wedding

Hi

I was looking at some of my friend's study abroad blogs, and realized that I update and write way too much. I think it's become something of a guilty pleasure to come to the internet cafe and use computers--it's the bit of home and familiarity. And, I feel like I have an audience for my ramblings, even if it's just my parents. Hi, parents.





I went to a wedding--the cousin of my host brothers was the bride. It was crazy and fun--very colorful and lots of food. It was beautiful and sonically pleasing. There was a band at the wedding with tabla player and heavy synth and sounded like disco music over tabla with cellphone ringing. When the groom's party came, they brought a marching band, and many men firing guns into the air. So you could hear the two parties converging, for a good twenty minutes, much beating of drums and shooting (which scared me. I told my host brother I was scared, and he assured me they were experts and I was being a wimp. I shut up, then my other host brother comes over to me and says in a jolly tone, "this is very dangerous, yes?"). Anyway, creatied intresting sonic effect. I sat with the bride most of the time, who is not really allowed to participate in the festivities after the ceremony and before the fire-ceremony at the end. She was beautifully done up- you can see. the worst part was, they hired two girls to dance on stage for like three hours while the men got horny--clearly, they were not hired for their good dancing. Many members of my host family quietly told me that they also found this distasteful, too, so at least it wasn't just a liberal American reaction.

It must have been very expensive, it was very showy. The tradition is that the bride's family has to pay for the wedding. THis has big implications for women in india, becuase it means that daughters are financially undesirable, and is one of the reasons that infanticide and forced abortions of female babies are so common in India, and the proportion of women to men in the population is falling so much (is that the right way to say it? I mean there are fewer women). I wrote a bit about women in my notebook:

The battle against Kamdeo
must never be against her face
the beauty of women is
the beauty of all of us
and is under attack,
has always been.
Violence and subservience
the eternal producers of CHapati
while the men eat
the arrows of silence shot into her heart
and she beleives them
and has always.
So she is alone,
convinced she is a burden
constantly trying to make up for herself.

In my host family, I am constantly impressed by my host mom--she is cheerful and loving and always singing, one of the best spirits I have ever come across. She is lucky to have a good family--although she is the only woman in the house, her sons are devoted and helpful to her. There are two men in the house, her husband and his younger brother. Her husband is very crabby with her, and mostly ignores her and takes her for granted. This is how most marrages here are, I feel. But she is lucky that his brother lives with them, because he is sweet to her and they are very close. Most indian women don't have that, they are just alone under the burden of their husband's assumption that they exist only to serve his needs.

Maybe I'm unfairly steriotyping here--I have not traveled widely enough or met enough people to actually claim to know what I'm talking about. But I do know, almost all marrages here are arranged, and divorce is rare. This morning, a woman came to speak to us--she was being abused by her husband, and so she ran away into the city and found work herself. After she began to make money, her husband and sons followed her into the city and moved in with her, so now not only is she the mother, but also the only earner in the family. She cleans other people's houses.

More later
love
jed