Indian Wedding: The Awkward Edition

Four months ago, on a perfect sunny day, my sister had a big fat Indian wedding.

(you knew I’d write this post eventually, right?)

Like most weddings, the day began at 4am (at least for my sister it did. I “slept in” for another hour). By five o’ clock she was already being transformed from whatever she is on a regular day (bleh), to a Bollywood bridal princess.  After I brushed my teeth, I snuck inside her room to check out the work-in-progress. The hair had been put into a lovely up-do, but the make-up was still underway. In other words the eyeshadow was finished, but the furry fake lashes had yet to be glued on (sorry, but you CANNOT get married “Indian style” without fake lashes, it’s a disgrace to our culture if you don’t).

I smiled in approval since it WAS her special day after all, but my mother who was standing in the room as well, was a little bit more on the bolder side.

“Why are you putting so much eye makeup on? You’re making her eyes look pointy and long.”

Poor stylist, poor sister.

I didn’t have time to enjoy the motherly insults, because I had to get ready too. I originally thought I’d be getting professional hair and make-up for the morning ceremony, but I quickly realized my sister wanted me to look uglier than her, so it would have to be a self-service job.

My first choice of hairstyles would always involve kick-ass curls, but for Sikh wedding ceremonies, you had to cover your head and tie your hair back.

So ponytail it is!

I still looked pretty good with my sea foam-coloured eyeshadow and matching sea foam outfit (sounds ugly but it wasn’t I swear), so by 7am I went downstairs to help out. This involved putting fresh rose boutonnieres on all the men, who apparently can’t pin a simple flower to their jackets. I didn’t like this job, mostly because we Indians aren’t very “touchy feely” people (except for awkward hugs with distant relatives). So to go through man after man, whether uncles, cousins or brothers, and stand mere inches away while I pinned on the flowers?

Eww.

Once that was done my sister came down and the photographer hi-jacked her. For like over an hour. Yawn.

So I caught up on some TV (not that I didn’t have TONS to do later…just wait until I get to the reception).

By the time the photographer released her, it was time for the videographer to have his fun. He envisioned this heartwarming story, where every one of us, including my brothers, would smile and hug my sister. After which he’d put on a lovely soundtrack. I found this to be the most amusing part of the day. Thing is, any display of affection between my siblings and I is like kryptonite. Sure a hug is not a glowing green rock, but it will cripple us and make us beg for mercy just the same.

For MY “video hug”, I pulled her in from the shoulders and supplied my best glowing fake-ass smile (what? I want to be Hollywood some day, this is my test-screening). For my brothers, they tried to get away with a one-handed shoulder pat plus a nod of acknowledgement. But our director wasn’t having it. So my parents and I waited through take after take, until they finally acted out some semblance of a hug.

We ain’t no Brady Bunch.

Once that was finished, people started filling our house, and we went through a TON of family photos. The only awkward part was when the not-so close relatives wanted the photographer to do special shots just for them and the bride.  This happens all the time, and you can say you’re running late, but they persist and persist. So the photographer finally gave in, but whatever…AS IF we ever sent them the pictures…

At last (and already a half an hour behind for the ceremony—or right on time according to Indian punctuality) we made our way out of the house. And into the SUV limo!

This was another awkward moment. Only fifteen people would fit into the limo, with the original assignment being our six family members, our gran, two aunts and uncles and some cousins.

But then some “Indian moms” had a melt down. The funny thing was, they were my MOM’s friends, not my sister’s. But these forty to fifty something women were intent on being front and centre.

Which means the limo ride quickly became: bride, mom, me, cousins, aunts…and miscallenous Indian women who think they’re the shit.

I’d never been inside a limo before (please refer to Appendix: “girl who was dateless for the prom”), but within a moment, I felt like a ballin’ rap star.  All I could think was “Where  are my ‘ho’s, where’s the Cristal, and where is my bling?!”

We had the bling alright, but as for ‘ho’s and alcohol, did I mention the limo was full of middle-aged Indian women? Right.

That’s all for now, as the wedding day purge will continue in my follow-up post (’cause no one can stomach more than 800 words of Romi in a single shot…too bad I wrote an 84,000-word novel).

Happy Diwali, Now How Do I De-Sweeten?

Just passing through to note the occasion of another Diwali. The festival of lights, the triumph of good versus evil, in short the most significant festival in India.

What troubled me about this holiday though, was that a lot of people had fireworks within our extended neighbourhood. Trust me, I LOVE fireworks, and I beamed as they lit up the night sky. I beamed even more when my dad called us out into the yard.

“Let’s start the fireworks. Get the camera!”

We stood there huddled by the open screen door, waiting for the lights to blind and the crackles to deafen.

It began and our hearts started racing. The explosion of flaming lights on our patio grew taller. Two feet. Four feet.

It was the warm-up ’till the hundred-foot blast.

Four feet.

Four feet.

And then lights out, the flame is dead.

“Come on now, keep watching. I have three more!”

“Are they the same as the last one dad?”

“Yes they’re the same, enjoy all the colours!”

Uhh…okay.

Not to be a fireworks snob, but I was waiting for the hardcore shit that Apu sells to Homer Simpson in the Kwik-E Mart. You know the stuff that he’s hiding in the back. Like the firework rockets.

No rockets here.

The fireworks disappointment I can deal with, but how do I deal with the sheer amount of sugar I consumed in the last two days? The Indian sweets, the syrupy delights…my god the translucent syrup.

Scientifically-speaking, I’m thinking that the best way to neutralize sugar, is to eat a ton of salty food, exclusively. For the next twenty-four hours.

I don’t have a doctor’s note to confirm it, but I’m pretty sure I got an A- in high school Chemistry.

Now someone pass the sodium chloride and let’s get this party started…

Bridezilla and the Whisky Factor…

I fell off the blog wagon just a slight bit, but I was hard at work with the editing of my very first novel, you know  “Year of the Chick“.

Now’s the perfect time to take a break, and it’s not like I’m finished describing my sister’s Indian wedding.

Where did I leave off?

Oh yeah, whorish children with manicures.  That was two nights before the big day, which leads me to the last day before…

..Earlier I’d mentioned that fitting in a sari for the wedding was a tough one. It would basically have to mean eating healthy for the seven days prior.  But of course there was a catered dinner for almost every last one of those seven days. And of course I can’t resist a thing that’s fried or drizzled in curry, so what to do?

The appropriate response was surely a flushing of the colon, or a slicing of my thighs and subsequent stitching, but I was saved by something so much better:

My sister embraced the full potential of bridezilla, and totally wore me out!

That doesn’t sound very fun, and she’d already subjected me to decorating slavery, but in her last day’s insanity before the big event, she had me running all around to do her bidding. And I mean RUNNING. Things like, racing back to the craft store for even MORE pots of fake-ass flowers, last-minute groceries, decorating the temple in under thirty minutes, it was my own mini-marathon! I was perfectly happy to sweat out the samosas in this way, except my efforts at the temple were thwarted on the day of the ceremony. It’s just that, when you try SO hard to make the white fabric hang off the pillars JUST so, only for some children to run right through it, knock over the pillars, and break a flower pot?

Well at least it wasn’t MY wedding. And also, isn’t this an added reason to put little kids on retractable leashes? I mean I know there’s a negative association with children on leashes and…dogs, but we also feed our kids, we also clean their poop until a certain age, so aren’t they a bit like dogs after all? When I have children, I’ll solve the dilemma by keeping my rug rats locked up tight in those pet carrier things. Like imagine how much faster parents would finish their shopping, if the grubby rug-rat hands were trapped behind a carrier wall.

Well it seems like I’ve fallen off the track, but the point of course is that I ran around completing the last minute tasks, and my body seemed to keep its (average) figure. Yay!

Before I could put on the wedding attire, one more catered dinner awaited. This time it was the choora ceremony, where my mother’s older brother would adorn my sister with the fabulous bangles shown here (those are the actual ones).

The food was great and so was the weather, leaving many of the guests to revel in the party tent outside. But just beyond the outer edge of that tent…was trouble. It came in the form of too many Indian men, and too many bottles of Crown Royal whisky. Most of the men were able to know when to quit (since their wives simply glared them into sobriety), but as in most Indian parties, there is always that ONE guest. In our little world, that guest came in the form of the one random male who was invited by a foggy obligation.

He came to the party wearing a velour track suit, so you knew it was trouble off the bat. And when he started accosting the Portuguese server we hired (is that illegal? Well she was getting more than minimum wage), we knew it was time for him to go.

As my dad stripped away the bottle of Crown Royal, track-suit man grimaced and groaned. Then he stumbled up the steps into the kitchen, and proceeded to harass my grandmother who was busy making tea. That’s right, a fifty-year-old drunkard chasing an eighty-year-old granny around the kitchen; did I mention that the wedding hadn’t even started?

Eventually the energizer bunny fueled by whisky lost his thunder, and he soon passed out in a lawn chair outside. My dad was perfectly happy to leave him here, but eventually one of his “people” came by to pick him up. I stared at his driver quizzically. Who are these people anyway? Do we call these people our friends?  Maybe Indian weddings need to be a little bit smaller, you know to filter out the riff-raff.

But whiskey riff-raff returned the following night, dressed to the nines for the reception. Correction, he was dressed in beige-coloured Indian style pajamas.

But let me stop myself there, since the wedding itself deserves its very own post or two…

Mini ‘Ho Alert: Children With Manicures

Continuing on with the days preceding my sister’s wedding, we find ourselves at “two days before” the big event…

In our Indian world within the world of Canadiana, “two days before” means an evening of wildly intricate mehndi designs. But before we could begin with this activity requiring more patience than I’ve ever possessed, we had to get our manicures!

That’s where most of my story begins and ends today…in the waiting room area of the nail salon.

For the entire time that I sat in the waiting chair, I found myself shocked and appalled by the Indian girls sitting next to me.  These girls were already through with their appointment, but their presence in itself was the core of my frustration:

-why did a six-year-old girl and an eight-year-old girl have  a nail appointment?

Your feathers may not be ruffled yet, and yes I understand the joy of your mother painting your nails just for fun if you’ve been very good, but this was NOT a mother-daughter bonding event. These were two little girls with fancy manicures AND pedicures, already stripped of their childhoods.

Six-year-old:  “Yours looks better than mine!” She finished with a pout.

Eight-year-old: “No look, she gave you a nicer design on your feet!”

Wait…DESIGNS?

Oh right. It’s this recent phenomenon of complicated designs to augment the average manicure. I myself have not been able to try out the designs for myself, as I’m a simple girl of “french manicure” or “solid colour” persuasion (if and when I should even get a manicure). But to witness six and eight-year-olds applying the latest trends?

No!

It feels wrong to me. It might not feel wrong to the world at large, since the world is okay with six-year olds oiling up their thighs for juvenile beauty contests, so fine…I accept that truth.

But you know what?  Oily thighs on a child don’t work for me (it feels wrong to even type it), nor am I in favour of making little girls grow accustomed to cosmetic life.  Imagine these girls going home and playing in the sandbox: “No! Don’t push me! I don’t want to scratch my manicure!”

A child is SUPPOSED to get all grimy and scratched.  Screw getting your nails done, those girls should be cutting up worms just for the heck of it!

At least that’s what I did when I was a kid, and look how wonderfully I turned out.

I just start to wonder when the day will come that I’ll see a little girl with acrylic air-brushed porn star nails.

Should I just close my eyes now? Because I feel like it’s on the brink…

…Now where was I? Oh yeah, after our manicures, we got to dress our hands in mehndi!  I suppose that’s the rest of the story, but my annoyance precluded me from mentioning it ’till now. Needless to say, getting your hands done is a whole lotta fun, but the hard part becomes the hours and hours you’re supposed to keep the mehndi in tact. It all depends on how dark you’d like the final product to be. If you wash your hands too early, the mendhi ends up looking like a faded light orange, even when its darkened from the first day or two of exposure.

But this was my sister’s wedding. We wanted the GOOD stuff, so we allowed the mehndi artist to mist our hands in sticky lemon spray once she was done, and then…we didn’t touch a thing. Don’t ask me how I went to the bathroom, but once bedtime arrived, I had to wrap my wrists in that white stretchy bandage material, the kind which resembles the mummy-wrap that burn-victims wear.

It was a less than comfortable sleep, but the end result was a strong amount of colour that lasted for a couple of weeks. And on a final note, while I went for the elegant and flowery designs on the inside, I wanted something different for the outside of my hands. So I picked a more unique design for that. It almost resembled pointy daggers shooting across my hands. I thought it was pretty bad-ass.

And now all I want is a fire-breathing dragon made of  mehndi on my back.

Bad-ass…

I Interrupt My Blog To Say…

…MY NOVEL DRAFT IS DONE!

That’s right, four and a half months and 78,852 words later, a once-proofread draft is complete for the “Year of the Chick.” (see other blog)

Aside from that there’s nothing else to say, except it’s 2am, and I should be getting to bed now (am I really going to wake up at 6am? Yeah, yeah I am…).

So does this mean the late nights will end, and that I’ll somehow regain all the sanity lost from the last four months?

Well let’s not be ridiculous, I still get to edit!

But rest assured, regularly-scheduled blog-programming, blog-reading and “reply-to-comments” will resume next week.

Thank you for your patience.

In the meantime, here for the first time EVER in the open public, two direct excerpts from the novel…

1. “I walked towards the scale with some newfound inner strength. What was I even afraid of?  I’d already told my mother that I hadn’t gained a pound in the last six months, so now I could prove her wrong.

The problem of course was that I hadn’t weighed myself in an entire year.

I thought about the snowman cookies from the day before, and the delicious foamy latte.  And what about the fact that I’d just eaten breakfast?  Everybody knows that weigh-ins after breakfast add three pounds.  Dammit.

With inner strength gone I finally mounted the scale.

The scale blinked on and off as it processed my weight. Meanwhile I attempted to stand on the sides of my feet.  I wasn’t really sure how that would lessen the number, but I tried it all the same.

The scale turned on for good with the final answer.

Holy Hell and God, I’d gained fifteen pounds in the last twelve months.”

—————————————————————————————

2. “The greasy-haired brown-skinned Indian man waved his rum and coke in the air, as his thick and bushy uni-brow pointed up and to the right, ever so suggestively. Of course every Indian girl whether hot, semi-hot or average had always been subjected to these uni-brow advances. The curse of unrelenting (and clueless) Indian men. Tonight though, I expected his interest a little more, since I was all decked out in my bright pink birthday dress, with matching nails and professionally curled locks of hair.

“Is your name Parveen?” He asked with a smile. His voice betrayed an accent that suggested emigration to Canada in the last twenty years. Not a “fresh off the boat” accent, but it was notable. I wouldn’t have minded the accent at all, if every Indian-born man I’d ever met in my life hadn’t conducted himself like a horny sleaze-bag who’d never seen a boob.”

And that’s all she wrote…for now.