Marriage Is A Box Of Chocolates

Conjugal life will never stop throwing curveballs at you. You’ll enjoy some and barely tolerate others as you learn to become adults together.

- Natasha Badhwar

I hate attending weddings. They are phony, wasteful and irrelevant affairs and I really don’t understand why people work so hard to get rid of their money overnight.   

The only wedding I didn’t mind so much was my own. It had its moments. My friend Reena was still fixing the last safety pins on my cream and gold dup­atta when a couple of grown women barged into the dressing room and enthusiastically addressed me as “Mami!” Apparently they were thrilled to be my new nieces. The shy, beatific bride face that I had been practising disintegrated in shock.

Many hours later, there was the moment when someone handed me a plateful of biryani and it began to feel like maybe it was all going to be worthwhile. It turned out to be impossible to put anything other than a few bits of flavoured rice between my lips because of the larger-­than-my-cheek nose ring that I had been balancing on my left nostril. My newly minted, sherwani-clad husband helped me eat, and I was relieved to find that underneath the costume, it was the same guy after all. Someone took a photo of the mom­ent. Years later, you can’t tell how petrified we both were at that time, as we giggle at each other with a spoonful of biryani balanced between us.

And finally there was my father. All through my childhood, he had created confusion by wiping his own tears at scenes in the movies when a bedecked but distraught bride is separated from her helpless parents during the bidai. Now, when it was time for his only daughter to leave the marriage venue, he decided to look utterly exuberant and fulfilled.