Now, if you’ve been living in Pakistan, I dare you to refute this statement. If you’ve not as yet attended a wedding where the baraat came at 11:00pm and left at 2:00am, I can confidently say that you have either not attended a lot of Karachi weddings, or you’ve been living under a rock. As my cousins from abroad, who come to attend weddings here very eloquently express: “It’s quite ‘late’!” ‘Late’, my dear cousin, would be an understatement.
The craze of mind-bogglingly late weddings has spread like wildfire throughout the city and is a trend that has picked up over several decades. I don’t know for sure what the conditions were before the 1990s, but that’s how it is now. Walk in to the hall 11:00pm, eat dinner at midnight, meet the groom and bride’s parents, smile at all your mother’s cousin’s father-in-law’s children (who are these people, anyway) and pray your aching feet don’t fail you before you reach home. And, if you are really, really unlucky, you’ll be one of the close relatives/friends of the groom or the bride, which means that you’ll have to stay back till the rukhsati, which in itself seems like a hackneyed scene from a particularly bad TV serial.
Honestly, how exactly do we expect to teach our children the virtues of getting up early if we keep them up till such unearthly hours, loitering around in formal clothes, saying hello to people we only meet at weddings? You might disagree, but that’s kind of a conflicting upbringing to thrust on children.
What happened to the law that demanded that all night events coming to an end at midnight? The whole ‘Cinderella-esque’ running away before midnight definitely appealed to my sleepier nature, and for nights as cold as the ones we are suffering through these days, what say we give those laws another try.
Published in The Express Tribune, February 10th, 2014.
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