Love marriage

I heard an incredible story yesterday.

I was at the last Diwali party of the week, held at the home of the sweet lady who helped me find my flat. Mrs. K and her family host foreign students who are studying in Pune; my friend A stayed with her over the summer, and my German roommate-to-be, F, has stayed with her for the past few months. In any case, she, her husband, and her son are incredibly warm, and invited the lot of us over for a little Diwali bash. We ate sweets , watched CNN, and spoke in lots of languages at once. There was a lot of laughter.

When one family at the party -- a young husband and wife, and their baby son -- had left, Mrs. K told us the story of their marriage.

A few years ago, the young lady had been staying with Mrs K as a paying guest while she worked for an Indian cosmetics company in Pune. While she was in Pune, she met a young man from Kerala. They fell in love, and wanted to get married. Eager to show off her boyfriend to Mrs. K, she had him (and a group of his friends) come by the street where Mrs. K lives, so that Mrs. K could spot him from the balcony. Mrs. K, suspecting he would be a "dark little man with a beard, like all those Keralans", was surprised to see a fair (and shaved) man below her balcony. She called him up, he met the family, and everyone became friends.

There was just one problem. The young lady was Hindu; she came from a very strictly Rajput family based in Varanasi. The young man was Christian; he came from a very strictly Catholic family in Cochin. Everyone knew their parents would never agree to let them be married.

So the K's took matters into their own hands. They took the couple, and a few friends as witnesses, down the local court in Pune. They got married there.

But everyone knows you're not really married in India until you've had a religious wedding -- and, let's face it, a PARTY. Plus, they still hadn't told their parents.

Everyone thought for weeks about what to do. Finally, the girl went back home and told her family. They reacted badly (to say the least) and locked her in the house for days. Finally, her younger brother intervened on her behalf, and convinced her parents to let her return to Pune and to her job. Her parents called the K family, saying that if their relations found out about the marriage, the family would be cast out from society and shamed for generations to come. The young lady's sister and brother would never be able to find spouses.

Many tears and negotiations later, her family finally consented to the marriage -- as long as it was held under firm Hindu guidelines, and as long as no one found out the boy had been brought up (and indeed still was) Catholic.

The boy was fine with this. The girl was ecstatic. A few more hurdles remained, though, the first of which was convincing the boy's Catholic family to consent to a Hindu wedding. After putting their heads together, the K's figured out how to jump this one: Mr. and Mrs. K (two very fair Brahmins) would pose as the young man's parents; assorted members of their family would pose as the young man's brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, and cousins. The man's family would never have to know.

They rehearsed for weeks leading up to the wedding. Everybody knew everybody else's character. The wedding passed without a hitch -- until, that is, the bride and bridegroom went to a Hanuman-ji mandir to pay their respects. While they were there, dutifully praying to Hanuman with all their relatives (and fake relatives), they heard a voice cry out, "Hey, Shenji Joseph! What are YOU doing here?!" It was one of the young man's friends from school, who by a strange twist of fate had ended up in that city, at that temple, at that moment. Before the innocent friend knew what had happened to him, four of the men from Mrs. K's family had pounced on him, muffled his voice, and forcibly dragged him out of the temple.

Everyone breathed a sigh of relief.

The second wedding ended well, and the couple flew to Kerala to be married as Catholics. (For, the young man's parents had said, it would be just FINE if the two were married -- as long as the ceremony were absolutely Catholic as could be.) The young woman's parents, satisfied that they had convinced their entire family and neighborhood of the groom's pure Brahmin roots, even attended the wedding.

They are now living happily ever after as a practicing Hindu-Catholic family.