Well, I started this post hoping to get wedding photos/videos before posting, but I never got them so this is actually posted a lot later than it was originally written…

“Last weekend,” my good high school friend Neeha got married! Some of our high school friends and I got to be a part of it so it was one of those exciting BLOG-WORTHY CULTURAL EXPERIENCES!! It was such a beautiful wedding and a really wholesome experience altogether and it was great to see old friends again. There are a lot of aspects to the Indian wedding celebrations! I’ll try to stay as accurate as possible from my understanding, but even from region to region there are different traditions; so everyone knows, this is a Telugu-Kannada-Hindu wedding. It’s also (relatively) small/short, only being 3 days of public celebration, whereas I hear that most Indian weddings can go for about a week!

Friday evening: Menhdi night

Friday evening we went to the hotel for the menhdi night. Menhdi is a type of body art where the skin is temporarily stained with pigment from the henna plant. In a lot of south Asian cultures, it’s really popular and culturally significant, kind of like getting your makeup done. Typically the designs are inspired by nature, oftentimes depicting leaves, vines, and flowers. The henna paste is prepared and put into cones similar to piping icing on a cake! Then it’s squeezed through a really thin tip and deposited on the skin. The longer it stays on the skin, the deeper the stain and the longer it lasts. We even had some lemon-sugar water to dab onto it to help the skin moisten it and let the skin take up the stain even better.

During the menhdi night, Neeha was getting her bridal menhdi done and there were other people doing menhdi for close friends and family. Usually it’s done on the hands, but for Neeha she got her hands, arms, and feet done. Like getting your nails done, you can’t really move or anything or you might mess up the paste, so you end up staying v e r y still for as long as you can while it dries. Except when it is so intricate it can take hours just to apply and then you still have to stay very still.

Neeha started at 2:30pm. When I got there at 6pm, she had one side of each arm done and was working on the back of the first arm…

And then afterwards we moved when more people arrived, and she got her feet done. We had to get the photographer’s portable light sources so that Nina (the artist) could see when doing the feet. In the end, it took about 7 hours for her to get her bridal menhdi done from start to finish. She wasn’t up and walking until a bit past 9pm. Her at-the-time fiancee, Abhi, had the duty of feeding her since she couldn’t use her hands or get up from her seat. We all had a dinner from a little buffet line and enjoyed the company and socialization.

We high school friends got to help a bit, whether that was helping hold her dress or blow drying her menhdi so it would dry a little faster, grabbing things for the artist, and so on. It was pretty fun, very casual social get together and got to meet a few of her cousins as well. I got menhdi done, on both hands! I only took a close up of one though because when I had the other one done my left hand was still occupied with being still and drying. (Don’t want to bend the fingers or it’ll crack a bit.)

My menhdi sadly didn’t last very long–after a week it’s pretty faded since I have to wash my hands so much at work. I loved getting menhdi done whenever I had the chance at cultural events since it’s so pretty and lasts a while, and it was really special to be invited to get it done with her!

Saturday night: Erdukolu

The Erdukolu is somewhat like a pre-wedding party with some of the bride and groom’s close friends and family. During this, the two “sides” play games which help bond the families coming together in celebration. When we got there, the bride and groom’s “sides” had separated themselves along a long hallway.

During this game, the bride and groom took turns “requesting” something from the other. It could be anything, from singing songs, translating sentences in their family’s dialect (their families speak different dialects–Neeha speaks Telugu, but Abhi speaks Kannada), dancing, and other light-hearted humbling (“I want you to get on your knees and beg me to marry you!”). If performed satisfactorily, the requesting party takes one step forward (or half step if they did a bad job or extra step if exceptionally well done). Us non-Indians were not able to help with many of the more culturally-relevant requests, but Abhi tried to throw Neeha for a loop a couple of times by requesting some very not-Indian things. The first was a salsa, to which we had Nicole, who is Chilean, to lead the perfect improv salsa dance. The second was a moonwalk, to which I was able to finally break out all those hours of practicing at Duke while walking away from people’s benches by moonwalking. We danced to Michael Jackson’s “Billy Jean” and I had to pull out all my best MJ moves. Eventually the gap got smaller and smaller and the two sides met in the middle, to do the exchanging of garlands.

Except that’s a game, too.

While attempting to garland their to-be spouse, each side tries to thwart attempts by the other side to garland their honoree. Eventually the men on Neeha’s side just picked her up and threw her over so she could garland Abhi first. Neeha always wins :)

They then exchange garlands three times back and forth, and then other members of the family garland members from the other side to symbolize the welcoming and unifying of the family (a theme that persists through the whole wedding events). The garlands are made of jasmine (that’s me!) flowers & buds and rose petals and are really fragrant and also SUPER heavy considering they are still fresh flowers. They are kept in coolers after being made to help keep them fresh until they are exchanged.

Afterwards, more dinner! We also met Tanya, who is Neeha’s friend from university. They were roommates and went through their medical program together at Northwestern. Obligatory dress pic #2:

After the fun and games and dinner, we had dance practice. Some of the girls and guys were chosen to participate in some choreographed dance numbers at the Sangeet (more on that later) and we hadn’t actually had any in-person rehearsals yet. I had practiced on and off for weeks before the wedding because I was really nervous and I guess all those years of dance set a pretty high bar for coordination and choreography (not to mention there isn’t a whole lot of overlap between traditional Chinese folk dance and Bollywood dance). Some people hadn’t even learned the dance, so it gave me a little bit of relief knowing it wouldn’t have to be absolutely perfect, just fun. :) The guys were in considerably worse shape in terms of dancing and learning dance, but Neeha got them off to a good start so they could practice independently while we did ours. Neeha came up with the choreography for each of the dances to be performed at the Sangeet. Neeha’s done formal training in classical Indian dance (I went to her arangetram like waaay long ago) so teaching basic dance was a walk in the park for her.

I ended up not getting home and to bed until past midnight.

We interrupt this program…

So my friend Sisi also got married! Her wedding was in Boston gardens on Saturday morning. Luckily she set up a Zoom link for us to tune in so I was still able to watch it. It was really short and sweet, the exchanging of vows only took 10 minutes and then that was it. I don’t have any pictures, I guess the best I could give would be like an awkward screenshot. But it happened in the whirlwind of everything!

Sunday morning: Wedding ceremony

Buckle up this one is gonna be long! I got there a little early to get ready, as Neeha had saris made for us non-Indian folk to wear to the ceremony since it was more traditional. The auntie that designed the saris helped us get ready, and since they were pre-pleated saris for us plebs it only took 15 minutes to get them on. We then visited Neeha downstairs while she was getting ready for the ceremony. She was preparing by putting little bits of rice into a small bowl while reciting some mantras. She paused long enough for us to take a quick group pic since it would be hard to catch her later with how many photos that would need to get taken with various parties involved!

We also got a full-length sari photo.

Okay so I’m now writing this part of the post three months after the wedding itself so sadly a lot of the finer details are now lost to the tides of time and my bad memory. But during the ceremony, there was a portion that mostly involved Neeha’s parents and the groom’s family. My understanding is that during this time the groom is Lord Shiva incarnate for the day, and the parents are blessing his entrance into their family. At this point the bride isn’t here… yet.

AND THEN SHE GOT CARRIED IN ON A BASKET. Because walking is for chumps!

There was a lot of praying and other ceremonial aspects to the wedding; the wedding was very involved with the families of both sides. They held a veil in between Neeha and Abhi until the special moment of the marriage. The time of their marriage was determined by astrologers who took into account their birth stars and the current season to determine the most auspicious time to get married, which was something like exactly 12:16 pm on Sunday.

The initial prayers and ceremonial rites finished a bit early, so we waited about 20 minutes before the special moment when all the stars aligned for the joining itself. It all happened so quickly: they lifted the veil, and Neeha and Abhi both had a red powder that they put on each others’ foreheads and held a pose like that for a while. There was a lot of celebratory music and cheering and it was great.

There was a lot more parts to the ceremony that involved large bowls of rose petals, tumeric, rice, audience throwing rice, music, sashes, walking around a ceremonial fire, and the like. It was a surprisingly informal affair–midway through everything lunch was ready and people just up and left to eat, hahahaha. My new friend and I stayed for a bit to watch the whole thing before going to eat. Then there were more family prayers and photos, and we broke for the equivalent to cocktail hour and then the RECEPTION!

Sunday evening: Reception

Like it is in the Bollywood movies, the reception involved lots of dancing. Girls, guys, couples, coordinated and choreographed beforehand.

I got to dance, too. There was two ladies’ dances I was in, and finally all the practice and such paid off. It went really well! I was really nervous but there’s something about performing dances that it kinda melts away the stage fright. I think also a part of it was just all the fun everyone was having, and the fact that I was in good old company.

The main reason I waited so long to finish this post was because I was hoping to get some good video of the dances. Maybe if by the time I finish writing my next update I have some, I’ll add them in.

Until then!
-Jasmin