A village wedding

Weddings are not my cup of tea. For the most part they bore me rigid, and for years I have taken a book along into which I retreat as the waves of tedium wash around me. The two families and their various satellites look beady eyed at one another across the celebratory wasteland of tables laden with plates of dead bird boiled in diesel, weighing up whether the gold on display is the real deal or cheap bling. There is rarely much of a mingling, this is business not pleasure, and the couple who may well have been total strangers up until this point sit with a look of frozen terror on their faces at the prospect of events later that day.

All that said there are occasional matrimonial encounters that (a) I cannot avoid and (b) turn out a little better than expected. Thus three exhausting days spent in and around the wedding of my brother-in-law’s only son. And whilst I cannot say that it was an experience of unalloyed joy for me personally, it was good to see a couple of young-ish people making a marriage of their own choice in an atmosphere that I have to say verged on the jolly. Not something you see every day.

No wedding is cheap, and this was no exception, but neither was there much by way of extravagance. The wedding cake was a symbolic single layer. It was held both in the village on land owned by my wife and in the tiny Catholic chapel in Rahim Yar Khan. Both bride and groom broke with tradition and looked at all times like they were enjoying themselves. Yes there was finery of a modest nature on display, but at the insistence of me and the Missus there had been no crippling loans taken, no vastly expensive gifts on either side — this was a wedding in the nouveau pauvre strata.

The families are not in dire poverty though mine had been when I first met them, and the bride’s family mostly military and small-to-medium business. Respectable decent people, educated and pillars of society generally. Families that have white goods and consumer durables and flatscreens and education and ambition. They also have the capacity to be warm, open and welcoming and by the time we got to the point of the two actually commingling it was clear that this was a social success if nothing else.

This was a mixed event, with none of the tensions that underlie segregated affairs that I so detest. A couple of hundred men, women, children and some very elderly seniors, as well as a healthy leavening of unmarried teens of both genders got together and had a whale of a time. There was no indication that the sky was going to fall imminently as a result of this wholly natural activity. Nobody got into an argument or even a fight — and I have seen several of both at weddings in Pakistan — and email addresses were shared as were invitations to drop by if in the neighbourhood that were sincere. There were speeches marshalled by the Missus who could fill the boots of the UN Secretary General were the need to arise. The dead-bird dish was at least edible and once the men with the sound-system had been persuaded that ear-splitting volume was not what was needed — we all rather enjoyed ourselves.

By the time it was all over and the tables had been cleared away and the bills paid and the litter cleared up I realised with a minor shock that I had not taken my book out of the rucsac.

It may be that my perceptions of the matrimonials are distorted by a lack of attendance over the years, and that things have moved on from the dreadfully stilted marionette shows of the past. That the relaxed and friendly event that I just attended is now the norm rather than the exception — who knows? Nobody was bankrupted and one woman got to wear an absolutely cracking pair of socks — duly photographed. The happy couple got to push out the marital boat into a sea of well-wishers and even I, curmudgeon that I am, cracked a happy smile.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 17^th, 2017.

Like Opinion & Editorial on Facebook, follow @ETOpEd on Twitter to receive all updates on all our daily pieces.