, bus tickets, hotel room bookings, new under wears, Ray Ban goggles (for candid selfies with a fort in the background) and ethnic attire left me with only enough money to fill the bottom of my pockets and make jingling sounds by walking briskly.
A plane ride, cab ride, bus ride and a not so comfortable train ride that collectively spanned over 12 hours made me wonder if I am making the right choices when it comes to making friends. After continuously traveling for a long time, my body was suffering from acute motion hangover. I could feel the platform rhythmically oscillating under my feet. My friend was kind enough to send over an SUV that would carry us to the guest house. While calling that vehicle an SUV is like calling Nokia 3500, a smartphone — in the vehicle’s defense, it was built to endure and take hits from the unforgiving roads of that region.
But we were not.
My back was never the same again after that trip.
Another friend of mine who had accompanied me on this journey, was quite recently introduced to the invention called camera and therefore, was maniacally capturing anything visible to the naked eye, like -
- the array of palm sized pictures of various Indian Gods and Goddesses on the SUV’s dashboard
- the huge cracks in the road that were possibly built along with the road
- a local man wearing a huge red turban out on a leisurely walk with his bull in the middle of the afternoon
- close-up of my face which was host to an expression due to fatigue, hunger and general existential confusion about my purpose in this world
- and the driver who would look away from the road for frighteningly long periods of time whenever the camera was pointed at him
After we reached the dharamshala where all the relatives from boy’s side had set up camp, I took a long bath and wasn’t willing to step out of the shower till someone yelled ‘Food’. A word of advice here for the ‘foodies’— Don’t EVER go for the sweets first. Those are always the very first items on the buffet table. A rookie, under the influence of hunger, would gobble down a good number of those sweets in the very first serving, unaware of the secret cousins of the groom ready to ambush him with bowls full of the very same sweets and force them down his throat ruthlessly, all the while, mocking his low appetite and laughing away his mild acts of rebellion.
Being one of the closest friends to the groom, the responsibility fell upon me to deck him up for the evening rituals. While I was helping him into his sherwani, his cousins and not so adult uncles cracked the customary vulgar jokes about suhaag raat problems which in any other situation would have only raised eyebrows and cries of misogyny. The vibe in that room shifted from fun and jovial to dead serious when I decided to spray perfume on his sherwani because three different people yelled, “Careful!” as if the future of humanity relied on my ability to spray perfume judiciously. Stunned and frozen, with the bottle of perfume in my hand and the tip of my forefinger on the trigger, I shifted my eyes from person to person, demanding explanation for the sudden change in the mood, “Why?” was all I could utter under my breath. The groom gently touched my shoulder and whispered,
“Its Rajasthan, you know why!”
“No, I don’t.” — is what I should’ve said but I didn’t want them to question my knowledge about Rajasthani customs and beliefs, especially after having boasted to them, in every possible conversation, about my four years of stay there when my father was posted in Rajasthan.
In the evening, groom had a super slow horse riding session around the campus of dharamshala as we danced around and posed for pictures. The usual force feeding during dinner was followed by a sleepless night of acidity and painful farts.
Next morning, when we arrived at the girl’s place, all her cousin brothers (and I swear, there were so many of them) swarmed all over us and forcefully snatched away all our luggage. Being a gentleman, I resisted for a bit when one of the girl’s cousin whispered in my ears, “We can’t allow you to carry your own luggage.”
“Why?” I asked smiling.
“It’s Rajasthan, you know why!”
But, of course, I said to myself.
I eventually decided to let him carry my bag upstairs. In fact, I also tried to lighten up the mood by cracking a joke about weddings which didn’t quite go well and instead gave the impression that I was not happy with their hospitality. Humor is not for everyone. After placing our luggage in one of the rooms, we were rushed downstairs into a huge hall crowded with people sitting around tables and eating. The smell of good food was clearly a cheer bringer but not for long. As groom’s best friend, I was made to sit on the same table as him and was given the utmost attention. Maybe a bit too much. The servers started to put food on our plates and everything was sailing smoothly till I got this tingling sensation that someone was standing behind me. Before I could react, a fist appeared in front of my face and shoved its contents into my mouth before I could cry “help”. It was fried cashews and almonds. I turned and saw a young bright face smiling at me. Just another of the girl’s cousins — because, why not.
With my mouth stuffed with dry fruits, I gestured with my hands — “What the fu*k?” He patted my back, guffawed and walked away. Everyone on the table went through the same ordeal and I thought it was over till it happened again.
For another eight times.
Each time it was a different person.
I turned to the groom’s uncle sitting next to me and asked meekly, “Why on Earth…?” and you wouldn’t believe what he said.
“It’s Rajasthan, you know why!”
Post lunch, each of them took turns to make fun of my abysmal appetite and how it had something to do with my urban lifestyle and the pizza eating culture.
The mandap for the wedding rituals was setup in front of the girl’s house on a street which was really narrow and congested allowing people to be only on one side of it. There really was no way to cross to the other side unless you are a ninja. But being the champion of fools, I jumped walls like an out of work Parkour artist and went to the other side to have a better view of the entire ritual. I glanced around expecting looks of adulation for my athleticism only to find old aunties throwing judgmental looks wondering, “Kaun hai ye bandar ka bachcha?”(Rough translation — “Who invited the infant monkey?”)
All jokes aside, I, for the first time, was impressed by the efficiency of the entire setup. No costly wedding halls, no unnecessary LED screens showing live footage of what everyone can already see, no unnecessary extravagant display of grandeur. But what I gloriously failed to notice was a huge muscular bull, approaching the mandap from behind me. The lane was narrow enough to give the bull complete monopoly over who passes through and who gets crushed under his horns. Unaware of the development behind me, I was shooting the fera ritual on my phone when a shrill feminine cry disturbed the already noisy atmosphere of the mandap. I turned to probe the source of that noise only to lock gaze with the approaching bull.
My years of training kicked in, freezing my legs instantly. I was practically, cemented into the road. Next thing I did was to pray to God that if I, per chance, secretly had the ability to talk to animals telepathically, that would be a great time to activate it.
I, clearly, didn’t have any such ability.
“I am fine, by the way”, I murmured, addressing the indifference with which everything went back to normal.
Rest of the event went pretty uneventful and thankfully so. After another bout of forced-feeding and the customary mocking session of my appetite, it was time to say farewell. They were kind enough to give me as farewell gift — a basket full of faafda, laddus and other sweets thickly coated in enough ghee to energize International Space Station for the next 10 years.
I shared the laddus and fafdas with two foreigners in the train to Jaipur. The struggle with which they swallowed the extremely sweet laddus and ghee-coated faafdas encouraged me to mock their disgraceful appetite and the urban pizza eating lifestyle. One of them inquired me why there was so much of sugar and the weirdly nice tasting oily content (he was referring to the ghee) in everything. Smugly, I replied –
“It’s Rajasthan, you know why!”
[turns around and swaggers away in slow motion as things explode in the background]
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