The Joke My Wedding Was
Which one of the brides are you?
I had a Christian wedding in New Delhi, India, where Christians are a minority, and such weddings are rare. We had a lot of non-Christian friends who wanted to attend the dreamy white wedding for the first time.
Now if you are a little familiar with Hindu weddings, you would know that they never start on time. The groom is supposed to make the woman wait and purposely arrive late on horseback with the enthusiastic boy’s side of the family.
The garlands are exchanged, dinner served. The actual religious ceremony is held at a godforsaken hour in the morning. Only the closest knit family stays on for it. Guests who are too old to wait to eat and need to stick to a strict schedule stay home!
We had to explain to our non-Christian friends the importance of being on time. Normally, the church had other wedding slots to adhere to and the priest would get the people married in twenty minutes flat, without waiting for the closest of relatives.
But as always, life had to jinx us. My Catholic wedding was perhaps the only one in the popular New Delhi Cathedral that not only did not start on time but was four hours delayed.
At 11 am, when I was supposed to be standing there at the alter, a bunch of teenagers clad in white took the stage with girls on one side and boys on the other.
The church was full, with 300 excited guests standing in the heat, waiting to park their cars and witness something new. Some did manage to take a peek. They thought this was a mass wedding of some sort.
One confused friend from France called me frantically, “Shireen, which one of the brides are you and why are the grooms also dressed in white?”
I was sitting in the car and had no idea what was going on inside. I tried to intervene, but without hearing he continued.
“Ah! Perhaps because in your conservative country, the grooms are also virgins!”, he went on, answering his own question.
“But why are the to-be-married women and men standing apart?”
His perturbing questions and my ignorance made my heart race.
Turns out, the church had fixed a Confirmation for about 100 teenagers way back in advance and had mistakenly given us the same slot. They could not tell us last minute to change the time as cards had been printed and people informed.
By the time we understood the chaos and made our way there, half of the guests left without bidding goodbye.
The decorations that we had painstakingly installed the night before on the pews had been ripped apart. The paper flowers were handmade, and the priest was there as we worked tirelessly till the wee hours last night! He could have told us to forgo the hard work, but no!
The reception was held another hour away, in the middle of nowhere. It was supposed to be a day wedding and we did not install lights at the venue. It was supposed to go on till 5 pm max.
It was spring and already dark at 5. Cold lunch was served instead of tea and coffee. The DJ who had another appointment had left. The cake cutting and the toast were forgotten due to the confusion.
The only good memory I had was of my international musical friends trying to rescue things with an impromptu performance. This the videographer forgot to record.
Many oldies left in a haste due to the disorganization. Another half fell while trampling in the dark.
There were no good photos, as there was no light! It seems like the videographer and photographer also did not want to think about this bedlam.
They had forgotten to edit its memories and we got to see the terrible results a year later. By then, the shuddering memories of this horrendous day had subsided, and I was distracted by a little monster in my lap.
After months of planning, if there was a day that everything from start to finish did not go right, it was my wedding day. Many remember it as, “The day wedding that turned into night”.
That catastrophic day made me have doubts about our relationship moving forward. After all, we had not really started on the right foot!
We are now married ten years with two kids. Like the wedding, our life has also not gone as planned.
In ten years, we have moved countries and states within the USA seven times. We still do not have a permanent place to call home due to the uncertainties. We are living apart for more than a year, trying to carve a permanent home, very much still in love.
When the unexpected happens, you can always hope that love will endure through it all.
