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.

Flashback

Every silence is made up of a network of minuscule sounds that envelops it. And every solitude, is made up of fragmented togetherness that surrounds you. It is night. Late in the night. The white and blue radio cabs are yet to take over the city. Hues of yellow-blue taxis predominate the eastern Bypass roads. The one I am sitting in, is playing Md.Rafi singing a cheerful Shammi Kapoor number on the radio. The lonesome honks of the few aged taxis and rusted buses, behind, disturbed my thoughts. The traffic sergeant at the Science city crossing once helped me find the direction to some exam center during my college days, few years back. A fleeting glimpse of the sergeant did not help me decipher if it was the same man. The taxi headlights caressed those dimmed streets of my city, I once crossed daily. Is it nostalgia that overruns me everytime I come back to this place? Or is it what you call ecstasy... the eternal pleasure that I get sinking into the depth of this city's enormous couch? Or is ecstasy a long forgotten song sung by mother when young? Is it meeting a long lost high school friend, amazed at the sight of her vermillion between the parting of her hair, suddenly realizing we have grown up? Or is it memories of occupying the first row in the classroom, and sneezing repeatedly every time the Hindi teacher banged on the table with her duster? From Tagore's rejection of Knighthood, to Ganguly's bare-chested jersey-waving victory, to irreplacable and untimely loss of film maker Rituparno Ghosh... all that we live with is memories. 

 

My mind fleets to the lazy afternoon in the now-shuttered College Street, where once I bargained on tons of second hand grad-school books, that I leafed through only a couple of weeks before the exam. Rest of the year was kept for the infamous "adda" over "cha and toast". Another, brake jerked me to consciousness. The taxi drove past the lane I was visiting about 7 years back, twice a week, while in school for English tuition. She was in her late 60s. One post on a social networking forum, about 3 months ago, read that she was no more. Cancer devoured her. Death is so strange; stranger than life. One moment you are alive. The next moment you' re gone.
Every shut sweet shop, and every dark lane I crossed reminded me of those rare visits to "mamabari" in South Kolkata. Getting ready to go out with mother was associated with her soft silk sarees, the smell of old naphthalene when she pulled them out from the steel wardrobe, piles of old photo albums, some of the oldest ones being ingested by arthropods..... layered frocks for children that was in style, and ofcourse, the joyous tram ride. My mind was flooded with childhood memories, associated with this city, the ancient aroma locked in those almirahs and the tiny world that every child lives in, called, Mother.

While my eyes were about to shut after the day's hectic schedule, light from a heading car blinded me, followed by screeching brakes. The awfully narrow alley leading to my home it was, and neither vehicle had way to pass. While the drivers screamed at each other, a man, who resembled a friend of mine came out of the cab to make way. Yes, I knew him. Alokesh Mitra, the geekiest of my batch in school, it was. He was heard to be a medico, practicing in Pune, now. As I yelled out waving at him, he smiled and came close. And after exchanging few anecdotes from our common past, he took off his black cap, that surprised me with his shaved head. "My father passed away.. I am returning from the crematorium, performing his last rites...". It was time to depart. He took out a pack of Gold Flakes from his pocket, lit one and aired it, as the smouldering smokes of agony slowly disappeared into the air.