Week Ten - Very Rich Family, Mam
This week involved a 10,000-person Telugu wedding, Jason voluntarily doing yoga four mornings in a row, my first shift as a volunteer baby cuddler, a Japanese pottery-breaking workshop, several decades of Telugu and Hindi movie music on a rooftop, and Jason roaming the antique markets around Charminar trying to become a better photographer.
The Reddy wedding
I went to the enormous Telugu wedding we teased last week. My friend Irina and I were invited by Guruji and his wife, and after repeated encouragement from the yoga group, we decided we really couldn’t turn it down. It was held in Hall 4 at HITEX and supposedly had 10,000 guests. Standing inside the venue, that number seemed entirely possible.
Getting the dress was an experience in itself. I went shopping the day before with very little idea what was appropriate. I wanted a sari but was warned off because they are complicated to put on properly. Apparently you can hire someone to come to your house and drape one for you, which may be the level of intervention I need. I settled on a lehenga. The first store couldn’t find anything that worked with my boob size, even with adjustments, so at Koskii I eventually put myself in the hands of the woman helping me and said, essentially, “I’m going to a wedding. What to wear?” After trying purple, orange and several other options, and with input from Jason and Jack, I chose a beautiful red beaded outfit with a crinoline underneath.
I had been worried about being ridiculously overdressed, but once we arrived I realized there was an extremely wide range. I was more dressed than some and considerably less than others. I loved my dress. The skirt was so enormous I could barely get into the car, it twirled beautifully, and it may have been fancier than my own wedding dress. My secret concession to practicality: underneath it I wore shorts and gold FitFlops.
Irina saw the volume of fabric and beads involved in my outfit and apparently told the women helping her that she would like something simpler, preferably with pants. She looked lovely in pink and orange and fewer people stepped on her outfit.
The men and women seemed to have read the dress code differently. Many of the men wore white shirts with white or dark trousers and looked perfectly comfortable. The women filled the room with saris, lehengas, silks, beads and every colour imaginable. The most extravagant jewellery belonged to members of the wedding party, who could be identified by their sparkle across the hall.
The entrance had flower-covered canopies, drummers, a marching band, paintings of Ganesh and Krishna and two enormous decorated fake elephants. The bride arrived beneath a four-post floral canopy carried by four beautifully dressed men, then met the groom on a huge flower-covered platform in the centre of the hall before they moved to the stage.
The auspicious time for the wedding was precisely 9:12 p.m., so the important part of the ceremony had to happen then. There were two giant video screens in the hall so those of us eating some distance away could follow along. We watched jewellery being exchanged, rice and flowers being thrown, feet being washed and several rituals I would be doing a terrible disservice by attempting to explain.
At one point a Telangana minister appeared onstage, offered his congratulations and was swept away again by his entourage.
Food stations stretched along two walls, with both veg and non-veg sections and fruit and desserts through the middle. The food was proper Telugu cooking, so I concentrated on dishes that appeared least likely to contain the three-plus mandatory green chillies. Guruji had us start with fruit and dried fruit to help our digestion, which I accepted on the basis that he seemed to know what was coming.
Later, the caterer interviewed Irina and me about the food and casually mentioned a pizza-and-pasta station we had completely missed. Eating pizza at a 10,000-person Telugu wedding seemed like a spectacular waste of an opportunity anyway.
Irina and I appeared to be the only white people there and were once again asked to pose for photographs. People seemed genuinely pleased that we had dressed for the occasion, which was reassuring because I had spent much of the evening hoping I wasn’t unknowingly violating some wedding rule.
Towards the end, Guruji and his wife went onstage for their photograph with the bride and groom. Watching the stream of guests made me wonder how many of the 10,000 people the couple actually knew. We started asking people what they considered a normal-sized wedding. The smallest answer we got was around 1,000; 3,000 seemed quite ordinary. Ten thousand, apparently, was legitimately big.
Ganesh picked me up afterwards and, as usual, managed to summarize several hours in five words.
“Very rich family, ma’am.”
Yes, Ganesh. Very rich family.
Monkey yoga gets a new recruit
Jason joined me for monkey yoga this week, which deserves mention because Jason hates yoga.
He came four mornings in a row and really enjoyed it. The group welcomed him warmly and then appeared to make improving Jason their collective morning project. Someone was constantly correcting his form, telling him to sit differently, straighten his legs or breathe properly. Occasionally someone would simply sit beside him and supervise.
Jason suddenly found himself the focus of a great deal of attention, so naturally things were going very well.
What probably sealed the deal was discovering that an outdoor yoga class in the Botanical Gardens burned about 350 calories before he had even had coffee. He came home each morning enthusiastically reporting the calorie count, which may not be the spiritual enlightenment Guruji is aiming for, but everyone has to start somewhere.
There are also peacocks and baby peacocks wandering around the gardens at that hour, which makes 6:30 a.m. considerably easier to forgive.
Jack, Vishal and I now have annual passes for the Botanical Gardens, and this means that they both go for walks around 8:30 before it gets too hot. There really does seem to be something about starting the day in nature that calms everything down for each of us.
Labour Day
Monday was Labour Day in Canada, so Jason and I took advantage of the holiday and went for lunch at Café Eclat.
We ate lunch, had a nice time and came home.
I include this mainly as evidence that we are still capable of participating in an activity without it involving elephants, religious rituals or several thousand strangers.
Baby cuddler
Thursday was my first day volunteering as a baby cuddler.
I want to be careful about how much I share because the organization is understandably protective of the children’s privacy. Broadly, a local orphanage allows volunteers to come in with toys, play with the toddlers and hold some of the babies so they get additional individual attention.
I wasn’t sure what to expect, but I loved it. It felt good to have somewhere to go and simply be useful for a few hours. There is also something wonderfully straightforward about an assignment where the principal qualification is being willing to hold a baby.
I have had worse job titles than “volunteer baby cuddler.”
The garden
My balcony gardening operation continues to require management completely disproportionate to its agricultural output.
I spend an absurd amount of time moving pots around to capture little patches of sunlight. The last sage bud appears to have died, although the basil is happier, so overall I would describe production as mixed.
Then I discovered mealybugs and spent part of the week researching homemade plant treatments. By Sunday they appeared to be retreating. I remain vigilant.
I am growing herbs, not defending a commercial plantation, although increasingly it feels otherwise.
Harriet, Leo and the imported food supply
Harriet is doing better and has finally finished her antibiotics, although we still have another couple of weeks of wrestling cranberry pills into her.
Both Harriet and Leo are very enthusiastic about the canned food Alessia brought from Canada. We tried buying Sheba tuna in jelly here after someone recommended it. They sniffed it, sampled enough to establish that we had disappointed them, and walked away.
Irina makes her own cat food and apparently plenty of other people here do as well. I’m not there yet, but I also once thought balcony farming sounded simple.
We’re also wondering if Leo is bored. Momi walks him and we walk him, but most of his exercise is within the property and by now he must know every tree, bush and patch of grass personally. We’ve brought out more of his puzzles and will try the dog park again.
Breaking pottery and Telugu greatest hits
Saturday started with a kintsugi workshop at a coffee shop around the corner. Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery, traditionally using lacquer and powdered gold to make the cracks part of the piece. Our workshop involved rather less gold and rather less explanation than anticipated, but we had fun. Deliberately breaking pottery is strangely satisfying once somebody has officially told you it is part of the process.
In the evening we went to Akan, a rooftop overlooking Hyderabad’s Rainbow Bridge, to hear Ayaan Vinuthna perform. His voice was terrific, and for the second half another singer joined him as they worked through Telugu and Hindi movie songs from roughly the 1980s through the 2000s.
It gradually became clear that we had stumbled into a greatest-hits evening for several decades of Indian film music. People around us knew the songs immediately and were singing along while Jason and I had no idea what was coming next. The table beside us eventually took pity on us and started helping us pull up the songs in Apple Music as they were played, so we now own an “80s Telugu Hits” playlist.
I’m not entirely sure how often that playlist is going to be used, but we have it.
Our ongoing research into Hyderabad cocktails also continued. The evidence remains strong that bartenders here and I have very different definitions of a standard pour. Fortunately the beer was good, and we had our first momos.
The music prompted us to finally watch Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, or DDLJ, one of those movies everyone here seems to know. It is gloriously and unapologetically 1990s: lots of music, broad comedy, enormous emotions and a plot whose destination is not especially difficult to identify.
Jason goes to photography school
Sunday morning Jason met his street photography coach and spent several hours wandering through the antique markets around Charminar.
He has been taking thousands of pictures since we arrived, but this session was more deliberate. They worked through a bunch of settings on the Fuji and then started focusing on framing and storytelling: where to stand, what to include, what to leave out and how the different elements in a photograph work together.
Charminar is an excellent place to learn, although possibly not the easiest. There are antique dealers, tiny shops, old signs, jewellery, motorcycles, people repairing things, people carrying things and faces everywhere. Every time you see one photograph, three others seem to walk through it.
Jason came home excited about what he had learned and already looking at some of his photographs differently. Given the number of hours he intends to spend with this coach over the year, I expect the rest of us will eventually become extremely familiar with the phrase, “Wait, the light is good.”
Monkey Yoga…focus…
Gen’s Big Fat Indian Wedding…
See Gen’s interview with Hyderbad TV6 (turn off “autodub” on Youtube, otherwise it’s really weird). - youtube.com/watch?is=UJ4zvkLZ0flJKzyf&v=GDmd9PFWEw4&feature=youtu.be