The Spring Wedding II

Continuing the saga of love, emotions and melodrama, aka, my brother's wedding, I would like to recall a famous statement by someone - "Every wedding has a drunkard, a jerk
and an asshole!" Well my brother's wedding was no different - it was the real deal in that sense :) I wouldn't elaborate on who played those three roles, but I just wanted to point out that the above statement is a very keen and accurate observation.

Well with 4 days to go for the marriage, the guests started arriving. The first to reach was Mike - my brother's friend from work who flew in from the US. I went to pick him from the airport in Delhi, and as his flight was supposed to reach in the morning, I had to make the drive overnight (it's roughly 6 hours from Ludhiana to Delhi, depending on who's driving of course!). So the taxi comes to pick me up at 2 am, and it's the most run down Toyota Qualis that I've ever seen! Well,there was nothing that I could do at 2 in the morning, so I swallowed my anger and got in the backseat. In spite of the rickety car, I slept pretty much the whole way - you can tell when you are tired! Mike's flight had already landed by the time I reached the airport. As he came to the arrivals section, I waved at him, and it took him a couple of seconds to recognize me even though we had met a few months back in California. 30 hours is a helluva long journey, and that too for someone stepping foot outside the US for the first time. Poor guy, little did he know that the most trying part of his journey had just begun!

He had asked to stop at a hotel so he could get a shower before we drove to Ludhiana, and from the little survey I had done, people had told me to get out of Delhi before getting a hotel, and also that there were decent hotels right out of Delhi on the Delhi-Ludhiana highway. Well, we stopped at the first hotel after the bypass as it had been over an hour since we had been driving, and it turned out to be one of the most rundown hotels I had seen - more like a youth hostel. I had to make a decision here - whether to shop around for better hotels and end up with something better (which I wasn't sure of after I saw this one), or to take the darned room and let Mike have a shower (or a bucket-and-a-mug that he calls it now :) ) so we could start for Ludhiana sooner. I decided in favor of the latter, but only when I actually got into the room, and Mike got into the bathroom, that I realized how bad the hotel room actually was! The curtains and the carpet were torn, the TV remote didn't work, the sheets were dirty, and well, in short, it seemed like the room hadn't been used in weeks. I didn't know then but I came to know later that even the water in the restroom wasn't clean. But well, I played along as well as I could, explaining to Mike that this was a decent hotel, and even though he must have been disgusted, he took everything very sportingly. I figured - if he takes all this on his first day in India , then he can take anything that follows on the trip :) Good reasoning, but I bet he wanted to kill me that day!!!

And did I mention - the air-conditioning in the taxi didn't work either!!

Anyways, 6 hours of a rickety ride in a rundown Qualis with no air-conditioning, and Mike was all set for his first Indian experience. I had taught him on the way how to say Sat Sri Akal, hello, hi, thank u etc., and of course some curse words in Punjabi :) Back home, he greeted my parents with a Sat Sri Akal in perfect Punjabi accent. It was funny coz they were kinda unprepared for this, and were gonna say hello how're u etc. - stuff that they aren;t used to at all. That night we went for some shopping, and didn't let Mike sleep so that he wouldn't be jet-lagged. Some day it was for the American!!!

So this was Wednesday night, and time for the first ceremony of the wedding - a kirtan that was supposed to start at 2 am!! Now I know that the Gurus recommended the Amrit Vela, early morning twilight hours before sunrise, for meditation, but I'm pretty sure this wasn't the way they intended it to happen. Most people who made it to the kirtan didn't sleep the whole night, and would have gone home to sleep for a gud 4-5 hours before going to work. I myself wasn't up till 11:30 the next morning. Probably having something at 6-7 am would have made more sense - but then I'm not the authority when it comes to decisions like this :p

I think I'll need a good 4-5 blogs to actually reach the wedding day!! Seriously - after the trip it felt I had been away for more than a month, just cause of the number of things that happened, and the emotional roller coasters that it made me go through!!!