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…

Voyage to India: Sunsets in Bombay…

As the sun began to set on our five-week vacation to India, it was time for some excitement in Bombay (it was still called “Bombay” in 1995, so that’s what we’re sticking with).

Our cousins lived in Delhi, so we dropped in for a visit on the way to the airport. It was my cousin’s birthday that day, which meant a cake had been arranged, along with a plethora of Indian sweets.

I quickly discovered that the cake was neither moist nor decadent as cakes should be, so I turned my attention to the gulab jamuns. After twenty minutes of behaviour that I cannot recall, I’d supposedly eaten five or six of them. For those of you who don’t know a lot about gulab jamuns, let’s just say: sugary syrup, milk solids, double cream, and they’re fried.

It was a bad idea but I hadn’t eaten lunch.

My bad idea followed me to the driveway as we said goodbye to make our way to the airport.  Seconds later, my bad idea unleashed itself in a three-foot radius covering half of the driveway. It was my greatest performance of projectile vomit to-date.

I vomited again when we arrived at the airport, and once more when I found the nearest bathroom. About a half an hour later we discovered that our flight would be delayed until the following morning.

As the news set in to the weary travelers, we found ourselves a spot on the floor that we could sleep on.

In the next few hours I puked five or six more times.  At last I was sent to the airport “doctor”, who had set up his practice beyond a bunch of darkened corridors, in what looked to be a glorified closet. He didn’t say much, but approached me with a big-ass smile and an even bigger needle.

By the time I returned our flight had moved ahead a couple of hours. It was time to go.

So that flight to Bombay…hmm. It was ninety minutes, and that’s all I really know, since I spent the ninety minutes passed out and drooling on my sister’s shoulder.  I think I still owe her for that one.

With my body weakened and my belly fragile, I took in what I could of the bustling city. Bombay offered the first I’d seen of beaches and ocean waves. Now THIS was a vacation.

For our first afternoon we squeezed our way through a crowded bazaar, realizing very quickly that Bombay was indeed a “tourist” spot. In other words everything was over-priced, times ten. For example, where you’d normally buy any clothes and shoes for a fraction of the price that you’d see in North America, everything here was…equal. The audacity.

For some odd reason I found myself entranced by a shoe store. I couldn’t explain the feeling at the time, but something about the modern look of the store, and its contrast to everything else that felt traditional was intriguing. It also had all the latest “Western” styles of boots and shoes. Could it be that I was feeling homesick?

My parents decided to enter the store and try to find some shoes for my dad. Knowing right away from the product selection and the rude-looking staff that the place was over-priced, I cringed in preparation for my parents to make a scene.

“How much are these shoes?” asked my dad.

“Two thousand rupees”

“Two thousand rupees?!?! I could go back home and buy three pair of shoes at a price like that!” he lied.

Awkward silence, sales staff rolling their eyes. Sigh.

Once we had firmly established our middle-class lot in life, we stuck to the food stalls and stuffed our hungry faces as the sun began to set. Everyone except for ME, that is. I was stuck with a bowl of chicken noodle soup, except there wasn’t any chicken or a single noodle. Just a bowl of hot yellow water, salted to the extreme. Nice try, India.

The following day was much of the same, but in our last evening  in Bombay, we hit the beaches.

Now don’t get confused with your typical concept of hitting the beaches. This means something very different for an Indian family of twelve. For me it meant a bright red t-shirt tucked into my jeans, with sandaled feet so I could get a little wild and feel the sand. So wild.

I had come to this place for an adventure, so when I saw the big white horse and the man with the sign saying  “Forty Rupees”, I wanted in.

Forty rupees later I was striding across the beach atop this beautiful steed. I looked like those chicks on the romance novel covers, minus the shred of silk that was supposed to be a dress (and plus  a red t-shirt and a pair of jeans).  For forty rupees I was allocated two whole laps across the beach. It lasted five minutes and I felt like a girl who’d been finally released of her over-protective life. This feeling only lasted as long as I didn’t look down, since the horse was on a leash with its master on the other end, running along to keep up.

A horse on leash? Yes. But it was Bombay baby, and at last I had my very own Indian adventure…

[This concludes my back-track of my family's trip to India, circa 1995.  I visited India once again in 2006.  I will post about that trip at a later time, since it involved a whole different set of recollections, mostly surrounding: perverts, the Dalai Lama, propositions, gold, a magnificent look at textiles, and being followed by more perverts in an air-conditioned mall. And of course, here's the very first post on the Voyage to India, if you feel like starting from the top...]

Voyage To India: Mystery Burgers and Stainless Steel

With less than two weeks to go in India, it was time for us to pack in the tourism. But before we arrived in Bombay or drove up high into the mountains, we had some smaller bits to deal with first.  This involved a day full of shopping in the city of Chandigarh, which in 1995 was the leader in variety of shops, quality of living and modern eats.

The drive to Chandigarh took a full three hours from where we were staying. This threw a little wrench in my mom’s excited plans to run through the shops in a state of immediate ecstasy. No mother. Food would have to come first.

For three and a half weeks, we’d been filling up our bellies with more Indian food than you could ever imagine. Or maybe you can imagine it, if you picture three weeks of a constant buffet. It sounds like a dream, but back then we were kids and we wanted some damn fast food.

In an age before India was ripe with McDonald’s, KFC and Pizza Hut, we still found a place that could meet our needs.  I wish I could remember the name of the place, and I doubt if it’s still in existence, but to us it simply seemed like McDonald’s: The Indian Edition.

My ten-year old brother immediately ordered the signature burger, which he must’ve been craving for weeks. At the time no one  thought to remind him that cows are sacred in India, and that Indian “burgers” aren’t made of beef. But anyway I’ll get to that later…

A few minutes later the family was scarfing down some chicken burgers, while my brother sat still with the oddest little look on his face.

“What’s the matter?” asked my mother.

“This hamburger tastes really weird. It’s all rubbery,” he replied.

“Well of course it’s going to taste different. It’s made out of mutton.”

“WHAT? What is that?” asked my brother with a greenish face.

“It’s like lamb. But it’s from a sheep that’s much more mature. So it’s called mutton.”

Our family had never eaten lamb. Or sheep of any kind. For this reason, I couldn’t decide why my parents hadn’t urged him to go with the chicken option. Maybe they wanted him to have a little food adventure.

If that was the case it was mission accomplished, since he puked all over his plate. Ha. Live ‘n learn kid.

My brother refused to eat another bite from that fast food place, but as we walked across the square to all the shops, we spotted a soft-serve ice cream stand. For this my brother was immediately ready to partake. I decided to have one too, not realizing though that homeless Indian kids have a strong nose for icy treats. In fact the second we had our cones we were ambushed, with the saddest faces and loudest wails I’d ever heard. I was literally being pushed by little children as they clawed for my yummy ice cream.  My current self would’ve felt really bad for the kids. But then I was a grungy teen, and only seconds away from smacking up those little brats.

My dad got them off our scent when he tossed a bunch of rupees in the other direction. They went after them like hungry pigeons.  I don’t mean to compare India’s homeless to hungry pigeons, but I’m simply playing back the memory from age fourteen. Ahem.

From the ice cream stand we strolled into the Indian shop. I couldn’t really place what sort of shop it was, except that it carried almost everything. Home decorations, trinkets, cassettes, and lots and lots of kitchen gadgets. It was my mom’s little heaven, and already she’d picked up twenty different items made of stainless steel. By the way, what is with Indians and stainless steel products? They love that stuff, but I’m not sure why. Is is superior performance? Durability? I’m not too sure…

As my dad took his spot by the Indian cassettes, us children roamed around with nothing to do. For me that is always a bad thing, since “nothing to do” tends to spring my bowels into action. This time I was hopping to and fro in the kitchen gadget aisle, trying to discourage whatever was pushing through. It was my scariest moment of the trip. Like what do you do if you poop in our pants when you’re a teenager?

At last my dad turned around and he saw rocking back and forth in the corner, with my face now dripping with sweat. Since my mom was still all drugged by the stainless steel, my dad walked me back to the fast food place for a poop.

Phew.

As the sun began to set on our food and shopping day, my parents took the driver to a nearby village. I had no idea why we were there, until I overheard my parents utter “fortune teller”. Huh?

They didn’t confirm or deny, but they told us to wait in the van.

This waiting turned out to be an hour and a half of siblings in violent heat. We  yelled, smacked and punched each other out in our upper arms (faces were off limits). We took a little break in between to eat some melted Oh Henry! chocolate bars, but after it was back to the fighting.

It was nightfall by the time my parents returned, and they didn’t say a word about the fortune teller. How mysterious. I did however catch both my mother and father shooting me suspicious looks from the review mirror.

So what on earth did that fortune teller say in 1995? And did any of it come true? Hmm…I never did find out, but the trip continues…

[This post was another in the series of my first family trip to India in '95.  Here is the first installment]

Voyage to India: Taj Mahal

In my last post the primary reason for our five-week trip had settled itself, since my uncle had gone ahead and married a woman he’d met only three days earlier.

This left us with some time to ramp up the activities.

First on the list was the Taj Mahal, which was a four or five hour train-ride from where we were.  Whenever I see depictions of Indian trains on television, I’m overwhelmed with the images of locals stuffed into grimy cars with limbs sticking out from every window, and tourists being sandwiched in between (and groped).  These trains do exist, but little do you see of the roomy train cars with comfy blue bench seating, and not to mention all the loads of leg room.  To think that this could all be yours for just a couple hundred rupees (i.e. ten dollars) extra! So there’s your lesson for today, don’t believe everything you see on TV.

Once we arrived at the looming outer structure of this totally epic edifice, we were asked to remove our shoes by the outer entrance. Unlike our visit to the Golden Temple though, here the shoes were scattered everywhere.  Which of course means that Slumdog Millionaire wasn’t lying: some hood-rats might just come along and steal your shoes!

Luckily for us our family’s shoes were nothing to admire in 1995, as none of us owned Reebok Pumps or fancy Doc Martens of any kind.

One of the most amazing Taj Mahal moments was turning the corner from the outer entrance and the gift shop. In that very moment we saw it: it was the Taj Mahal in perfect symmetry, with beautiful gardens at its front, and a backdrop of an azure sky.

Things became even more amazing as we got up close.  I was literally standing right in front of the very marble walls that had been built by Shah Jahan, as a tomb in the  memory of his wife Mumtaz Mahal.  At first I had that frightened museum look on my face: am I allowed to touch this? I looked around and everyone else was groping the walls with a sense of wonder. So I did too.  That’s right folks, I touched it. Wow.

The fun wasn’t even over yet, as we actually got to inside the tomb, hell ya! (I didn’t say “hell ya” out loud, but I was damn excited).  Walking inside was the eeriest feeling.  It was dimly lit, and when you looked up above the domed ceiling caught your eye with its beautiful designs.  I could not imagine being put to work on such a massive edifice. In fact it had taken almost twenty years to complete the Taj Mahal, which tells  you it is not so easy to carve all these intricate (and symmetrical) designs into marble, and then add colour to them too!

Back to the eerie part, we were standing in front of two very large and impressive sarcophagi.  Again we saw the intricate marble designs, though they were slightly obscured by all the flowers.  This activity of tossing flowers onto the coffins was a popular one for tourists. I could imagine the excitement, because  although these weren’t the actual coffins with the bodies inside, I spotted a grate in the floor right below them.  It was in that lower level that their real graves sat.  And so the tourists were allowed to to take an orange flower and toss it onto one of the coffins.  It was said that if your flower landed on a coffin and stayed there, you’d experience great prosperity.  My flower fell off the side of Mumtaz Mahal’s coffin.  Shit.

As we exited the tomb feeling totally exhilarated and a little creeped out, I started to notice something.   All of the people that “looked” like tourists (i.e. white-skinned folk, folks with modern clothing, myself with my modern hair and awesomeness) had been ushered inside for the special tour.  The only cost had been a tip to the tour guide. All of the ones that looked like locals or borderline beggars were kept at a distance, never allowed to come too close to the tomb.  I suppose they didn’t represent enough potential on the “tip” front.  I’m not sure if continues to be that way today, but then it was a notable divide.

By late afternoon we hopped back on to the comfy train and traveled home, with the glow of sunset as our guide.  All the while my heart danced away at the thought of having seen, touched, and smelled all the history.  This was about the time that I officially became obsessed with nerdy things like history and art and books ‘n stuff.

Go me!

Alright then, more India entries to come (and yes, it looks this will carry over into May. I suppose I have more memories than I even knew about…)

[This post is another in the series of my first family trip to India in '95.  Here is the next installment]