At a Peasant Wedding

 

It’s quite tough to be a non-drinking member of a wedding party in Haryana. Everyone is drunk to be in an enlightened dimension, leaving me the poor earthling struggling with the ground realities. Since truth is decided by the majority, I feel myself clueless and almost an idiot. The marriage DJ starts blaring. The massive woofers and speakers of the music system shake the ground under my steady feet. The liquor-lovers look more sure-footed with their unsteady feet on a shaky ground. The loud blasts of music leave my ribs shaken.

Drunk peasants give a fantastic thrust to their spirits. They challenge all norms of established mindsets, cultural matrix and constitutional niceties. It’s madly adventurous to be among them, I tell you. If you aren’t a fellow seminarist to them, then be prepared for an onslaught by the agents of anarchy.

Hinduism is indeed very liberal. The starting song is a dedication to drunkenness. ‘Bhola takes a bucket of bhang and shakes his bum to ecstatic dance’ is the approximate translation of the rowdy Haryanvi song about Lord Shiva’s fondness for bhang. They are so happy that the Lord Himself loves drinking. Dozens of liquor-lovers turn ecstatic.

Flying drones is prohibited without authorization in India. And so is celebratory firing. But most of what we do in celebration falls on the other side of law. A young man is flying a drone to make it the best marriage party ever to have visited the village. Another is firing angry vollies of bullets into the body of a helpless sky. I try to add value to their fun. ‘A drone just hovering around is no fun and so is the blind and aimless firing into the sky,’ I call their attention. ‘You try your aiming skills at the drone,’ I propose the scheme to the gun wielder. ‘You prove your expertise in flying by taking it away from the bombardment,’ I suggest to the drone flier. Dozens of voices grab the option and they are egged on to start the game. Even random, close-eyed shots would have a better chance. The boozed man’s careful shot shakes the skies. An electric wire finds the aim. Snap goes the wire with a bang. The scared drone crashes on an attic, making it a perfect drone attack.

There is a spin-off from the same wedding. I come home at night, hugely relieved to come in one piece. But someone bangs fists at the iron gate. He is a most distant relative, so distant that you lose the trail of the relationship if you try to go to the source, who has come attending the same marriage function. He is curtly denied entry into any of the houses he thought had a duty to entertain his stay. Perhaps someone suggested that the writer is a good option under the circumstances. So here he comes to my place. He is unsteady in gait but very steadily holds his feeble right to stay at my place. What will you do, if even after you declaring his totally unwelcome status through your gruff behavior, he pretends to be most at ease as if flowers have just been sprinkled over him, making him the most esteemed guest on earth? You have to be an out and out rascal in bad behavior to help him accept his unwelcome status. The roughest cut-sharp notes are simply songs of welcome to him, so here he is sprawled comfortably on the bed and I take my bedding on a cot in a corner in another room. But before that he prefers to be more welcomed through talks. He is very proud about his vast travels. ‘How many places you have visited in India?’ I am finally forced to ask, getting curious about his far and wide travels. ‘I have travelled far and wide!’ he declares. Then he enlists a thorough sketch of his forced entries into the houses in the neighboring districts within a diameter of 50 km. ‘I have travelled a lot,’ he declares with the world-weary finality of a traveler who has just returned after taking a trip around the earth or maybe even beyond. Thank God, this feeling of world-hopping travel got him sleepy and he dozed off.

But well into the depths of night, another liquor-lover is singing his bawdy songs against humanity. He has drunk away his land and domestic peace. The last installment of the compensation money for his land acquired for a new road project was swiftly drunk away. All that was left was a lakh of rupees. A smart guy cleverly branded his old car at 1.25 lakh rupees. The real price must be around 75000 rupees. He gave a discount of 35000 and sold the car for 90000 rupees. The liquor-lover hits the ceiling in hitting the jackpot.

In return of the favor done to the purchaser, the seller gets a promise to use the vehicle as and when needed till he gets a new car himself. It will be an exception though, he promised to the new owner of the dented old car. In addition, there was another condition. This one made the liquor-lover really happy. He had to promise to take the old owner and his group on two trips to Haridwar. Fun trips, they promised. The two proposed trips to the pilgrimage town saw the rest of the money going out of the pocket. The borrowing of the car turned out to be a generality, not the exception as promised earlier. There is no new car purchased by the previous owner so far. The frequent borrowings result in repeated tiffs between the neighbors. And carrying the momentum from one of the numerous tiffs, he is now tearing apart the shrouds of dark night with his piercing shouts.