The Wedding Eve

The night before the wedding, is it customary (in Lakshmi's culture) for the bride and groom to entertain guests at their respective houses. People that can't make the wedding and your neighbours are amongst those who typically attend. We arrived with Prakash (Lakshmi's father), and so we stayed for a while. In doing so, I was able to observe the ritual. Guests would arrive, there would be what appeared to be slightly uncomfortable greetings, the guests would sit at the table and eat, then leave. After three or four iterations of this pattern, I asked Lakshmi why. It turns out that the guests had been neighbours that the family had not seen in five years, probably since someone else's wedding, but it was obligatory to invite them. Then some family arrived, and they stuck around. There was a beautiful moment when four ladies of the family from roughly the same generation were sitting in a row on a low couch, each in a different coloured sari, mostly of the brightly decorated Tamil variety. (Prema wore a lovely but more sedate sari with a dark background, compared to the intense reds and oranges of others.) Somehow the image of the four women was at once familiar, by the natural aggregation of a closely related group of the same gender in a social situation, and strange, by their race, dress and language. I got a half decent photo of them with Sophie's camera.