It was always tough with the women in India. Despite the strong turn-on, it was not easy to get close to the almond eyes, the exotic scent, and sexy belly button piercing wrapped in a traditional sari.
Add to this lure the jingling of a thousand gold pendants, bangles, and bracelets, woven in their hair, ears, on their hands and feet. The endless girlish giggling, curvy shapes, thick black hair and faces prettily cut like the packaging of high-quality, black Assam tea.
Even after months spent in India, I was rarely sure where I was standing. From our perspective, typical parties with hordes of single ladies and gentlemen on the prowl just did not happen in the city of Amritsar, with a population of one million. For that, you would have to go to Dili, but more likely to far-off Bombay.
During less-than-savory contacts at gentlemen-only parties in the north of the country, I understood from the laughter and smirking of the locals that these were probably professional services.
On the street and in the shops, one is faced with a horde of giggling friends whose task was to defend the honor of each of their members.At family gatherings, all are assumed taken, so even a completely innocent conversation with a lady at the bar can cause such passion that the Indian curved dagger of the mortally offended husband was halfway out of its sheath. Literally.
I have also received two officially arranged offers to meet with the end perspective of marriage, which always started with the question of my income. With my better European salary, this would not be a problem - in fact, quite the contrary. But given that at this point, I had not even seen either bride-to-be, I could not engage in mating, which would overcome the awkwardness of the whole situation.
Of course, I respect these traditions. So many countries, so many customs, after all.
Not even my Indian friends looked like lotharios. Not much was said about love towards the local women. I understood the fact that they had some affairs when they sometimes magically produced a small “mistress” button phone, in which they only spoke in a conspiratorial whisper and subsequently started their cars to attend an urgent meeting somewhere at the edge of the city. Of course, strictly confidential.
My big Indian wedding was in direct contradiction with what was going on in ubiquitous Indian television. On the screen, "love" manifested itself as a collection of the following: deep, sensual gazes, fluid movements, gentle touches, and exuberant dancing. And it always seemed to end with a visual of an Indian waterlily, apparently code for intercourse. I always thought it was all so childishly excessive.
I was fascinated by it.
Same as that evening when a bunch of us were drinking at Bharat's, of course in strictly male company. When it comes to alcohol, I’ve discovered these Sikhs can drink. We were already buzzed when around midnight, Bharat’s mother, totally angry, stormed in and started yelling at him, likely because five cigarettes were in the ashtray in front of us. Regardless of whether you are 20 or 50, smoking in front of someone older or a parent is definitely a no-go here. I stared, disbelievingly, at the scene.
It has to be noted that Bharat had just turned thirty, was well-built and trained, which was of course useless when defending himself from his mother, who dragged him onto his feet while piercing us with a deathly stare, and then pushed her son into her car.
Nobody knew what was going on, and we had to wait for Bharat’s pitiful explanation which came in about an hour. First, he told his friends in Hindi, and whatever he said caused an uproar of laughter from the entire group. After a generous gulp from an Indian whisky of the Blenders Pride brand, he, partially resigned and partially amused, explained the situation to me.
In his thirties, he was way beyond the deadline of when he should marry, according to the good customs of the family. Offers from throughout India started coming when he was just shy of 20. He explained that the way it happens is that an offer comes by mail with a photo of the bride, a short biography of the family (who must be from the same caste), the description of their wealth, skin colour (which can oscillate between Kashmiri cream white and Tamil dark brown) and an offer that the prospective couple could meet under the strict supervision of the family. He had turned down dozens of these offers, all while having a few relationships and many affairs with jumbo jet of flight attendants, the perks of being an airline supplier. But none of these women, he said, would he ever have introduced to the family.
After the last official offer, he’d had an argument with his father, and his desperate mother promised that if all else failed, she would help using magic.
Immediately, she called the family enchanter, who was tasked with creating the desire to marry in Bharat. This is why, for the last half a year, the enchanter came every morning and hung various amulets (usually from dead animals) and flooded the entire house with putrid-scented smoke (which caused Bharat, after partying all night, slight nausea).
Although “guaranteed,” this process did not bear any fruit even after months, so the enchanter devised a new way to bring the misbehaving son to the altar.
Bharat’s task was to hang a lock on a railing at the busiest roundabout in the middle of Amritsar and utter a spell. Unfortunately, this 100% guarantee of a wedding collided with our party mentioned above, which Bharat preferred out of fear of matrimony, and he’d forgotten the lock on the seat of his car. That’s where his mother found it, and the rest, you already know.
Bharat, under the supervision of his loving but currently very angry mother, had to embarrassingly hang the lock that night and utter the magic formula. Lo and behold, it worked.
In two months, he called me enthusiastically, and shared that an Indian family had come to town from New York with beautiful Aadhya, with whom he immediately fell in love.
The wedding lasted precisely one week, and alongside me were 2,000 of his closest relatives, and I have to say, I have never seen anything like that.
Images from Unsplash