The great Indian wedding tamasha

The wedding wallah
Farahad Zama

Abacus
2010, pp 335
Rs.290

Wedding Wallah is third in the series, coming after The Marriage Bureau for Rich People and The Many Conditions of Love. Does being unaware of this fact affect one’s reading experience? I would say mostly not; however, I did wonder why certain back stories seemed just not enough of a justification. Contained in 335 pages and written in 22 chapters, Wedding Wallah espouses how decisions about life and love in India are never personal but an event where everyone around has a say. 

Mr Ali is the Wedding Wallah; an old, genial gentleman who runs a marriage bureau to help the wealthy find a suitable match. Mr and Mrs Ali and their house where the marriage bureau functions is central to the novel in that most characters are somehow intrinsically linked to them. The cover claims the novel to be about “pride, prejudice and unsuitable arrangements”. Making these words come true are the predicaments of Aruna, Ramanujam, Rehman, Paru, Dilawar, Bilqis and Vasu.  

The story winds excitingly through Aruna’s coming into wealth through marriage; Dilawar’s secret that could cost his family their aristocratic lineage; Pari, the widow, and her adopted son Vasu’s “second” chance at life through remarriage; Mrs Bilqis’ hurry in setting up her son’s wedding and Rehman’s broken heart, hidden love and the diversions he finds in activism. It ends on a spicy note with Naxalism added to taste to spice up the plot.

While the dialogues seemed a tad bit contrived for these beach-towners, and the characters not of an ideal roundness, the book seems to be consciously written for a “global” audience with self-conscious explanations of terms like “vada — spiced lentil doughnuts” which gapes at you redundantly if you know what vadas or Tamils or Hanuman are. My problem is not with explanations but with them sticking out like sore thumbs throughout the book.

The pinholes in the narrative are where, for example, Aruna tells her husband why she wants to delay having children: the reason seemingly more for the benefit of the reader and the plot rather than her neurosurgeon husband.

The dilution of Naxalism can be laughed off as a martyr for plot resolution and the reverse stereotypes of the girl who wants to marry a priest instead of an investment banker and the young couple who work backwards to get their marriage “arranged” are all, for me, chalta hai in an Indian story these days. It is what we do for entertainment.

Zama’s skill lies undoubtedly in describing the minuscule nuances of everyday life, be it the spider in the living room that the hostess goes to great lengths to avoid the guest from noticing it while the host thinks it hilarious to point out, the trick of gregariously ordering tea for your office guests but making sure it never arrives, or the steps to tricking a crow.

They are all ingenious parts of Indian life in a way that conjectured miracles and the dramatic Shakespeare-spouting heroine and Khayyam-spouting hero can no longer be.

My favourite scene is where the author takes the liberty to reveal the future of everyone involved in an accident. I can see how this book could sit well with a foreign reader; the still socially and religiously conservative Indian folk fighting their way out of the shackles of cultural taboos to emerge into the brave new “developed” world. An entertaining read if you are not looking for life’s answers in here.