Today's Scripted Wedding

The northern wind was stabbing me from the back, as I sat on the dusty terrace of our two-storied humble abode, to warm up under the fading winter sun. Never did I experience a colder winter in the last 5 years. Or did my tolerance threshold take a humble bow, with age and experience, I wondered! It has been seven weeks I left this place, being wedded to a new place, family and man. Embracing a brand new world, while still holding on to your roots that have grown deep and strong for the past 27 years, shaping oneself into a living testimony of resilience, ain't easy. There are a hundred things that run through my mind. Because being unconventionally new, is strange to me. A thousand battles lost, a hundreds won, a million miles crossed, I hoped, I broke, I hoped again, wearing my emotional armor strapped in place, with breath taking intentions, I am going on for three decades now. I don't own a new soul. It is rugged, and exhausted, yet loving and full of compassion. With all the scars left, I, am not new.

The sky turns red, as the dying sun splashes a dash of vermillion across it. It is even colder now. I get to see a lot of migratory birds, flying back home. The world has humble creatures, who thrive on hay and water. And then we have humans, the most intelligent in the race, practicing extravagance. Every day we make careful choices, knowingly or unknowingly, that give our future a shape. Looking back, at how things were a couple of months back, while I was still deciding if I was ready to begin a new way of life, I realize nothing changes if we don't. Being brought up by liberated parents, especially a mother who still teaches me to be a compassionate lady, motivates me to be more ambitious at work, who ostracized futile religious and social practices and has raised herself above the insignificant earthly matters that does nothing but takes the focus away from our daily state of well being, I still find happiness abiding by her preaching.

The grandeur and conventionalism of the wedding customs practiced even today, fail to convince my sense of practicality and logical conscience. Practices re-inforced at my own big day, did not comply with principles I grew up with all these years. Strangled in the arms of ancient rigid practises, aren't we failing as a society and as a nation in the global race of intellectual evolution? And all this in fear of being ogled at!

I chose to ‘walk’ the customary rounds around the groom, instead of being carried strenuously on a wooden stool (“piri” as we call it) by three or four men of the family. I did not hand over a tuft of rice grains to my mother saying that I was repaying the debt of all that she gave me. I was parting from my nurturer and the stringent customs of our community never put emotions first. I was vocal about some infrastructural problems of the wedding venue even while I was dressed as the bride; a bride who is  supposed to be shy and quiet.

Layers of make-up done for 4 hours, weighed down by the profundity of all that I was wearing, and doing re-takes of rituals for the photographers and drones flying over me, I almost forgot that it was the beginning of a new venture. That it was also a marriage, besides the scripted wedding. The feeling did not sink in.

The quietude of Calcutta evenings does magic. It brings the rebel out of me. Yet again, diving into the couch of togetherness and companionship, and having someone to falling back upon, at the end of the day, is everything our generation understands of a marriage.