India: Day 31: Waiting and Wedding

Random stuff of the day

Dhobi brought over her little daughter. She was wearing nice clothes, like going to Church!
Saw yet another kid riding a bike nearly his height.
Another animal to see: Elephant! I saw a cat, finally, the other day. Oh, and I saw pigs having sex behind the slum across the street. Dogs were going at it too, and kids for some reason like hurling rocks at these creatures when they are at it.

In India waiting is a big part of life, waiting for answers, waiting for rides, waiting for food, water, etc. Today we waited the longest for these guys to show up. We didn't really even need them but they wanted to ride with us to this ceremony called "Tilak", it's the "engagement" part of the marriage when the women of the bride come to the groom's house and formally accept his marriage with their woman. Anyway, we had to wait three hours for these people to show up. They never called, didn't answer our calls, and probably never thought about being so late. Amit, when he finally showed up apologized profusedly but then that was it. We were so angry, swearing to give everything up and go for a beer, but then when they showed up we quickly forgave them. Weird.

The Tilak itself

We were super late, most guests have left and most food was gone. But they still heated up food for us, including the gulap jamun and that deep-fried orange thing I've seen on streets.
Beggar girls came forming a bee line with silver containers in their hands, all very happy, hardless even noticed the foreigners present. They were here to collect whatever food the guests didn't eat. I was very touched to see the gleam in their eyes and the joy in their faces.
A storm of bugs were everywhere, flying around us, diving into our food and drinks, and unlike the vegetables in this country, the insects in this country come in huge varieties. One insect didn't even look like an insect until it started moving in my plate.
Some random people just waltzed in and started dancing to the bad Hindi pop music.
Unique gulab jamun where there's this funny red stuff inside and raisins, really yummy. Best I've had so far.
People were very very curious about us. I guess this was worse than Lucknow because these are real villagers who haven't gotten out much. They were in for a treat, I guess. And they had no qualms about staring non stop at Jennifer.
The food and dance area was in a make-shift tent painted in Chinese theme! Chinese temples, rivers, typical traditional paintings. Very bizarre.
I liked the food, lots of variety, and very spicy. I haven't been here long enough to get tired of the food. They may all taste the same, but I noticed the difference in preparation and styles. For example, all the rotis taste the same to me, but I can see there're different thicknesses and shapes and types of flours (still, different flours yielded very similar tastes.)
We met the mother and the father. I forgot to mention from the hospital visit day that they do this thing I find interesting but would never do myself. To show respect to someone you lower yourself and touch both his shins and kiss, what was it, your fingers? Then you raise yourself up. And you don't just do this for elderlies, but also to someone higher caste than you. I've seen people do this to our friend Amit, who, like just about everyone we've interacted with on business, is a Brahmin, the highest caste. For me to lower myself and touch their feet or shins is really demeaning. It's worse than kowtow in traditional China (and that you do for officials, not friends and relatives). Anyway, the mother was very talkative and lamented that we came so late. They had a nice house. They have a water pump (well water) outside! It was so funny!

On the road, to and from the tilak, some worthy notes:

People hanging outside a moving tempo like what you see in photographs of Indian trains!
Flat tire in the middle of nowhere, darkness
Good road means one that's paved or just doesn't have potholes
Scary trucks sharing the narrow roads with bicycles, pedestrians, cars, motorcycles (which they call "bikes" here), and cars like ours
Street-side samosa was hot and delicious!
Railway crossing. They close the railway crossing like fifteen minutes before the train actually crosses the road. We waited in the heat for that long because we were the first ones. Those not in a car, like pedestrians, motorcyclists, and bicyclists just took this little path that allowed them to cross the train tracks. It's like the metal detectors you see everywhere; you find a way to get around it. And then after the train has passed, I realized it wasn't a "they" that closed the crossing. This is India, so everything is manual labor. "They" was really this one man who opened the gate. Often things don't make sense, and probably half the time, at least, it's not because of difference in culture, but that people here really don't care about doing the rational things.
Lots of other tilak along the way, some were so brightly lit that it was almost daylight
On our way back we saw something of a version of a bachelor's party. A whole crowd of people were sitting on chairs in front of a stage. No, not just people, exclusively adult men. (This is in open space where people on the road, like us, could see.) And what was on the stage was this woman, very pale skin, long silky hair, dancing in an (almost) erotic way. But the funny thing is that the only exposed skin was her face, neck and most but not all of her arms. It wasn't even belly dancing! But it was supposed to be erotic or something and all these men sitting, as well as men standing on the sidewalk getting a free show, were mesmerized. At some point a man went up to the edge of the stage and threw a bunch of red bills (they would be 20-rupee bills, I guess) at her but she just kept dancing. This was something of a strip-tease? I don't know. It was weird, sort of disturbing too that these village men came to the tehkil ceremony and are dazzled by this non-naked woman dancing some nearly erotic moves and then throwing money at her, perhaps to remind themselves she was just an object, or to collectively reassert men's control over her.