ONE of our neighbours is in the wedding business. For this reason, it
is nearly always wedding season at their house.
The workday does not begin until sometime in the afternoon and it does
not end until deep into the night — after the guests have left the
brightly lit venues, and the chairs and tables and lights and stages
have been dismantled, to be set up again the next day for the next
wedding.
Over the years, their wedding business has grown to
gargantuan proportions with attention being given to the most
microscopic of details. It is not a surprising development; as
Pakistan’s cities have swelled with newer arrivals and the progeny of
old inhabitants have grown to adulthood, betrothals are numerous and
more resplendent.
There is, however, another reason for the
ever-expanding numbers of businesses catering to the soon-to-wed. As the
rate of rural to urban migration rises, and the expanding labour export
market leaves many in a constant revolving process of arrival and
departure, the family structures that sustained the marital celebration
have all but disappeared.
Underneath the mandatory merriment lies a torn social fabric that is not what it used to be and has little idea of what it wants to be.
The consequence, of course, is that weddings (and not simply the matches made) are transactional affairs.
It
is far easier to pay someone to make the food, provide the music and
set the stage; indeed, with money one can guarantee mirth and merriment
of a sort that family relations never could. Those that are paid to be
joyous and accommodating, after all, are much more reliable than the
relations scarred by deceptions past, by inheritances denied — all the
dark realities that those hosting weddings are eager to forget.
And
forget they do, thanks in part to those that have made weddings a
business. With the once-loved ones duly sidelined, wedding organisers
and planners will happily take over, ensure that the mehndi is arranged
in glittering trays, the offerings for the bride, the perfume and the
bangles, the shoes and the chocolate, are all arrayed on trays and
wrapped up in tulle. Whatever gaps are left unfilled by the paid can be
made up by friends enlisted over the years, whose weddings the now bride
and groom have dutifully attended: the cashing in of favours past.
If
the now marrying have been lackadaisical in attending the mehndis,
mayuns, nikahs and rukhsatis of others, the effects will be visible,
usually on the dance floor. As all urban Pakistanis know, the number of
dances to the latest Bollywood numbers, remixed rap anthems and
revitalised oldies are all testaments to the popularity of the bride and
groom.
The sweaty, dancing, hapless souls, happy on demand and
desperate for a bit of the limelight, must participate in the mandatory
merriment; it may be their best chance to snag a wife or husband of
their own. A second rank may constitute the recently married, eager to
exhibit the dribbles of youth that marital drudgery has not bled away,
exhibiting the triumph of still fitting into the garments of one’s glory
day.
Nearly everyone who reads this article will participate in
such a spectacle in the short cool months, when large crowds are more
easily amassed, fatty foods more easily consumed. Old saris will be
dragged out per the retro themes of the day, itchy suits and
over-garnished sherwanis stuck over bodies grown large between now and
last December.
If the hirelings that have been employed to produce
the wedding feast are well paid and honest, there will be biryani and
korma and only mild heartburn. If not, the vapid consumption of
grease-laden food will end with a long night, solitary payment for
communal gluttony. Those are the physical risks, the psychological
carnage of forgotten sisters, ignored cousins and so much else that has a
cost all its own — that accrues invisibly but inflicts its own mortal
wounds, whose blood and gore lie just beneath the enforced joy.
The
wedding is an emblem of culture, and the Pakistani culture, battered by
decades of war and demographic change, stands changed. The Pakistani
wedding, with its hollow adherence to custom and tradition, largely aped
from television dramas and Bollywood sagas, is an attempt to patch up
the holes and gaps of now with hired hands and self-serving friends.
Underneath the mandatory merriment lies a torn social fabric that is not
what it used to be and has little idea of what it wants to be.
A
sincere commitment to maintaining familial relations requires more than
attendance at weddings; it necessitates respect and a desire for love
to mean more than the public proffering of hugs and kisses at nikahs and
rukhsatis.
If the increasing numbers of monetary transactions
involved in arranging a wedding, from the florist to the DJ, from the
caterer to the venue manager, are any evidence, then it is money and not
family that is of primary importance. With the former, the pretence of a
happy family untainted by sibling cruelties and parental favouritism
can be magically recreated at the wedding venue: a glittering bride and
groom, a backlit stage, thumping music, all making up for the love and
closeness that is no more.
The big wedding has long been a South
Asian boast, and urban Pakistanis have begun to enact its grandiosity
and faux sentimentality with the artifice of Bollywood productions.
There are actors and actresses, some better than others; there are set
designers and scriptwriters, choreography and music and, of course,
heroes and villains.
There is one crucial difference though: the
unreality of the Bollywood production is well known but the chicanery of
the urban Pakistani wedding, its glittery gloss over frayed families,
its garish re-enactment of cinematic scenes, insists that it is, in
fact, the real, joyful, thing.
The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.
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