Birbal is an important member of my in-laws’ extended family, and it is as extended as they come. The departed matriarch had given a bit of her extensive land holdings in south Kolkata’s Jadavpur area, inherited from her father, to each of her four daughters (my mother-in-law and her three sisters), who have all made their homes around the mamabari where the two mamas, mamis and their families live. So their homes are within walking distance of each others’, and life for the most part is hosting elaborate meals for every conceivable occasion and unduly fussing over whoever falls ill ever so slightly.
By family standards, Birbal took time to agree to get married, waiting first to establish himself in his legal practice and then finding the right girl who would be able to fit in with his own extended family. His mother, my wife’s boudi (bhabi), was all for doing up the ground floor of their home for Birbal and his wife so that they could live together separately with the rest of the family. But he would have none of it. The family would have to remain as joint after his marriage as it was before. He combined in himself both tradition and modernity by resolving: I will find the girl I like to marry (no arranged marriage) — but make sure she is able to live with the rest of my family. All this explains why Birbal’s wedding was a bit special and even more of a mega family event than weddings routinely are.
We were firmly told not to run our kitchens for four days. We would be really happy if you can make a little effort to come and have your meals with us, said his granny, and she meant it; the greatest pleasure in her life was to have people enjoy her hospitality. She also embraced both tradition and modernity: the bahu who fitted entirely into a traditional household but hung on to her schoolteacher’s job, and whose pastime after retirement has been doing her own kind of research and writing articles like “Tagore’s ideas on modernising Indian agriculture”.
I approached the wedding with much trepidation, not knowing what the four-day eight-meal ordeal would do to my weight and blood pressure. Looking back, I realise that health-related rules have been severely broken, but that has been compensated for by enormous social insights.
The first and perhaps the most distinctive event was the show from family members the evening before the marriage. Many Bengali weddings these days have adopted the pre-wedding sangeet evening of north India — but as I found out, organising family shows on important occasions has been one of my in-laws’ traditions. The event was properly choreographed, with a written narrative, given some shape through several rehearsals. Recitation, song and dance, all delivered by family members, was great fun, particularly dances by portly women who were as game as the rest. Then an overextended family member did a stand-up comedy act – sitting on a chair – and finally everyone piled on to the makeshift stage to join in the last community dance. There was obviously a strong tradition of the women in every generation cultivating some soft skill like singing and dancing and some of the men turning into elocutionists.
The wedding itself, in a meticulously maintained north Kolkata house nearly a hundred years old, with stained glass skylights, was again a lesson in mixing tradition with modernity. The women were all in gorgeous saris, some with their long hair elaborately done up and others with their short hair trendily styled. A sprinkling of old people with walking sticks managed to make it, carefully escorted by relatives. And the wedding itself was as traditional as you can conceive, under the glare of video cameras and blinking cellphones.
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The reception that Birbal’s father organised fit the statement that an established lawyer can need to make on his only sons’ wedding. The buffet counter dominated one side of the swimming pool, with a sarod and sitar recital delivered from the stage put up on the other side. The bride sat in splendour in the main hall, periodically getting up to greet the succession of guests who had come to bless her. And so that the crowd inside did not overwhelm one, a screen by the poolside gave a closed-circuit view of the happenings inside the hall. The food by one of the city’s foremost caterers was sumptuous; the only person who looked a bit unhappy was the old man among the serving crew who had difficulty in pronouncing the name of the dish, chicken tetrazzini, that he was serving. If the women in north Kolkata were traditional and modern by turns, those in the south were mostly prosperous and overfed.
As the overfull parking lot slowly emptied out with the guests leaving, I tiredly sought out Birbal’s father to tell him something he would love to hear: Dada, your choice of menu and caterer is superior to that on the girl’s side. The ultimate symbol of the past and the present harmonising was the superb notun gurer ice cream (flavoured by the new jaggery of the season) which was a fitting finale to four days of feasting.