Live from Field!

I am reporting live from the field of action where the pace of things has increased considerably since when I left, which is no surprise considering it is now just a little under two and half months to the wedding.

Shopping is on at full-swing, just as the tailors’ machines are. Chachi has hired a sweet young lady to look after the household chores full-time so that she can now do the running around at any time without worrying about our enormous appetites and incessant demand for food, which is a serious rodha when you have a wedding to organize.

It is Monu’s wedding and she wants her clothes to be perfect. Every stitch, every design, every outfit, very colour must be absolutely flawless. The lehenga and the suits are brought out every day and are shown to anybody foolish enough to venture into the house. There are lengthy and often repetitive discussions of how the dupatta should be contrast and must be sent back because it is not heavy enough yet and a thousand such complaints every day. It is Monu’s wedding and when I say “she” afterwards, I am not talking about Monu but our little devil Sonu.

The bride’s lehenga is not done yet and there are considerable gaps in her wedding trousseau but Sonu has been diligently working on her wedding wardrobe since before the rishta was fixed. I exaggerate not; there are outfits starting from when Sonu will board the train to Dehradun from Delhi right up to the one she will wear after she has finished crying at Monu’s bidai. In between, there are clearly marked outfits for after she wakes up but before she gets ready for a function, one for the function and even outfits for after the function when everybody gathers around to gossip and bitch. The last outfit is separate from the night suit.

When I was in Ranchi, Mom and I once started looking up her “loot”. Every Punjabi woman has a stack of sarees, suit-pieces, stitched suits and accessories stashed somewhere and these are over and above her regular wardrobe, including her regular party wear. The stash is accessible to daughters, sisters and anybody else the owner of the stash deems fit. So I was going through my mom’s stash and I found a nice, glittery pink and gold suit-piece that made me go “ooooh”. So I picked it up and lo-behold my wedding woes were wondrously resolved.

But when I reached Doon and proudly displayed the suit-piece to Chachi and Sonu, the latter started shrieking inaudibly because her pitch was so shrill that she had gone ultrasonic (ok I picked that one up from Friends). Turns out, the texture of the piece is similar to one of her outfits for the wedding. And the colour too. Let me elaborate. By similar she means “in the family of pink”. Her’s is magenta and mine is not quite magenta and not quite pink. So somewhere in between, but still miles from magenta. And then I broke the news that I intended to get the piece stitched in the Nehru-coat style that is “very in” these days and I now admit this was a bad bad move because it led to some very audible wailing. See Sonu’s suit is also in the same style and I suspect she tried to patent the design.

The episode was extremely distressing and I fear such madness will only increase in frequency over the coming months. Adieu, sanity. :/