First Comes Love, Then Comes Marriage

Sorry Guys it's a long-un, but it was a crazy wedding weekend!

It all started with an insane shopping trip with 5 young Nepali girls all very excited to dress the foreigner. We hurricaned into a sari shop, I was shoved on to a tiny stool (which sitting down, made me about the same size as everyone else standing) and all these beautiful cloths, in stunning colours were put up against me, discussed, debated, and discarded. The only word I could understand was Rato Rato (Red! Red!) so I presumed the plan was for me to wear red. And sure enough, at one point a very red sari was produced, held against me and approved by my entourage of stylists. I was a little disconcerted about the red-ness of it all. In Nepali, the bride wears red and knowing already how much I would stand out as a westerner in a sari, I didn't want to draw any more attention to myself by being the stupid westerner dressed up like a bride. But the girls were hearing none of it and after a 10minute heated discussion (my colleague Vidya is a mean barterer) I was the proud owner of a bright red sari with silver sequins.

As we headed out of the sari shop, across the busy market, up some stairs and into another material shop, I realised the sari was only the first purchase of the day. Next came a Kurta - a traditional Nepali outfit that consists of a tunic like top and tight trousers* - then bangles, shoes, a petticoat, a top for under the sari, more bangles, nail varnish ... and finally I was all kitted out for the wedding weekend.

Vidya's family live about an hour outside of Kathmandu in a village and it really is crazy how quickly you leave the urban, noisy, traffic filled sprawl of Kathmandu and find yourself surrounded by mud houses, cows, chickens, paddy fields that stretch as far as the eyes can see and hay stacks everywhere. Vidya's uncle's house (where the wedding was to be held) was an amazing, typical (Brahmin) Nepali village house. Built above a cow shed, no amenities, no running water, the kitchen was the domain of all the women of the family, who cooked fantastic food on a kiln type fire and the courtyard was where the men sat, chewed the fat and waited for the women to bring the food.

If you were to ask a Nepali what the most important thing in their life was, they would probably say Family. Families are everything to Nepalis. And not just immediate family, cousins are also called "sister" or "brother", aunties and uncles are like parents, close family friends are also referred to like family and children are everywhere, related to everyone. In true Nepali style, Vidya was related to practically her entire village and everyone she introduced me to was a sister or a brother or a cousin sister or a mother or an uncle-brother. And to make it more complicated, Vidya's mother is her father's second wife (as in he is married to two women) and they all live together and Vidya calls them both mother. Confused? Try being me, try piecing it all together bit by bit, over the period of a weekend, when most of it is in Nepali!

So I arrived on the Friday night and was immediately thrown into the middle of all this family and given my wedding duties, picking through a pile of grass to find suitable stalks to make the bride and groom's garlands and wrapping trays of food in red cellophane to give to the bride (see photos). We, the younger, unmarried girls of the family, were all staying on the floor of what would become the bride and grooms new room, but for the pre wedding night was where all the feverish preparations were taking place. We fell asleep at about 1am, got a few disturbed hours of sleep then at around 5am the next morning the busy, bustling, noisy preparations of it all started again. Now, since coming to Nepal, I have lived a pretty solitary existence. It is not like I don't see anyone; it is just there has been a lot of just-G time. For the next 72 hours, however, I was never alone. It was just people, people, people everywhere. Staring, touching, standing near, following, laughing, picking me up and throwing me into the middle of a crowd yelling "Nach, Nach!" (Dance! Dance!) The second night after the actual wedding I slept on the floor in a room with Vidya, her friend, 3 cousins, an auntie, a grandmother and a baby. It made me realise that I am a personal space girl, that this mass, family, people everywhere, never a moment alone was actually quite hard for me. So often in the West it is about gaining independence and standing alone. It's about moving away from your family, doing things for yourself and establishing a life on your own. But here in Nepal it is all about family, and that all consuming, living in each others pockets, sharing each others space side to huge, noisy, extended families. So to Vidya's family, I was the one to be pitied. I was alone. The older generation, particularly Vidya's grandmother (an amazing lady who at 84 was still very much the matriarchal head of the family - she had given birth to 15 children 9 of which had survived) found it nearly impossible to grasp the fact that I lived here, alone, while my parents lived in America and my brother lived in England. In her eyes, I was bereft, practically an orphan, how did I cope? Where were my uncles? Aunts? Cousins? This was all said through my broken Nepali and her hand gestures, but at the end of the weekend I think she offered to adopt me! When I left at the end of the weekend, I thought I would be so relieved to be alone again. But instead I just felt lonely. In Vidya's life there are so many women, and these women have such a strong bond, it seems that they don't look to their husbands for support and friendship (especially if like Vidya's mum you are one of two wives) instead they surround themselves with other women. At one point during the weekend I needed to escape just briefly from two young girls who had become my slightly annoying shadows, always next to me yelling "gemma you come with us, yes?", "gemma, london is the capital of england, yes", "gemma, you dance, yes?", "gemma, you eat, yes?", "gemma, you like Nepal, yes" so I made my way up into the kitchen, which was filled with women sitting around, eating, drinking tea, laughing, talking, smoking, cooking and I could have sat there for hours just listening to them sharing tales and laughter and understanding.

Sorry, I digressed from the wedding...so I will write the rest of that cool and crazy weekend in bullet points, just to keep me on track:

- So the tradition here is that on the wedding day the groom's family all pile into a car, a band strike up and everyone makes a procession to the bride's house to have a feast and then bring her back.
- Except in this case the groom's family were so huge, there were three bus loads of us all. So with the band strapped to the roof, three bus loads of giddy excited family members headed to get the bride from a park in Kathmandu (because there was so many of us the bride's family could not fit everyone in their house)
- And this entourage did not even include the groom's mother(s) or most of the older, married women of the family who are not allowed to come to this part of the ceremony but stay at home, prepare the house and dance lots while they wait for everyone to return.
- As it was an arranged marriage, the bride had only met the groom for 15minutes and through the whole ceremony part of this first day (which takes place off to one side while the guests eat an enormous amount of amazing food and occasionally wander over to see what stage all the ceremony is at) the bride keeps her eyes down and never looks directly at the groom
- In the evening, the bride comes home with the groom but none of her family and friends. So for this first night she is totally alone with a man she barely knows and an enormous amount of very excited people. Everyone (and I mean literally everyone) piles into the tiny bridal suite and the bride meets her mother in law for the first time and then has to fight with her on the floor over a pile of rice.
- Then everyone sings and dances and claps (regularly throwing the tall, pale girl into the middle of a circle to make her dance) and the bride just looked so confused and small.
- After a while the bride made her way back into her new room, but the groom didn't follow, he was too busy dancing. Instead a load of the guests follow her in and just sort of hang out in there, while others peer through the windows.
- By midnight, I was outside playing cards with the groom and all the men of the family and the bride was still in her room with all the women busying around her and all the children staring at her through the window – there was just no concept of leaving the newly-weds to get better acquainted! And neither the bride nor groom seemed in any hurry to be left alone.
- And the next day the bride had to be up at 4am to put all her clothing and makeup and garb back on!

(*I will not even begin to describe the awfulness of me in a ready-made kurta – the tunic tops all looked like kiddy-dresses I'd long since grown out of, the tight trousers clung to my skinny legs in a distressing leggings-type way, and all of this humiliation was carried out in front of a shop load of hysterical, short Nepalis! But finally I found one)