Notes from the Field

It all began with several meters of magenta pink gauze, adorned with a meandering line of golden thread, encrusted with hand embroidery and little shiny blue sequins, all stitched in together to mimic flowers and vines. Add one jumbly, bouncy-jouncy plane ticket, two arms worth of choraa (bangles), and spin. Slowly. While Kanchan’s mom wraps me in the most beautiful fabric I have ever seen. Gorgeous magenta. Tulle-like, almost a ballerina, without the big flouncy skirt. Gita efficiently and diligently tucks the top of the fabric into my petticoat, a small, plain skirt I happily wore as I secretly danced around Kanchan’s room, just the petticoat, the little tightly hooked top, size 8 high heels on size 10 feet, and me. I feel like a princess. A Nepali princess.

This is not the point, but this is where my recollection starts. I remember magenta gauze, and contemplations of love and marriage. Which, I’ll have you know, go together like a horse and carriage.

Sudarshan is getting married. Hitched, as it were. Sudarshan is my friend from Yale, a wonderful Nepali man who was one of several Nepali friends to help orient me to this country, his home. And now I am wrapped in pink gauze like a present sent straight from Barbie’s Dream House, and headed to his wedding. The world is so strange and wonderful. So  unpredictable.

Tuesday night at 8:18pm I get this text:
“Hi Meredith, i tried to call u but with no success. I got engaged n getting married on friday. U are invited for friday and saturday. I’ll call later for details.”

I am intrigued. Perplexed. Elated! A wedding! In Nepal? But wait – to whom?!

An arranged marriage, I find out Wednesday morning, as I struggle with the moral implications of scratching field plans for three more days. I am a bad scientist, I think, but a good friend. I will have to remember to tell my advisor that, if he asks.

These are three short days, I think. Damn – there will be no sari for me. I told Kanchan to get married so I could wear a sari to her wedding, but she is as yet unpersuaded. Now there is no time to have my own made, and I’m mildly (very mildly) chagrined. I’m an outdoorsy, tough-girl, feminist who really likes to dress up. But after I decide I can’t afford to miss this amazing event, to which I have been so kindly invited, I realize I must fly tomorrow, to attend on the next day, which means there is no time to have my princess dress custom stitched.

Chaos. Bits of research mingle with a trip to Bagar at the other end of Pokhara – “Rekhadidi can I borrow a sari?” Tiny Rekha and I are optimistic until I try to cinch the top. No deal. My big American shoulders (and Grandma Trainor’s flabby upper arms) are not convinced that Rekha’s tiny blouses are meant for them. And in fact, they’re not. Rekha frantically buys me a plane ticket when I say all too calmly that I will pick one up tomorrow. No go. Thanks to Rekha I have the last ticket available to Kathmandu all day tomorrow, and got it by a hair. Crisis averted. I will be at the wedding, but maybe not dressed?

I pack a kurta suruwal, the traditional long shirt and trousers, but am quietly bummed not to dress in a culturally appropriate way (read: pretty). Like wearing jeans and a t-shirt to a black tie affair – maybe a visitor can get away with it, but it’s not exactly fitting.

The flight to Kathmandu is quick. You smelly, dusty, intriguing and complicated city – I am back. And so soon after leaving you. Ta-Da.

Glad to see Kanchan but she is busy –we both are. I buy much-needed topo maps before raiding her mother’s closet. Kanchan’s mother has a wardrobe full of saris. It is a little-girl-princess’ sweetest dream. I laugh and maybe even clap with elation. I was not the little-girl-princess – that was Rachie – but her nine year old incarnation would kill to play in this wardrobe. The fabrics are gorgeous, and the colors and patterns are vibrant. Just like Nepal.

I try on Gita’s custom-made blouses and they fit – it’s a miracle. None of us understand how, but we’re not too interested in trying. We find me a pink one (magenta!) and an orange one (creamsicle?) They are beautiful. Gita will help me put it on, so it doesn’t fall off, while Kanchan is at school and then work. Kanchan takes out all her gold jewelry and lends it to me so I will look like a real Nepali lady. I love her for it. She unwraps previously unopened packages of bangles for me, and lends me her favorite ring, made of an earring her grandmother had favored, which lost its pair. It is so beautiful I feel nervous. I never wear gold.

I am a perfectionist when dressing up. I want to replace my nose and ear piercing with gold like the Nepalis, but to do it right I’d have to switch the side (of my nose) with the piercing – Nepalis pierce on the left – I pierced the right. Someone should have told me that would be mighty inconvenient in Nepal someday, back when I went with a gaggle of first-year college girls to defy our parents and embrace our age. Bad planning.

I am swathed in pink tulle. Did I say that already? I take surreptitious photos of myself, which don’t come out right. I don’t care. This is fun, and I am so thankful to Kanchan and her mother for tolerating and enabling my desire to play dress up in their culture. Gita laughs that I am like a mannequin, I stand so still when she wraps the sari (itself just a long rectangle of fabric) around my waist and throws it over my shoulder. I am afraid to mess it all up, but they even have a matching bag. Cotton-candied-girly-happiness. I feel pretty.

Sudarshan’s wedding is phenomenal. I hesitate getting out of the car in the mud of the day (this is where I trip and fall, right?) but his cousin-brother proactively and kindly greets me and introduces me around. All male cousins are brothers, and all female cousins are sisters. This makes family introductions complicated but relationships sweeter. I walk into the venue, which has covered tent-walled patios, as well as a banquet hall. I am more nervous. Everyone is looking at me, I think, because I am a bideshi in a sari. Is it good or bad to want to look like you are of a culture from which you do not come?

I “Namashkar,” hands folded, until I’m pink in the face. Namashkar is Namaste with great respect. I don’t know who to greatly respect here, and so I greatly respect everyone. People are very kind to me about my “dherai sano” (very small) Nepali and pretty sari – they say both are “dherai ramro.” I think everyone else is looking pretty “dherai ramro” too. There are mostly elders there – we are waiting for the parade.

Forty minutes later a parade arrives. There are musicians – almost a drum core’s worth of drummers, brass, and a clarinetist who can whale. Or does he wail? They are amazing. I think they could school American professional musicians, they are so good. The drummers are just phenomenal, too. But they lose my attention. A white car drives up behind them, flanked and preceded by an extended family’s worth of women in auspiciously-colored red saris, all on foot. They come bearing gifts, like the three kings, except by the dozen, all foods carefully prepared and wrapped in red plastic wrap. And they are followed by Sudarshan.

The car is decorated with long strands of flowers and the initials ‘S & S’, written in streamers. Out steps someone whom I have never met before. He looks like a king, and holds himself like one, and it is just tremendous to behold. It is Sudarshan, and it is not. My friend who so innocuously wears jeans and American-style t-shirts is wearing a multi-colored (rangichangi!) pair of pants, shirt, and shoes, all made of the same woven fabric, the style of which is widely seen in topis (mens’ hats) here. He has a thick white band of fabric around his torso, from his upper ribs to the top of his hips, which seals the effect, emphasizing how lean and tall he is. Hair freshly cut, he wears a necklace made of grass around his neck, and another made of marigolds. His shoes are pointed and elfin slip-ons, and beneath the crest of his forehead, where his topi rests, there is a large tika, the deep red blessing his family, friends, and priest have begun to give him, which is made of rice mixed with yoghurt, red-dye, and other foods to make it stick. Sudarshan looks stunning. I am flabbergasted. It is unlike anything I have ever seen before in my life.

Perhaps nervous, he stands from the car and comes straight over to me, adoring friends and family watching with enthusiasm. I don’t know what to do – if he were American, or this were America, or any combination of the two, I would kiss his cheek, or hug him, but we are both in such very different roles from any for which I know the script. Does a woman in a sari hug a man about to be wedded? I play it safe and go with ‘no.’ Instead I stand feeling great fondness and awe and just gape. We talk about something that is nothing, like how I got there. I want to shout “Holy Crap, Sudarshan!” but smush it down inside. I attempt propriety.

Sudarshan gets married. It is a long process, and I am not supposed to be there. The women of the groom’s side (of which, on this day, I am one) are at his house, with his mother, who does not attend the wedding. They are wearing red in abundance, as I find out later, and they are dancing, and singing, and preparing the house for the arrival of the new resident – the bride. There are traditional tests to be set, foods to be put out, rice grains to be laid out in little piles on the floor. Ritual abounds.

Being a bideshi means I can stay at the wedding, though, and I watch rapt for almost all of the 5 hours it takes for the marriage ceremony to take place. I wish that I could write it out like the artist Maira Kalman would, and show it all in artistic glimpses, but I would never stop talking and my stories are already so long.

The rituals are glorious. There are relationships formed and broken; there are food and drink and tika prepared and drank and eaten and blessed and bestowed; there are tears on many sides, mine included. Ground is covered as the bride and groom walk around the center of the ceremonial space, with fire smoking in the middle; prayers read out at high speed by old Brahmin priests from both families; feet are washed; money given. The band trills and then builds with the emotion of the moment – I think they are playing my heartstrings like a movie would, as the music swells when Sudarshan puts an orangey powdery tika on the center of the forehead of his bride, the mark of a newlywed woman, which she wears only today – tomorrow it will be red. When he does it she cries. She left her family’s house this morning and will not return there to live again in this life. The transition, to my bideshi point of reference, is brutally abrupt. I think of how slowly I moved out of my own parents’ house, how unofficial the process is until the day when suddenly you realize that you do not live there anymore, and will not again.

The bride is gorgeous. She wears a red sari and copious amounts of beautiful gold,  her equally red veil flecked with shiny reflective sequins hanging low over her forehead, adorned by a gold ornament. Her hands are clasped much of the time, arms adorned with as many red and gold bangles as they can hold, and her gaze is fixed in a permanently downward direction, demure. I check in with Kanchan later – are Hindu women not supposed to look up or look excited while they are married? They are not. Oh good, I think. I didn’t know what to make of that. The next day I tell this to Sudarshan and his bride (who I see has beautiful eyes) and we laugh.

There is too much to tell. The wedding ends when the couple moves through a ritual to transition the woman’s primary relationship from her parents to her husband. She cries, and then when she gets into the car with Sudarshan, her mother sobs. Her daughter has left her home, and although she will see her again, this is for good. Sudarshan’s father brings a gorgeous, scripted, framed invitation to the young woman’s father, to invite him to the reception the former will host the next day. It is a formality, and the men embrace. Her father’s composure breaks at last, and my own chest shudders with emotion. The Nepalis are better prepared for this process –they anticipate the tears, even celebrate them gleefully as a critical part of the ceremony. I am crying silently between parked motorcycles, in a hot pink sari. It’s all so incredibly beautiful, and so devastatingly sad. I am so moved. I love ceremonies, although I don’t pay attention when I’m the one who is in them. My friend Anobha who is also from Yale and a Nepali tells me I will have to have a Nepali wedding, no matter who I marry. I tell her I’ll wear a red sari. It’s auspicious.

I’m a little obsessed with the saris.

I am invited back to Sudarshan’s house, and I go, although the sari is starting to feel like those party dresses my mother put us in when we were kids, with big silky bows that were so pretty until they were so annoying because I just wanted to be wearing pants. I remind myself to relish the opportunity to wear one, though, and I do.

I have no idea what I am in for at Sudarshan’s. We board a bus, rented for the occasion. I still hear the band. It reverberates in my head – god those drums were good. No, wait – it reverberates on the ceiling!! THE BAND IS ON THE ROOF OF THE BUS. I am ecstatic. I laugh out loud. Sudarshan’s extended family members grin at my pleasure, the young teenagers sing Nepali songs extra loud, and everyone we pass stops to look. Most smile and understand and share the joy. I can see a single black and white sneaker hanging over the edge of the bus’ roof, its owner trumpeting away as we sway and hustled through the bump and bustle of Kathmandu. This moment is surreal, I think. How phenomenal.

We stop at an intersection – everyone is getting off. I go with them. “Dance with me!” call Sudarshan’s bainiharu, his many cousin-sisters and cousin-of-cousin’s-sisters. We are to form our own parade, and walk behind the band, in front of Sudarshan’s car, to his home. What an event! I decide there will be a drumcore at my wedding. Where I will wear a red sari. And a tikka made of rice, dye, and yoghurt. And bangles.

I dance a bit with the bainis (little sisters) but feel sheepish, am afraid to step on my sari and inadvertently pull it off, am wearing shoes two sizes too small, and am already being stared at by everyone we pass. There is a GIANT bideshi wearing a sari in the procession! I think they must whisper. “She’s huuuge!” I tower over the festivities like the giant Uncle Sam on the 4th of July. I mostly don’t mind.

We have fun. The music is great. Everyone gets into it. Motorcycles roll by, dogs nip at heels, a cow eyeballs us and chews lazily. I stumble along the cobblestone road in my little heels, feverish with the immense heat, fun, and celebration. I am drenched in sweat. So is the sari. We get to Sudarshan’s house and we are dancing in the street, although it’s really a lane. I am pulled suddenly into the backyard by Sudarshan’s brother to do something that is a Nepali word I don’t know or catch. But I go willingly.

I am stunned moments later to find myself in the center of a 3 foot by 2 foot rectangle of uneven sidewalk space, surrounded by more Nepali didis (older women) than I can possibly conceive of. Every inch of space from five feet off the ground to two or three feet off the ground is occupied by a continuous sea of women’s faces, each one of them beaming and expectant. There is every age, size, type of dress – the women might as well be dropping in commando-style from out of the treetops, there are so many of them. And they are all in motion. They dance to greet the bride, to welcome her home.

In fact, as I look, I see there are in fact aunties on the rooftops, lining them to take in the festivities. It is hot but now we are dancing – the women sing and drum, so well, and in the center other women dance. I dance. My shoes come off. The purse is taken away. I just flow with it. I mimic the movements of my hostesses, and am dancing with Sudarshan’s mother. She celebrates in style, a long rope of seaweed-colored green glass beads running over shoulder and down around her opposite hip, like the sash of a proud mother. This is her day, too, and you can tell.

Our arms are up in the air, and our be-bangled wrists twist in circles to make the choraa flash and clink in celebration, as we spin in circles and the long tails of the saris arc gracefully behind. The Nepali women I can see delight in my participation, so I let myself go. I stop watching, and I just dance.

A short while later I manage to escape the ecstatic circle of celebrants, and video the meeting of the parties – the men come from dancing with one another in the front, the women from the back, and they meet on the walkway between the houses, where we crush all of the plants with the steps of hundreds of feet. The music builds, the newlyweds walk through the mix, bride with head-bowed, groom narrowly avoiding being swept into the dancing crowd. Only his side and his family is present today – the bride’s family is at home, quiet, and a little sad.

There is more ceremony before the bride can enter the house, and when she does she steps from circular pile of rice and grains to circular pile, as if they were flagstones in a garden walk. When she enters Sudarshan’s room she must find her key to the home in a pile of rice, and Sudarshan’s mother tests her new daughter-in-law, kindly. I note with happy warmth the kindly way in which the women in particular receive the new family member – they have been here before. They know the fear and the hope and the excitement, and they are even gentler to the bride than the extended family’s men are, when they give the newlyweds their gifts. Every family member gives Sudarshan and Santa an envelope or a gift apiece. Santa’s job is to lay her forehead to the giver’s bare feet, in thanks, but many of those gifting catch her forehead in their hands, which both suffices and provides a reprieve, and also a benediction. The women in particular catch her forehead higher than the men, sometimes bowing to her instead, and smiling generously into her eyes. “Don’t be scared,” I think their eyes say. “We receive you with love.”

The gifts of the immediate family take a long, long time, and I am exhausted. I sit in the small room in a privileged seat, next to the bride and groom, that I may take it all in. At the end Sudarshan arranges a ride for me back to the road, and instead, I am taken all the way back to Kanchan’s. I am so thankful, because I am so, so tired.

And so the gorgeous day, full of so much mystique, intrigue, and ceremony, closes on me thus:

A bideshi, swathed in a length of pink fabric, now moist with the sweat of a hundred emotions and about as many dance steps, gathers her sari between her legs, clasping the extra fabric tightly there to prevent it from becoming entangled in the wheels of the motorcycle, and sits precariously, carefully, elatedly side-saddle, on the back of the young uncle’s motorcycle. Oversized feet peeking out of high heels are tucked precipitously sideways onto the slender platform for tiny, graceful Nepali feet, and off we go. Into the night, side-saddle, a blur of pink and pale white skin, heels hooked in wherever they’ll fit, one hand on the man’s shoulder, another on the back of the seat, holding on, hard. People turn to look in surprise at the bideshi in a sari, on the back of a bike, and away into the dusk and chaos of Kathmandu’s traffic we drive, fast, as my heart simultaneously clenches down with fear and leaps out of me with the sheer joy and elation of the moment, and the day.

And that, my friends, was the end of Sudarshan’s wedding.

-M-