Wedding procession

Baraatis enjoy a pre-eminent status. They are offered priority seating, often fed before the guests of the bride and her family, and many of them receive gifts during the milni 8212; a ritual in which close relatives from both sides clasp each other in a bear hug, amidst religious chanting: father and father, brother and brother, cousin and cousin, and so it goes.

My own experience of being a baraati first goes back to the late 8217;60s. A friend of mine from Agra was getting married to a girl from Dehra Dun. Some of us from Delhi were to join the baraat at Meerut. We reached at the appointed time but there was no sign of the procession. After a while we saw the decorated buses and hopped on.

Between Meerut and Dehra Dun, we had to stop no less than six times because of a couple of flat tyres, a broken axle and a smashed windshield. All this meant that we reached Dehra Dun at 1:30 in the morning instead of six in the evening. But none of the mishaps on the way had dampened our spirits as baraatis. The bride8217;s family members requested us to proceed directly to the reception venue and have dinner. Most of the guests had, in any case, left without eating and any further delay would ruin the food and also deprive us of the little bit of sleep that we may be able to snatch before the wedding ceremony early the next morning.

But we were having none of that. We decided to first bathe, change into our wedding finery and then perform our bhangra in a procession that included the groom perched on a horse and a band with chandeliers.

That was how the sleepy town of Dehra Dun got to witness the mad baraatis from Agra, all decked up and dancing at 2.30 in the morning!