In general any wedding is all about happy feelings; it is about taking beautiful vows, it is about lots and lots of smiling photographs with the bride & groom looking lovingly into each other’s eyes.
I had an arranged marriage, I met my husband just once – the day our wedding got fixed. Sounds rather uncanny in today’s world but that is how quickly it was fixed and wedding was arranged in a jiffy.
Before the wedding, the bride packs all her stuff in her suitcases and bags, prepared to move to her husband’s home. I still remember breaking down into tears as I was packing my stuff – just to think I will not wake up to see my old bunny bug toy against the wall, where my father had put it up for me when I was a kid, I will not get the familiar home smell in the many months to come again. I tried taking all the pictures, books, stuff and paintings from my room, but I realized how empty and lifeless it would make the room look, my parents will still live here and they will not be able to bear such an empty room.
Like most Indian girls, I have grown up to be an extremely independent woman – right from helping my mother and sister with grocery to medicines, taking them for weekend movies and festival shopping; I would be the official house driver and companion. I still remember the last movie we saw before my wedding – my mother and I broke down while coming back. Until then you don’t realize that you may never again cherish these mother daughter moments together. The wedding shopping fervour, the endless arrangements and the invitations – after all that you finally realize your old room will no longer just be yours any more. You are about to leave this room and this home forever and live with a whole new set of family and friends. You feel tensed, you feel scared and sceptical and most importantly you look back realize these days spent with your parents and siblings will never come back again.
On my wedding day, I remember the countless relatives from my in law’s side telling me “this day onwards you belong only to our family.” I smiled, looking at my parents silently who were so busy attending to the guests and thought “but I am always a daughter first”. I wonder how many grooms are told,” you belong to only our family now”? I am not sure .....
Behind the cameras, the mehendi ceremonies, the make-up sessions and non-stop controversial chattering of all the aunties, there is a girl who is thinking about the few hours which are going to change her life forever… The new home she is going to, the new relatives she has never met and so many new things keeping all her past behind, hoping she can stay in touch with all her friends, hoping her life does not change frantically and hoping she can still follow her dreams and most importantly hoping – this is my man…
So with all the anticipation, tension, expectations, hopes and dreams she takes the wedding vows and begins a new life promising her best as a wife, friend, confidante, daughter in law, sister, aunt and last but not the least the daughter she was and will continue to be.
The bidaai is just the ceremonial farewell of the daughter from her home; as her tears mingle with the make-up and as she steps out of the protective periphery of her home, only to be the smiling bride entering her husband' s home in sometime. A wedding is not just exchange of vows or colourful display of pictures on a Facebook page; it is the beginning of a phase where a woman embraces a whole new world.
It is not that you forgo your duties as a daughter or a friend, it is just that post marriage it is not just your parents or your friends – it is now our families and our friends.
After the wedding just as the presence of the new bride fills the groom’s home with guests and festivities, the daughter’s parents feel the pinch especially if the daughter was staying with them all the while. My friend once told how her mother woke up in the morning post her wedding day and accidentally made her breakfast realizing only later that she is at her in laws.
Home sickness during studies and home sickness post wedding are slightly different. In the hostel, the warden was always yelling and you were either yelling back or laughing it off with your friends waiting for the next vacation. Post marriage you are technically in your new home and you know along with time you will have to adapt to this new family, no matter how sweet and caring your mother in law is, the special tea your mother makes and the way she arranges your stuff and the way your father cuddles and cajoles you in irreplaceable at times.
But no matter how far the daughter is from her parents, at the end of the day, she is first their little daughter and then a wife and daughter in law. Like they say ‘ a daughter is a daughter all her life’.
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