Rewinding Monu's Wedding: The one where Bada Babu drugged us!

I have been meaning to write about specific incidents from Monu's wedding and so here is the highlight of the entire celebrations: Bada Babu drugging us on the day of the विवाह!

Now Monu's wedding happened in Mussoorie, which as I'm sure everybody knows (this is your cue to pretend you know about it, even if you don't) is an-incredibly-easily-accessible-and-hence-over-crowded-hill-station a stone's throw away from Dehradun. A big blotch on our family's honour and pride is that despite having lived in Dehradun- so technically among hills- all our lives, we are the first ones to throw up at the absolute beginning of the mountain road that I, UNaffectionately call "गोल गोल".

Now throughout the pre-wedding functions, starting with the कीर्तन and through the सगन, cocktail and all others, we dressed up एकदम झिन-टाक झिन-टाक and the grand finale to the aforesaid dressing up एकदम झिन-टाक झिन-टाक was the actual wedding, of course. But to be dressed in our absolute best and then to have to go through the high puke-risk zone to arrive at the wedding venue was almost a cruelty.

So when Bada Babu (if you have been reading the blog you will know he is बड़ी बुआ's husband, our फूफा) offered us magical tablets that he promised will remove the faintest signs of nausea and queasiness from our systems, the first people to gulp this tablet down were Arjun and yours truly.

Arjun is my newphew and Bada Babu's grandson. He is a good kid who takes a little too long to dress up for my liking and other than this minor difference, we get along not very famously (and why would we) but we are quite close. For reasons that I cannot remember, it later turned out that nobody else had taken the pill.

So after wasting time as one usually does when one is in the middle of a busy and important occasion like one's sister's wedding, the family dispersed to get dressed. Fast-forward through a lot of banging on the bathroom doors, screaming for combs and hair brushes and Sanjay जीजाजी drinking चाय out of a कटोरी because all glasses had been used up, the family assembled to leave for Mussoorie and were dispersed in batches.

Being a diabetic, one of my sure-shot symptoms of a hypoglycemic situation is when I feel an overpowering drowsiness and I cannot stay awake without super-human effort. So when I began to feel said overpowering drowsiness, I rushed to check my blood sugar only to find the BS levels stable. Confused, I still ate a biscuit and kept tab on my blood sugar over the next hour as I struggled to keep my eyes open.

I decide to wash my face once and after the required routine of tucking towels under the chin to prevent water from dripping over clothes when the clothes are your very best, I walked into चाचा- चाची's room to go through the connecting door into the bathroom and here I find Arjun slumped on the bed and snoring. Strange but connections are made rather slowly in my dim brain and I gave it no second thought.

Eventually, the last few of us were left at home. Arjun, who had been woken up after much difficulty was slumping against the wall where he had been placed and ordered strictly to not sit. I was made to sit on one of those cruel, straight-back chairs without any support of a dining table to put my head down on and Ram bhaia watched over the both of us and bellowed a very piercing 'OYE' every now and then. Even until then, we did not understand why we were so sleepy and kept thinking we were more tired than we had realized. Not the brightest bunch, as I always say.

Then while talking about nausea and the impending trip up the mountain road, I drowsily suggested Bada Babu's magic-pill, only to be told by somebody that said magic-pill is akin to the sleeping drought in the Harry Potter world

So that's how I ended up looking spaced out in Monu's wedding album and that's how poor Arjun was nowhere to be seen in the same album, him being passed-out in one of the comfortable-as-sin beds of the five-star.