Masha-Allah


The BBC reports that in South Asia, you can now pad the number of attending guests on your way to wedding debt. Er, bliss.

“An agency has been set up in India to rent out guests for couples keen to boost the numbers at their weddings…In the state of Rajasthan weddings are huge family events – so much so that to not have enough guests may be embarrassing as large numbers equate to power & status.

The Best Guests Agency employees can turn up either traditionally dressed or in smart Western clothes, and are briefed on family history and pretend to be friends from the past. Three categories of guests are offered, with the highest – at around 600 rupees – being be-suited guests who are tall, well-built, light-skinned and who can converse well.

Mr Syed, the founder, said that he has been contacted by families from far outside the state, including Bangalore, Calcutta and even Dubai.”

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In Freeland, people often invite only Very Important People to their wedding due to prohibitive costs. Many parents are leery of putting up cash for starter or multiple marriages as divorce rates soar to 44%. Also, their children are usually older & earning salaries by the time they settle down so more & more are footing the bill for their own weddings. We may be a charge-happy society but at least we only charge that which we can pay off in say, a decade. What better way to enter the marital state than $10,000 in debt after all?

When Basil & I got married in Pureland, we insisted that no more than 150 people be invited, which we thought very generous since we originally wanted to wed barefoot on a beach in Mendocino with no more than 25 people present. My parents were appalled at our sheer naiveté. With 150 guests, they complained, they’d only be able to invite family!

Eventually they stopped consulting us on anything as they realized they were paying for the wedding & thus could do whatever they pleased. My sisters had 500 & 700 guests at their weddings respectively and we eventually topped out at about 300, with all sorts of extra & uninvited characters showing up in the end.

Invites to desi weddings are given to all & sundry as far as I can tell. That medical college roommate your father hasn’t seen or spoken to in 30 years? He must be invited even if he lives in Chicago because if he somehow finds out about it, & realizes he wasn’t invited, he will complain and that two-minute ordeal is unbearable. My father, who drives like an aggressive madman (one hand on the wheel, one on the horn, & both feet on the gas), met some bare acquaintances at the Islamabad Club shortly before my wedding who had the gall to complain that they hadn’t been invited, & before my outraged eyes, he meekly issued them an invite.

It’s bad enough being at a wedding, this time your own, where you do not know 90% of the people attending, but it’s even worse when you realize that even your parents don’t know a good percentage of them. Suffice to say, I have many, many photos of me in a flaming red bridal gown smiling plastically with strangers.

Free food is a big part of it. You must invite each & every person you know, or brushed past in the market this morning, because otherwise they will whinge about it. But really what they are whinging about is missing out on a free meal. The way some people act at weddings you’d think they’d never seen a buffet before - literally elbowing each other out of the way, spilling food on their clothes in their eagerness to shove it in their mouth, & being totally unwilling to move away from the buffet table once they’ve filled their plate to let others eat because they want to stay close for seconds & thirds. Once, I even saw otherwise sane, professional, educated people throwing well-gnawed chicken bones over their shoulders & onto the carpeted floor before diving headfirst into the biryani yet again.

Plus, all those random people who invited you to their kids’ weddings where you then had to cough up cash as their salaami (present) must now be invited so they can in return cough up cash for your kids. Fair’s fair, after all. And, trust me, people remember how much you gave. I was once at a wedding where the bride’s sister yoinked the discreet envelopes stuffed with cash that guests were handing the couple, opened them before the guests had left the stage, rifled through the notes (glaring if necessary at any miserly guests), & finally noted down the name & amount in a handy dandy notebook that just happened to match her sari. As a backup, it’s also all on video, with a suitable filmi soundtrack.

So, people remember, but they don’t necessarily adjust for inflation. The Pak rupee was 15 to the US dollar when we moved there in 1985, so getting 500 rupees ($33) back then was a big deal in a country where the per capita income is still only $183/month as of 2004. The rupee is around 60 to a dollar now, but from the looks of it, for some people the 80s never ended.

In Pureland for many years the government actually outlawed the serving of food at wedding receptions because people were competing with each other to stage such lavish receptions that it was becoming well-nigh impossible for even the middle class to marry off their children without going into catastrophic debt because of raised cultural expectations.

As usual in Pureland, many people just worked around the law. They hosted dinners at home for selected guests, or in extreme cases, handed them gift certificates to restaurants, & even passed out gold coins to make up for it. Gee, wish I’d been invited to that wedding.

Seriously though, the fact that it has become a matter of izzat (honor) to feed portly folk a heavily meat-based dinner so that they can celebrate the wedding of your child by gaining a few pounds is utterly incredible. Feeding the hungry, I totally commend. But hardly anyone is interested in this Sunnah because they’re too busy tripping over themselves in their haste to impress the Joneses. Or the Khans, as the case may be.

(Speaking of meaty meals: There seems to be a direct correlation between how highly one honors a guest & the size & number of animals slaughtered for that guest’s meal. If you’re served one chicken, you’re as yummy & special as lentils. Which means not very. Mutton? Now we’re talking.)

Hotels made up for their lost revenue due to the law by charging an arm & a leg for serving guests tea & soft drinks with nary a dry cake russ in sight. My poor parents. They were dishing out hefty, inflation-adjusted salaami, sipping watery tea, & dreaming of the day when their three daughters would wed & they could, in sweet serenity, legally offer everyone flat Fanta…but when that time finally came round for the last two daughters, the restrictions had been lifted. So, now, if you don’t put on a lavish feast (no vegetarian food please, we’re Pakistani), people will…well, people will talk.

And we can’t have that, now can we?