next year in marienbad

There’s a certain L’Année dernière à Marienbad feeling to a traditional Hindu wedding. This picture pretty much captures that. Up on the stage, the bride and groom are deep into the ritual, the videographer is illuminating things, people are sitting and watching, walking around, and having conversations. The band doesn’t seem to be playing. My memory has been jogged by the little dixie cups on the floor that we had just had a nice fruit juice shortly before I snapped this.

[Addendum: another shot from earlier in the wedding from the stage, behind the bride and her father, looking out into the wedding hall seating area.]

padlocks

One day in Srirangam, Sandhya took me on a tour of the Sri Ranganathaswamy Temple. She used to live with an aunt in the complex. It is the largest (functioning) Hindu temple in the world, covering 156 acres. This was the only Vaishnavite temple we visited, because Krishnan’s family is Shaivite. Walking along, I noticed this small shrine festooned with a bunch of padlocks.

playing rummy

Got pinged early this morning by Rajesh (the fellow on the left of the picture). He’d uploaded the photos he took with his cellphone on our Ooty trip. This is one of the last ones he took. We’re on our way back to Chennai, playing a card game before retiring to our slab-like bunks in the AC sleeper wagon. Krishnan took the picture from the top bunk, and Vignesh is on my left towards the bottom of the picture. A little dark and shaky but it captures the mood as we head back for the humid heat of Madras from the cool air of the hill station, Udhagai, and the surrounding tea plantations.

kolam

Pretty much everywhere I went in Tamil Nadu, I’d see these abstract, symmetrical patterns in rice flour (called kolam in Tamil) on the floor near thresholds of one sort or another. In the picture below, Vidya, the sister of the bride Gayatri, created a new one in the stair well between her family’s apartment and the one Krishnan and I were staying in. (Ganapati, Gayatri and Vidya’s father, had rented a spare apartment for all the relatives coming in from out of town for the wedding.) A kolam doesn’t last very long, but they are a beautiful bit of folk art. They are called rangoli in North India.

lunch is served

At Deepak’s upanayanam (thread ceremony, see earlier entry), he and his cousins sat down for his first lunch as threaded Brahmin. On the traditional plantain leaves, you can see idli (a steamed , lenticular rice cake), vadai (a savory doughnut), pieces of badusha (coil-shaped savory snack), and coconut chutney (yum). There’s a sweet, orange-colored appetizer, too. From left to right: Rajesh, Deepak (Jayaganesh), Balaji (Indresh), and Vignesh. There’s a priest squatting behind Deepak holding his hand, and you can just see a little mahendi design on his palm. Water is served in little plastic tumblers.

henna body art

One custom that’s popular at Indian marriages is the decoration of hands (and sometimes feet) with henna (aka mehndi). Below is a snap of Gayatri’s hands. The feet at the bottom of the picture belong to Krishnan. Judging by the floor and its place in the sequence of photos, we are at the groom’s family’s house. Krishnan, Sandhya, and I delivered the bride to her new home in Madhurai. She had already stored the phone number on her mobile weeks before labeled “my home”.

As a bonus, here I am being given a dhoti in exchange for the bride and the wedding night mattress which we transported from Trichy on top of our car. The groom’s brother-in-law is on the left.

banian

I learned a new word in Udhagamandalam (or Ooty as everybody called it): banian. It’s what the British call a vest and we a t-shirt. The sleeveless kind which I have also heard called a wife-beater. The etymology offered in the OED1 is: “a. Pg. banian, probably a. Arab. banyān (16th c.), ad Gujarāti vāṇiyo man of the trading caste, ad. Skr. vaṇij merchant ‘The terminal nasal may be taken from the plural form vāṇiyan’ (Col. Yule)”. From its primary meaning of ‘a Hindoo trader, especially one from the province of Guzerat’ to its later meaning of ‘a loose gown, jacket, or shirt of flannel, worn in India’. And, it yields banyan tree, its fifth meaning. So, its meaning changed in India. It went from a kind of dressing gown to a sleeveless undershirt. The first a is pronounced as a short a or schwa, per its Hindi or Sanskrit value, in spite of its length in Gujarati.

upanayanam

The simple reason I went to Tamil Nadu was to attend two weddings and a holy thread ceremony (aka upanayanam, think rite of passage à la bar mitzvah for Jews or first holy communion for Roman Catholics). Here’s a snapshot I got at his aunt and uncle’s apartment in Chennai (formerly Madras).

Things to note: first, the weird lighting is not my camera’s pathetic little flash, but the scorching white-hot glare of the videographer’s camera-mounted light. Second, this is a good closeup of what pretty much goes on ritualwise in both the Upanayanam and the weddings. Four priests attending to the liturgical side, while dad (Gopal) wonders, and son (Deepak) tries to remain engaged. Third, the largish TV reminds us we’re in the 21st century. Fourth, the platter of offerings (e.g., plantains, garland, and assorted other stuff) sitting casually on the bricks (complete with kolam) of the hearth. There are also some mangos on the floor, along with flowers and a brass water vessel with dipper. My personal memory of this apartment was the fact that there was a computer with broadband connection in one of the bedrooms, and all the friendly folks who watched me sweat and drink lots of packaged water.

view from a room

The view from the apartment I stayed in in Tiruchirapalli. Well, OK, it's really the former temple town of Srirangam which has since been absorbed into Trichy. As far as signage in Tamil Nadu goes, this one is rather professional looking.

Just above the roof of the buildings you can see a red brick wall that encircles the old town itself. The Sri Ranganathaswamy temple itself is not visible but easily accessible by foot a few blocks away. The street is clean since the ragpickers and garbage collectors have been through earlier. (It’s good to live on the same street as the deputy commissioner of police.) What you can’t see or smell is the fish market next to the school. Whoa! The two trees on the left are coconut trees. There are some cow patties drying on the roof near the bottom of the picture.

back from India

I was in India for two weddings and a thread ceremony. I only had limited connectivity, and it was just too hot to blog, but now that I'm back, expect daily updates.