by Scaachi Koul
Sweetu came up to me and wrapped her arms around my shoulders and pulled me in for a hug, smelling like drying henna and old sweat from the three straight hours of dancing. “Are you having fun?” she asked in her gentle Indian-British accent.
“I am, but explain the man in the dress to me. Is it supposed to be funny that he’s in a dress?”
“Yes. He’s acting like a woman.”
“But why does he have to be in a dress?”
“Because what fun is it to watch someone dance when they’re not in a dress?”
“But, why is it funny?” This show was such an obvious play on queerness, on transphobia, but also the showcasing of women. Women as items, women as entertainment, women as commodities. Men as women as sexualized jokes.
“Look,” she said, exasperated. “You are in a very hypocritical country. Women cannot dance in front of men, but a man in a dress, he can dance in front of men. It’s all a big joke. On women.” She laughed and pinched my cheeks when she said this, a sentence that should have made me angry, and should have hurt, but somehow made me laugh back.
What isn’t a joke on women, either here or back at home? Sweetu is empowered, she always has been, at least from my vantage. But so much about this wedding meant tolerating customs or traditions or experiences that barely treat women as human. When Sweetu wasn’t being reduced to merely existing as a bride, as a piece of meat to be handled and prodded, to have decorative contraptions stuck into her skull, her interests were otherwise unexpressed. She rarely complained, hardly asked for anything, and maybe that’s because Indian girls grow up going to weddings and we watch the procedure and we know our roles: be demure, don’t complain, cry but don’t scream, get tea for anyone older than you, and calmly meet expectations.
Sometimes Hamhock takes my left hand and holds it to his face and asks me when I’ll come around to getting married, when I’ll let him propose. I always say later, not now, no real date in mind, not because I want to torture him (though that is fun), but because I know what it would mean. All Hamhock wants is a big one-day bash for everyone we love, for his friends to be able to drink freely, eat whatever they want, and for us to get a toaster in the process. He is a sweet, precious moron who doesn’t know any better because he was never eight years old at his eldest cousin’s wedding, watching her body get doused in milk and rose petals and later yogurt to cleanse her before the wedding. He didn’t watch a man dance in women’s clothing because a woman was not allowed to. He would get to eat fried chicken and drink shit-shelf whisky with the men while one of my aunties gave me a lecture on being a “good” wife. He would be given the benefit of the doubt; I would have to be educated.
My parents would like us to get married (we’re living in sin and that’s far worse than an age gap or racial difference), and they’ve claimed they’d be fine with a courthouse wedding, a run to Vegas. They are liars. In the fifth grade, I got my hair chopped off in an ill-advised pixie cut, some two feet of dark black hair sheared off me like a sheep. Mom gathered it all and stuffed it into a heavy-duty Ziploc bag. “What are you doing?” I asked her as she tucked the bag into her purse. “When you’re older,” she said, “you’re going to get married, and this we can use for hair extensions on your wedding day.” She put the hair in the deep-freezer in the garage and it’s still there; sometimes when I root around for Pizza Pockets I will instead pull out a bag filled with my DNA. My mother would like a wedding, please, and it is not optional.
Mom used to tell me that white people don’t understand us, would never understand us, even when they are well-meaning and patient. At the time, this was her argument for why so few of us married anyone besides a fellow Kashmiri, or at least a fellow Hindu. I thought she was being reductive and unforgiving, but she might have known something I didn’t: how do I explain to Hamhock, who feels only love and little obligation, that my life comes with an excess of the latter? You marry into this, whether you like it or not. The wedding is merely the first step in a lifelong commitment to rituals and customs that barely make sense even to the elders who propagate them.
And after all that, Rohan never did bring me that drink.
—
On the day of the ceremony—day five, by the way; it’s a full five days before we get around to the actual ceremony—I was wearing a distressed long-sleeved Blue Jays shirt. I wore it because I refused to put on my six-pound lehenga, itchy and clunky with its mesh and beading, more than two minutes before I absolutely had to.
“Do you have a nice T-shirt you can wear instead?” Mom asked me.
“What’s wrong with this one?”
“It looks like it came from…from…” My mother struggled to finish her sentence. She does this sometimes, when she’s speaking in English and she can’t find the words she wants, usually when she is going to insult me.
“From?”
“Some sort of…garbage pile.”
I’m not so much insulted that she has, for what is maybe the fourth time on this trip, asked me to change my outfit, but rather that this is her weakest insult yet. We had only been here a few days. It was too early to slip.
Although the ceremony didn’t technically start until 6 p.m., Standard Brown Time, meaning it would actually start at seven (it ended up starting at eight), we dutifully headed over to the venue at ten in the morning. When we got there, Sweetu was the most sage and collected bride I’ve ever seen, largely because I think that by the time you reach day five, you realize how little is in your control. You do not pick your outfits, your meals, the times of day you get to take a shit, or whether there will be some creepy-crawly younger cousin sleeping in the bed next to you. It doesn’t matter what you want because this day isn’t for you, it’s for your mother, you idiot, so just look nice and say “Namaskar” when someone walks in. Which is exactly what Sweetu did when we entered.
After a few hours of our routine (chai, roti, butter, chai), the process of preparing Sweetu’s hair began. Flanked by pillows, one of her aunties sat beside her, with her other female cousins and me sitting by her side. Aunty slathered her hair in coconut oil, root to tip, while other aunties wailed Indian songs that I couldn’t understand.
Once Sweetu’s hair was slicked down, Aunty painstakingly parted it down the centre, something that should have taken two, maybe three seconds, but because they wouldn’t use a comb (“They’re not allowed,” my mother said, which she used as a justification for every harebrained act throughout the week) and because all the aunties wanted to be involved, no one could agree on whether it was parted straight. Over and over, Sweetu’s hair was brushed back by fingers, parted by long nails, until they eventually agreed that yes, sure, this is acceptable. Aunty braided each side of Sweetu’s hair in a long, rope-like braid, weaving into it red threads with golden tassels at their ends. Then, wrapped over her braids, was a thick gold ribbon. They tied a beaded headdress around her forehead, and this was when I saw Sweetu start to sweat. Aunties had been pulling and prodding her hair for forty-five minutes by then. The headdress was the least of her concerns, though, because on top of it went a white strip of fabric, tugged tight, stretched over her skin and oily hair. I patted Sweetu on the knee. She whimpered.
They added a golden hat made of thin, shimmery synthetic fabric. Then a white sheet with gold stars and stitching. Then another headdress. Finally, to fasten it all, the aunties barked at me to retrieve some pins from a grey shopping bag I’d been handed earlier in the day. I am not a psychopath, so I assumed they meant bobby pins, but they are safety pins. Three grown women held Sweetu’s head and started safety-pinning the entire contraption into her hair, stabbing her skull with little pricks. Finally, she broke, bawling, big heavy tears that didn’t even run down her face but fell straight out of her eyes onto the ground. In response, the aunties hooted and hollered and laughed, maybe because this was all a part of the process, maybe because they thought she was crying because of the beauty of marriage or because Indian brides are just supposed to be sad on their wed
ding day. To them, she was a girl becoming a woman, despite being in her late twenties. Maybe that was the reason for the tears. But I still think Sweetu was crying because they were poking safety pins into her skull.
It was hardly the first time Sweetu’s family had seemingly derived joy from her clear displays of pain. Earlier in the week, she’d been subjected to one of the most painful (and yet mandatory) moments, with the insertion of the dejhoor, a gold chain with a swinging gold pendant hanging off it shaped like an engraved football—a piece of jewellery that signals a married woman the way a ring often does. The dejhoor is threaded through a piercing in the cartilage of each ear, right in the centre, a place typically reserved for little studs or hoops, not chain-link that must be pulled through an incision in a part of the body that does not flex. For now, they used red thread instead of the chain, with the ornament attached, but it’s still massively painful to have thick gold amulets hanging from the sides of your head. Sweetu sat in front of the fire and wept, begging them to be gentle.
Her to-be, meanwhile, had to do none of that. At my brother’s wedding a near decade earlier, he was forced to eat a salty traditional pudding that tastes like cold vomit, hug hundreds of near-strangers, and pray for an hour in front of a hot fire in the dog days of summer, but nothing was threaded through man-made holes in his body. I resented that no holes were being punched into the groom’s head for the occasion. When the dejhoor ceremony was over, Sweetu found me on the roof of the wedding venue and half-collapsed on my shoulder in exaggerated exhaustion.
“This is too much,” she said. “It never ends.” Her face was drained of colour and she gave me a weak smile, twirling my hair around her finger.
“Well,” I said, “the good news is that one day we’ll all be dead and none of this will matter.” Sweetu let out a heavy, desperate laugh, pinched my cheek just hard enough to hurt, and floated off to her next obligation.
An hour after the time the wedding was supposed to start, my cousin Birdie and I walked down to the front entrance with some of Sweetu’s other relatives to receive the groom. He was late. We waited at the end of a long carpeted runway for him to show up, bearing thalis filled with marigold petals. Others, including my brother and a very tired and weepy Raisin, held garlands to offer. We waited another hour.
The groom eventually arrived wearing crushed burgundy velvet from head to toe, draped in fresh flowers and money. We began the procession towards the pyre, Birdie and I tossing marigold petals at him as he walked. We moved towards a teeming crowd standing at the door, more aunties and uncles bearing garlands, and when they placed them around the groom’s neck, we had to stop for photos and for the video team. People ended up doing this repeatedly just to get the photo right, staging themselves just so, as if anyone gives a shit what you looked like at someone else’s wedding.
Once he was in, Birdie and I went back upstairs to get Sweetu. She was draped in an endless loop of red fabric with gold stitching, abstract flowers and leaves and vines, the border of her sari thick with embroidery. She wore at least seven gold necklaces, little pearls and rubies and the black stones that Indian women wear once they get married. Her lips were painted candy-apple red, her eyes lined with thin black liner, her cheeks had been pinched, a bindi placed dead centre on her forehead, just below a dangling piece of jewellery that hung from her part, underneath the headdress. I told her she looked beautiful, because she did.
“Really?” she asked, as if it would be possible for her to be anything but. “I feel strange.”
“No, you look perfect. Really.” I detangled one dejhoor from her other necklaces and inadvertently pulled her ear. She yelped. I took eight big steps backwards.
And now, soon, filled with blessings, the bride and groom would get married, and we would all watch, and it would be beautiful.
This is not what happened. This is not what happened because this was an Indian wedding and Indian people have planned it so nothing goes the way you want it to go because no one seems to agree on what is supposed to happen. While we were walking Sweetu to the pyre, I was trying to figure out how the thousand or so guests would be able to watch the ceremony—the space was hardly big enough for the immediate family during the prayer ceremonies. I asked Birdie, who laughed right in my stupid face because it’s in moments like these that I reveal myself to be an outsider. “First of all, the ceremony lasts all night,” she said. Define all night.
“All night. It will go on until tomorrow morning. And no one is going to watch the ceremony. Everyone will go eat and relax and sit outside and when they get tired, they’ll go home.” It was 9 p.m. This ceremony was going to last another nine hours.
I spent the night drifting around the venue listlessly. By eleven, I had changed into a sweater and jeans, one of my mother’s wool shawls wrapped around my shoulders. I ate fried eggplant and little slices of lotus root swimming in yogurt marinade. I drowned myself in tea and cookies. Hours of the night went by in which I didn’t see anyone I recognized. At four in the morning, I remembered that it was Hamhock’s birthday, but I had no Wi-Fi, and no active SIM card, and no way to tell him that I was sorry I took this weird trip without him. I held my useless phone, wrapped myself in my mother’s shawl, and cried in the fetal position in the now-empty reception hall. Why is it so cold here? I thought. It’s India. The only thing India is required to be is hot.
Papa found me after a few hours and woke me up to come outside so we could walk Sweetu to her new life. Customarily, as they have for hundreds of years, new brides leave their weddings to go live with the family of their husband—my mother did the same when she got married. For a few years, she was living with my dad’s parents, and later, when his father died, with my Chacha. Sweetu was off to do the same, if only temporarily, before she and her husband moved to North America. We were saying goodbye.
At six, we began the procession back out from where we’d brought the groom in. I had been deeply grumpy most of this trip, sullen like a teenager unwilling to participate in a school play, irritable about limited Facebook time and even less time alone, preferably in a room without my parents. But in that moment I had lost my instinct for negativity, for wanting to be anywhere else. It was the one moment in our entire trip when I didn’t hear a constant cacophony: children screaming in the streets, motorized scooters driving directly into each other, the endless din of Indian women talking, talking, talking. There was no moon, no sun, just the reddish dusty swirls of unpaved road getting swept up in the wind and a navy sky behind pink and orange drapery.
As Sweetu made her way through the crowd, no one talked. The only sound filling the frigid air was sniffing and tissues being stuffed into faces. Sweetu got to me, her eyes glazing over and makeup melting down her face. She hugged me around my neck and I didn’t know what to do, I rarely know what to do with brides, I never know what to do with a crying bride. “It’s okay,” I told her. “I’ll be on the other side of the hemisphere too.”
Sweetu took a step towards the car, then swivelled back to her mother, standing behind her. They held each other for what felt like a world-stopping lifetime. It made me want to rip my heart out and hand it to them because mine will never be used as much as these two were using theirs.
She waved goodbye from the car as she and her new husband departed for his parents’ home. Bua watched the car drive off, her little warped hands over her heart. She turned away and crumpled, her whole body shaking and hiccupping with sobs. She covered her face and cried as we all walked back to the venue for tea, of course, more tea.
But I don’t know what we were all fucking crying about because Sweetu returned from her husband’s home a laughable seven hours later.
Her in-laws had removed her headdress and washed the oil out of her hair. She’d been unwrapped and rewrapped in another bright-red sari, her hair pinned up into an elegant bun. She hadn’t slept, and I’m not entirely sure she’d eaten anything since the evening before, but she looked transformed. Sweetu was an adult now, a real
woman in a woman’s clothes and hair and makeup and a legitimate dejhoor, the strings replaced with gold chains, hanging off her ears. These are the signs, I guess.
Arranged marriages still make me uneasy, and their implication—that the woman is being sold into middle-class slavery—is nefarious. Certainly that’s true for plenty of women, and not just in India, but it was nice to see Sweetu and her new husband smile and swap whispered jokes and touch in fleeting moments that were more intimate than the interactions of some of the white couples I know. They gazed at each other in comfortable silence while the chaos of a brown wedding continued to dart around them. For them, it works, it’s working, it’s the most anyone can ask of a marriage. And good, because that wedding was endless, so it had better work out.
—
Descriptions of India are, so frequently, splashed with bright colours and charming poverty. When white people set movies or music videos in India, they often depict the spring festival of Holi, with coffee-skinned people throwing powder at each other while wearing white. In some regions, this does happen, but there’s something odd about other people using depictions of this holiday with no thought to when it actually takes place. Imagine if brown people kept making movies in which people were celebrating President’s Day for no discernible reason.
People allow India to exist only in two versions. In the first, everything is too beautiful to be encapsulated, women are swarthy and hippy, shoeless boys play soccer in dirt roads, elephants roam the streets, and temples are merely there for your enjoyment. In the second, India is a country lurching forward awkwardly, suffering a rape epidemic, incapable of a feminist movement or proper health care, a place where people shit and piss in the streets, where the caste system has ruined entire generations, where poverty is so rampant and depressing that you’ll hardly make it out with your soul intact, where your IT centre is based, a place just close enough to Pakistan or Iraq or Afghanistan to be scary, but stable enough to be fun and exotic. Because, boy, isn’t the food good, and aren’t the landmarks something, and hasn’t everyone there figured out a kind of profound meditative inner peace that we should all learn from? Like all things, the truth lies somewhere in the middle. A place, any place, can be beautiful and perfect and damaged and dangerous at the same time.