Wedding Bells In Badlapur
Why two perfectly sane, intellectuals pursuing higher education in the United States of A should travel all the way to an obscure location in the hinterlands of Maharashtra and exchange wedding vows is completely beyond my comprehension. But, that’s exactly what my bohemian friend Pooh and her hubby did. They had a getaway wedding in a certain ‘Rainy Resort’ in Badlapur last weekend.
Pooh is a very close friend and I would have braved any number of storms to make it to her wedding. 4 of us set out for Badlapur, bemused and unsure of what to expect at the venue. Only one thing was clear, there was adventure awaiting us on the horizon. It took us about 2 hours to leave the city. But the music was tub-thumping and the mood was happy ‘n’ gay.
It was a weekend of indulgence…contrary to the fact that it was a traditional south-indian wedding with pure veg food and no alcohol. We stalked up on Vodka and rum, ciggerettes and some stuff too. The roads were…actually there were no roads…just bumps and ditches. We got lost, zoomed past a raging forest fire, honked hard at a rickshaw which seemed to have appeared from nowhere in the wilderness.
We reached the venue at 10:30 pm, after arriving at the wrong resort first. A spread of steaming Tamilian delicacies on banana leaves, awaited us. We gobbled it up gladly. The bride looked very pretty yet yet exhausted, a result of stomaching all the in-family wedding politics. We sneaked a couple of ciggies into her room and she was cured in a trice. Her family members of course did not get a whiff of such activities as the smell of tobbacco, no matter how strong, is no match for a whiff of Elizabeth Arden!
My friend looked beautiful in her bridal finery. The twinkle in her eye dazzled as brightly as the sun and moon in her hair. She looked blissful, marrying the man of her dreams.
She had to wear 8 saris in the span of 2 days, including a cumbersome yet scintillating 9 yard piece! However, since she is more comfortable in jeans, it was a comical sight to behold, a bohemian, tomboyish young woman, forsaking the comfort of her trousers to manage reams and layers of cloth wrapped around her body. She continued to nonchalantly sit astride in her 9 yard sari and stand confidently with her hands on her hips. Our friend Prach who carries off the most cumbersome of saris with grace and elan , instructed Pooh to “stop acting like a don and please be a little dainty if you don’t mind”!
It was also terribly rib-tickling to watch her strike a filmy pose for the photographers who made her do such things as placing her index finger on her chin and look away from the camera!
Incidently, the non-teetotallers of the family had made contingency plans of thier own for uplifting their spirits. Thus they sneaked in and out of a little room tucked away, but equipped with all the right ingredients! That’s a lot of sneaky stuff happening, parallelly. Which leads me to wonder why we couldn’t just stop the charade, declare our dubious intentions once and for all and have one rocking wedding?
