Inventing traditions

The old tradition of grand weddings being celebrated over four days was long gone even before I was born.  The sons and daughters of the affluent villagers had moved on to cities that were sometimes on the other side of the country.  From way down in peninsular India, many of my people sought educational qualifications that took them away from their villages, and then their professions took them even farther, which is how they ended up in Bombay and Delhi and Calcutta.  Back then, it took more than four days of travel from Pattamadai and Sengottai to these cities; where was the time then to attend a four-day wedding celebration when eight days were spent on travel alone?

When I was a kid, weddings had been reduced to only two-days of feasts, fun, and fights.  Yes, fights were in plenty.  There was never a wedding, it seemed like, that did not involve verbal altercations.  A wedding well before my birth took altercations to a new level when the brother of the bride was murdered!

The event on the evening prior to the wedding day was about publicly announcing the engagement and introducing the groom to the village where the bride's family lived.  "Maappillai azahippu" (மாப்பிள்ளை அழைப்பு) which translates to inviting the groom/son-in-law.  A "pleasure car," as my grandmothers used to say, was rented for the occasion.

It is interesting how the usage diffused all the way down to a distant Pattamadai from America, where "pleasure car" meant a vehicle that was not for commercial or agricultural activities.  Of course, soon that usage lost its meaning even in America, where the car became a regular commuter vehicle.

The pleasure car was nothing but a convertible.  More often that not, it was an old Plymouth, like the ones that we see even now in the photographs of Cuban life.  The groom sat in the back seat wearing a full suit.  Yes, a full suit in the village.  In most cases, the suit was never worn again; after all, very few jobs in India--then and now--require a man to wear a suit to work. 

(Towards the end of his working life, my father took up a job with a Delhi-based firm and he reported to work wearing a full suit.  The firm's managing director chided him for not wearing a vest too--a three-piece suit was the standard there!)

Wearing a suit and being driven through the couple of streets in the village was, of course, not always the tradition in a culture that had not known a suit until the white man appeared in one, and with the pleasure car a new addition to life anywhere on the planet.  Traditions are not all traditions as we think they are.  We shed a few along the way, and invent new ones that later become the tradition.

The tradition of மாப்பிள்ளை அழைப்பு was discarded even when I was barely getting into my teens, when weddings ceased to be celebrated in the "native" villages where people hailed from.  It did not matter to city dwellers that they were raised in Pattamadai or Sengottai; they preferred to celebrate weddings in the cities where they lived.  The groom no longer sat in the back seat of a pleasure car to be driven around in the streets of Madras or Madurai.

People migrated not only to the big cities in India but to other countries too.  It is no surprise, therefore, that new traditions are being invented when weddings are celebrated here in the US.  Most of the children in the diaspora know nothing about Pattamadai or Sengottai.  Maybe they do not even know those names.  Those details do not matter anymore.  The one constant is the ritual of two adults making a commitment to each other in front of family and friends.

At the recent wedding in the extended family, we were seated outside at a table with a much older couple, who looked like they were in their 70s. Like most men, he too was bald on top.  Whatever hair that remained on the sides were grayish white.  She looked like the female equivalent of Ken Burns--a girlish face that perhaps has not changed much since when, you know, she was a girl.

I was taking digital and mental photographs of the proceedings for my reportage to my parents.  It was time for dinner.  Unlike the weddings in Pattamadai and Sengottai, where we sat on the floor and food was served on banana leaves that were in front of us, we stood in line in order to get whatever we wanted from the buffet.  

The husband came back with two plates of food--one was for his wife.  He placed them on the table.  "It is cold there" he told her and then went to get their drinks.

"That was so sweet" I told her.

As a man, I prefer not to use words like "sweet" and "cute" because they are so unmanly.  But, there was no other word that could describe an old man getting food and drinks for his wife.

"Yes, he is very sweet to me," she replied with a huge smile.

"How long have you been married?"

"54 years."

Fifty-four-years!

The gentleman returned with water for both of them.  "Your wife was singing your praises," I told him.

"She always does that only when I am away."

She smiled again.

Now that is a tradition that I hope will be carried on forever.