Monsoon Wedding

We’re in Bangladesh for my sister's wedding in October, and monsoon season is coming to an end. It's hot; sticky, humid, can't-sleep-at-night, shower-four-times-a-day hot. The electricity cuts out randomly and indefinitely, so you sometimes have to go for 2-5 hours without any fan or ice for your water; it's not too bad through the night but in the early afternoon there's nothing to do but retire to bed inside a mosquito net with the curtains drawn. It’s too hot to go outside during sunlight, so the days are split between reading, playing cards, dozing and watching the geckos climb the walls.

And then the wedding is almost here. And cousins from Dhaka, Chittagong, and all over Sylhet have swarmed to the house, and we are sleeping 5 to a bed sideways with our feet hanging off the end. And even with the kids sleeping in a row under the dining table there isn’t anymore space, so some of the guests have to stay at my cousins house nearby. But nobody wants to leave our house because it’s party central all day and all night.

We are staying up until 3, 4, 5am playing cards and carrom and ludo, telling stories and listening to music on ZeeTV, while the oldies sit and reminisce on old times and gossip about the new times, chewing paan and drinking hot, sweet tea. And the old grannies are smoking a hookah around the dining tables, and the uncles are sitting out on the verandah talking politics and economics and all the male ‘servants’ have been given beds in the garage where they have the privacy to play cards and gamble for real, and smoke cigarettes all through the night. And the female ‘servants’ seem to be perpetually in the kitchen cooking all day and all night because there’s anywhere between 20 – 40 mouths to feed at any given mealtime.

The days are filled with the florist coming to show the different ways that flowers could be arranged on the bridal stage and the lighting people are at the house for days draping 50,000 fairy lights over the house and from the main road right up to the gate, so that every one in town knows there’s a wedding taking place.

Beggars come to the house to seek alms and leave with their little brown sacks filled with rice and lentils and sugar and sweets. Every morning several grocers are at the verandah, one selling vegetables, another fish, another milk, another with 4 live chickens in a cage and promises that he has duck and other birds available on request. The shopping is endless because there are so many mouths to feed, and the more my Dad buys, the more grocers there are at the door the next day.

There is a constant traffic of cars coming and going through the gate as relatives visit the house to give their congratulations. All the windows and all the doors are left open day and night, and sometimes chickens wander in from the garden and have to be shooed out. One lays an egg on my bed as I sleep, which I find nestled on the duvet between my legs one morning, a little white feather attached to it.

And every person that comes brings boxes of Indian sweets, so we are nibbling on orange jelebi’s and brown gulab jamuns and snowy white rasmalai’s and halwa’s in every imaginable colour all day, until we’ve got sugary headaches and stomach cramps. Everyone wants to see the bride, and they all marvel at how beautiful she is and how gorgeous all the gifts are that have arrived from her family-in-law-to-be. Wedding songs are playing loudly all day so that even when you’re having a shower, you can’t forget that this is a wedding in this house.