Friday, November 13, 2009

Three weeks to go!

Just three more weeks to go for the wedding, and I am hyper – excited! It’s taken me a hell of a long time to get here though. The wedding date was fixed in mid- Feb, and till mid- May I was like ‘Ohmigod, I’m getting married, and this is the end of my awesomely awesome life as I know it, what have I gotten myself into, should I disappear somewhere unknown, I wish I was European so there was no pressure on me to get married’ types. In fact, apart from some close friends, I didn’t even tell most people that I was going to get married this year!

Then sometime around mid-May, I calmed down and started accepting that I would be getting married. I certainly didn’t look forward to it, but since it was inevitable, it was pointless feeling pained about it. In fact, even for the engagement, I had no involvement in any of the preparations, and just landed 2 days before the engagement. In fact, I had booked a flight to Vizag on 13th Aug morning, and duly missed my flight, and incurred a total cost of 10k to get home on 13th night, with the engagement ceremony scheduled for 15th morning!

But then the engagement changed things for me. Anyone who knows me should know that I’m a total attention seeker, and there is nothing like a wedding related ceremony to soak up the limelight! So I totally enjoyed all the attention, all the compliments, whether genuine or not, and thought ‘hell, if I am going to get pampered and complimented and gifted and showered so much attention, then bring the wedding on!!!’. And that, dear readers, is how I came to look forward to the wedding.

Two months after the engagement, in mid-October, I moved home to Vizag, and that’s when the excitement hit in. In the last three odd weeks I’ve been completely involved in wedding preparations, and it’s been hectic and it’s been loads of fun. Since I got home, I:
- finished buying the wedding sarees. My mother and sister of course made this job infinitely easier for me my shortlisting two sarees for each event, so all I had to do was get them draped while they voted for their choice.
- let my mother drag me around to get the blouses stitched. I usually have nothing to contribute when the tailor and my mom look to me for my inputs.
- checked all the invitation cards for defects and smeared haldi on their edges. A thankless job, I later learned, with my dad saying that the way I put the haldi, it resembled dung!
- scoured every stationery shop in the city, and bought up every glitter/sparkle/glossy pen in sight till we found a pen that wrote to my father’s satisfaction – this of course for the invitation card
- met the decorator twice, over two cities, showed him loads of pictures, and waved my hands vigorously in front of his face as if that would magically help him visualize what I wanted. I also spent a painstaking hour writing out specs in Telugu, only to discover he knew English!
- met the lights guy twice, at home and at the venue, and again did the thing with my hands, this time even using my fingers (to indicate sparkly lights) – the poor man finally took pity on me and offered to put up a full dress rehearsal one night before the wedding so I could check out the lights
- visited all the guest houses with dad, gave him my valuable opinions on each, and provided him moral support by sitting next to him as he sat with a notebook trying to decide which relatives should be allocated to which guest house
- accompanied my father, my brother and my fiancĂ© individually on multiple rounds of shopping for their outfits. Apparently, while I am not good enough to select my own sarees, I’m the victim of choice when it comes to giving opinions on menswear

I’m beginning to feel quite proud of myself for having contributed so significantly (!) to the ongoing preparations. Alas, my contribution is sadly undervalued by the family, who are always questioning why I don’t seem to have gotten anything done during the day, why I seem to be asleep all the time and why I seem to be on the phone when I’m awake, and such irrelevant questions…..preparing for a wedding is easy, but realizing this picture of an admiring family gathered around me and singing my praises is impossible :-p