Village marriages of the bygone era

 

We eagerly looked forward to weddings at our village during childhood, especially the girl weddings. Cheap, various-colored sweets looked like divine desserts in those days. But then a girl’s marriage would mean the groom’s wedding party coming to the village. It’s very difficult to decipher the entire set of monstrosities unleashed by the sloshed wedding party members. It was a special day for them under patriarchal rules. So even their most goonish conduct was viewed as funny at the most. They were entitled to the entire set of follies expected from a sloshed person.

They would mistreat the music band members, kick the groom’s horse, wallow in mud, shout profanities, make lewd gestures and make passes at the entire village womenfolk. Save the groom, whose face radiated some semblance of grace for getting a wife, the rest of his party would be a perfect example of ugliness and puerilities. It was a kind of unutterable indulgence that chucked out the entire village’s peace.

No wonder, thrashing the groom’s party before seeing off the bride wasn’t an exception. They would unleash a firmament and the helpless villagers, cumbered with fathomless woes, would forget the sublimities of welcome offered to the party a few hours ago and pounce upon the evil. It was a gigantic necessity to do so in most of the cases.

The drunk revelers would do snake and monkey dance to the drumbeats and throw coins and even 10 rupee notes in the air. It would enkindle a stampede among the onlooking village boys and they would rush to pick up the coins. Then the impervious baratis would beat the culprits who had picked the coins. And the beaten boys would take revenge later. As the buses and other vehicles started to go back, they would throw stones to break the maximum number of windowpanes and rival heads if possible.

Once we felt well recompensed when we hammered a wooden piece into the exhaust pipe of a wedding party bus and it won’t start causing a lot of anxiety and inconvenience among the foes. This slimy novelty was hurtled in their face because one of the boys from our group had been slapped because he had caught a 10-rupee note mid air that was hurled into the skies by a wildly drunk barati in celebration. So the bus won’t start for a long time and once it did there was a hail of stones. That’s how weddings were celebrated during our childhood in the eighties of the last century.