Every year as wedding season reaches its zenith, the words of my sixth grade teacher haunt me:

Must you constantly look at your feet like a shy bride?

Those simple words engrained in my mind the very picture of the traditional Indian bride. Demure and diffident at all costs, with eyes focused downwards to display the intricacies of vivid eye makeup. Across the oceans in America, while girls would dream about coming into bridal confidence at a white wedding, I spent my formative years dreaming about downplaying my audacious personality to perfect a bashful bridal stance. My pink and gold bridal sari would be a reflection of my emotion – budding from within, yet glowing outwards.

Years later, when the day actually arrived, I was anything but the picture of the traditional Indian Bride.

Just show up and be bridal, my Mother advised. She had been planning this party for years, and would b damned if anyone interfered with what she saw as her ultimate moment of glory.

My obsessive personality could not however, stop me from at least trying to plan each detail by remote control. So, of course when I showed up for the event, nothing happened the way I had planned it.

Our wedding was held at the Royal Bombay Turf Club, Bombay’s answer to upper class country clubs. Punjabis, the agriculturalists of North India are historically known for their tastelessness in upper class situations. Only we would decide to host our wedding in a horse-racing club, without considering the disadvantages of mating season.

For the occasion, we were housed in a small suite on the upper level of the club’s residence facilities. It was considered to the Crème de la crème of Bridal suites but in a few brief moments, I could tell that it was not the Four Seasons. The stately interior was baroque beyond measure. Musty velvet curtains hung down at French windows looking out to manicured lawns that flanked race tracks ripe with the scent of horse virility. Flamboyant English furniture showed off ornately carved crevices that were browned by dust they had collected over the last two hundred years. My allergies came alive instantly begging the relief of an open window. How our values had evolved, and those of the Turf Club had disintegrated.

Johnny Walker’s Blue label, a staple ingredient of a Punjabi wedding was not freely available. My elder brother in an attempt to keep the costs down had decided to purchase all the alcohol from a bootlegger. The bootlegger arrived promptly at our doorstep on the eve of the wedding, eager to sell his wares like all the other vendors.

My brother informed me judiciously that he could not risk the booze being swiped, and since he was busy with out-of-town guests, I would have to take control. He hid the alcohol under my bed with strict instructions for me to guard it meticulously. When guests arrived expecting to see a bashful bride-to-be, they were told that she was in the bedroom minding the liquor.

The next morning, Doris and Bharat, the hair-and make-up duo of Bollywood, arrived to transform me from liquor watch dog to radiant bride. My brief bouts of sleep in an unfamiliar bed the night before had resulted in a slightly flushed left eye. Doris advised me not to worry, my pink eye apparently matched perfectly with my sari.

Then, in the midst of doing my make-up, Bharat suddenly disappeared ‘to get a smoke’. Minutes went by before I realized that he had abandoned me in favor of some Bollywood actress whose own make-up artist had left her stranded on a movie set!

Doris completed my up-do amidst three generations of dysfunctional Punjabi women: a paranoid Mother-of-the-bride shrieking incessantly about being late. The bride-of-the-bad-mood, who insisted that her up-do gave her the look of a cone-head, and a perturbed Grandmother-of-the-bride muttering in confused worry, what exactly is a cone-head?

When we were ready to leave for the inner club gardens where the altar had been set up, the eunuchs had already gathered at the bottom of the stairs. How they had managed to enter the grounds of this elite club apparently surrounded by Gurkha guardsmen, I have yet to figure out. This was indeed the clever and inevitable way of the eunuch. They refused to let us leave until we had exchanged their blessings for a plentiful supply of cash. Up until that moment I had always romanticized about traditional bargaining of the eunuchs on my wedding day. Eunuch bargaining lent Indian weddings a colloquially unique flavor. But when my Grandmother began to talk down their numbers in senior-housewife-gone-to-the-bazaar mode, her daughter immediately snapped her out of it.

This is NOT the time for kitchen wisdom of the Punjab, she barked, unleashing a waterfall of one rupee notes at the eunuchs, who immediately cleared our path in delight.

By the time I came downstairs, the guests were already approaching the main entrance of the club.

Duck, yelled my Mother, we cannot let them see the Bride! But ducking was clearly out of the question, so with marvelous sleight of hand, she managed to somehow conceal my bridal form by unraveling her shawl as a stage manager would perhaps let loose a curtain in primitive street theater, the rhythm of her hand movements hiding the chaos behind the scenes. All this happened as we took an alternative route to the inner gardens.

It turned out that we had plenty of time. The bridegroom, who was to show up on an intricately decorated white horse, had been told to disembark his stallion outside the main gate. That I had overlooked the fact that it was mating season, precluded us from bringing an ‘outsider horse’ into the premises.

Now, for years I had envisioned that white horse perhaps more so than its rider, in the way that a Western bride envisions her perfect white dress. I had fantasized that my stallion would gallop into my bridal gates throw its head back, and rear up on its hind legs to kick dust of my past under its feet before it whisked me alongside my bareback rider bridegroom, to my untold future. Naturally I was heart broken at its rejection. All those months of over-planning the horse, its garb and its exact path to the venue had amounted to absolutely nothing.

I wept buckets throughout the ceremony. Ironically, the guests saw this as an auspicious sign.

Each tear of sadness she sheds at leaving her parents’ home marks the infinitesimal joy she will bring to her husband’s home. My tears were but an overflow of frustration.

Quite the crying already, hissed my bridesmaid. Your make-up is beginning to run. Instantly the taps were closed, I could not risk looking like a bridal vampire!

Years later as I marvel the sophistication of Bay area weddings, I cannot help thinking about selling the rights to my own bridal moments to Comedy Central. As I continue to hear other peoples’ perspectives on my wedding, I wish that I had I been a fly on the wall!


About the Author: Reenita Malhotra Hora

Reenita Malhotra Hora is a San Francisco based author and mother of two. She writes chick lit to preserve the daily comedy of her existence. You can check out her work at www.reenitamalhotrahora.com.