In March of 2013, I was invited to attend a wedding in Pakistan. I spent two weeks in Karachi, Hyderabad, Lahore, and Islamabad. This is the account of my real experience there. Out of respect for the privacy of my friends, I have not named anyone, and I will not be posting pictures of their faces, or providing details which may reveal their identities or locations. Read more about my diaries here.
Thursday, March 28th, 2013
Karachi and Hyderabad, Pakistan
On
Thursday there was no time for sleeping in. I was awoke at 10:15am and told
that we would be leaving soon for Hyderabad, the hometown of the groom and the site at which the wedding was to take place. A mere a three-hour drive away.
I hurriedly packed and changed clothes, expecting to leave at any moment.
But instead of rushing, relatives
lounged around the house, chatting calmly as usual. I was even told that we
would probably have time to stop at the Dolmen mall before leaving (!!!????) I had asked
the bride’s two cousins from India, to whom I had bonded with in the last few days, if I
could come with them to the mall before leaving for Hyderabad. I had my eye on a red
dress at a store there since the last time I visited, and I was hoping I would
get the chance to buy it before leaving Karachi. Going to the mall involved
gaining permission from their uncle as well as inviting other family members,
and by the time they had done so, a trip in one car with three people again
became three cars with fifteen people.
We did not arrive
at the mall until 1:00 pm. First we dropped of the second eldest sister at the bazaar, where she would be running errands in preparation for the wedding, then dropped off one cousin at Roses
Parlour, where she would be getting her mehndi done.
After we passed
the security checkpoint at the Dolmen Mall, I told the girls I wanted to do
some shopping on my own, and that I would meet them an hour later inside the
mall. As I walked around the first floor, I spotted a foreign family at a café.
These were the first foreigners I had seen since coming to Pakistan. I again
was overwhelmed by the complete sense of safety I felt inside the mall, as it
was so modern and reminded me so much of home. [Author’s note: As I
read this now, the recent mall massacre in Nairobi is fresh on my mind. I am sure the
shoppers and expats there felt completely safe as well. I am now struck by how
false my sense of security was. Even in Pakistan, people expressed concern that
I walked alone in the mall.]
Being alone for
one hour of shopping was therapeutic for me. I finally got the red dress I had been eyeing, and as I headed up to the top floor food court to
find juice, I saw the
bride’s cousin. Without greeting me, she simply said, “Gloria
Jean’s has a sea view!”
I had no idea
what that meant, I thought she was talking about a person. But then she led me
to the window of a beautiful cafe, with a remarkable terrace and view of the
Karachi beach. At Gloria Jean’s café I finally ordered the latte that I didn’t
know I had missed so much. But before I even had time to drink, the bride’s
sister found us and suddenly we were in a rush to get back to the house. I
stared at the couches longingly. How I wanted to relax and pass time writing on
my laptop as I usually do. How I wanted to sit outside (though I noticed only
men were sitting outside) and gaze at the harbor, but the driver was waiting for us. We took our drinks to go and hurried back to the car.
The house was in
a far more chaotic state than when we had left. Luggage was strewn about in all
corners of every room. Relatives were pacing from room to room, in an obvious
rush to leave but somehow not being ready to do so. We had only three cars and some twenty people
who we needed to transport. Not all of us were present at the house, and of
those present not all were ready to leave. The bride’s sister and cousin were
still at Rose’s getting their mehndi done, other relatives were running
errands, but the drivers were ready to go. It was 3:00pm. The mehndi was to start
at 7:00, and it would take three hours to drive to Hyderabad.
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| traffic on the way from Karachi to Hyderabad |
We swung by
Roses’s to pick up her
other cousin, ready or not. Inside the two-story salon,
many young women were sitting on pillows, having henna applied into intricate
patterns to their arms and feet. We pulled the cousin off a pillow
and took her to the car. Her mehndi hadn’t even dried yet so she had to
carefully slide into the front seat.
As we sped out
of Karachi, I tried to put on my seat beat which resulted in a roar of laughter
from the car’s passengers. No one wears seat belts in Pakistan. There is a persistent
belief that it’s cool/sexy/macho/desirable not to wear seat belts. People even
cut them out of their cars because they’re “a nuisance.” I was told that if you
are caught wearing a seat belt, other drivers will know you are not from
Pakistan, and they will purposely mess with you. I didn’t care. The driver
was such a frightening speeder, and the roads were so ill-kept, not wearing
a seat belt was akin to a death wish.
At 4:00 pm the
car finally departed for Hyderabad. It was a terrifying journey. Once we were
out of the city, the pavement on the roads had long since worn off around the
edges creating an abrupt ridge between the road and the desert sand. With no
visible paint lines in the road, drivers swerved in and out of imaginary
lanes. Five cars would drive side by side in a lane only wide enough for three. Our driver
sped past them all, he sped through the tiny opening between two semi trucks,
he overtook from the right, the left, and the center. He drove off the road
into the dessert just to overtake cars, and he would follow behind them, the
front of our car almost touching their bumper at 80 miles an hour. I gripped the seat in front of me with such intensity that my arm and abdomen muscles
ached after an hour.
 |
| a rest stop on the side of the road |
After another
hour-and-a-half of living a near-death experience on the road, we finally
reached Hyderabad. The straw huts of villages on the outskirts of the city were
illuminated by a the backdrop of a watery sky and the pale orange of a sorbet
sunset. When we finally pulled into town, we stopped
the car between two crumbling buildings underneath a net of telephone wires.
We left the bride
and her cousins at the parlour to get ready for the mehndi. I was asked if I
wanted to join them, but seeing how long it took them to get ready at home, I
had no desire to spend another 3-4 hours in a parlour. Besides, I was staying in Hyderabad for three days, and I wanted to
unpack and settle into my new dwelling. I opted to be
taken directly to the bungalow, where I could get ready at my own pace.
We arrived in
the bungalow just past 7:00 pm. I was the first to enter, along with one of the young cousins, a girl of only ten years old. The two of us walked around that
silent, dusty house exploring every room and corner. The ceiling of the house
rose to an impressive height, the furniture was bold and gaudy, but everything
was covered by a cloak of dust. Cobwebs hung from the staircase. The rugs
smelled moldy. This was the house of some distance relative. The family had migrated to the city and now the large bungalow was rarely used.
French doors
opened to a long wide hallway with white tiled floors. Couches, wide as twin
beds lined both sides of the wall as though they had been temporarily laid out for visitors
but then never moved. Nearly every room in the house was a bedroom, all of them a
study in contrasts. Lavish drapes adorned broken windows, immaculate rugs
placed over dirty concrete floors, mirrors with rotting and decaying edges.
Remembering that
the mehndi invitation said 8:00 pm, and it was already half past, I got ready
in a hurry. I put on a wig, so I didn't have to bother styling my hair, and did my make up in sections, in case I had to leave before finishing.
I then sat on one
of the hallway beds and waited…and waited. From time to time I would go into
the bathroom hallway, which had been sectioned off and was being used as a
dressing room by the younger girls, and each time I would find them no closer
to being ready than the last moment I looked. They were still slowly applying
making, braiding their hair, putting on their garments, one piece at a time,
all the while laughing and talking to make each moment last longer. I was
infuriated with the lack of urgency. I was also bored and ready to get out of
the dusty house and on to the party. [Author’s
Note: It didn’t occur to me at that time that these women were all from
different parts of the country. It had been a long time since they had seen
each other and events like these were their only opportunity to meet again. In
their villages, they covered their faces on the rare occasions that they left
the house. This was their time to see each other, faces uncovered, to laugh and
talk and catch up on old time. They were not just family. They were best friends.]
After my frantic (and unnecessary) complaining, one of the bride’s cousins got her father to drive me to the hotel. I
entered the grand ballroom at 9:45 pm along with the ten-year-old, expecting to walk in
on a ceremony halfway finished, but to my amazement, we were the only two
people in the ballroom besides the staff.
The
ballroom was shaded in red and purple lights. Chairs cloaked in purple fabrics
were arranged in rows for over 500 people. The stage was made from bold black
and white stripes that drew the eyes to its center almost immediately. On the
opposite side of the stage a platform had been erected and
adorned with wreaths of hanging flowers. Two ornate white sofes were placed
side by side, facing the guests. One sofa for each couple. Up until that point, I had forgotten
that this was a duel wedding. My friend and her fiancé were one couple, and her
fiancé’s older brother and his fiancé were the other couple.
 |
| The stage |
They
also served a variety of juices, grape, apple, and orange were among those I
could identify, (cheeko juice was, unfortunately, not among them). Since
alcohol cannot be served in Pakistan, I welcomed the juice variety. We ate off paper
plates with no napkins, and I dirtied my hands and silk kameez before anyone
could even see it. I ate a plate of pani puri and chaat each, and when I
approached the counter to get a second helping, the young cousin
thought better and stopped me. There would be a big feast later, she said.
“You mean this
isn’t the feast?” I asked.
“No, of course
not! This is just the appetizer. There
will be so much food later.”
Later? I
wondered when that would be. It was already after 10 pm. Slowly small groups of
people began to train in. I spotted two college-aged women with
long black braids and the most elegant dresses I had ever seen. One was made of
sheer black fabric, and the other was a deep emerald green. The dresses hung loose like
drapes just barely grazing the floor. Both women wore black eyeliner, and had
obviously gotten their hair and make up done at a salon just before. It was
flawless.
Since we were
among the only people in a hollow ballroom, we began talking. They were
Muslims, and students at the groom’s university. They were the only students
from his university to attend his wedding. [Author’s note: I would later meet the groom’s
best friends in Lahore and Islamabad, none of whom attended the
wedding. I didn’t realize this at the time, but it was a tremendous act of
courage for two Muslim girls to attend a Hindu wedding alone. They likely faced some criticism from other Muslims about associated with a Hindu,
and they may very well have faced criticism from Hindus who were present. Their gesture was significant
and meaningful in a way I had neither the context nor knowledge to understand.]
As more people
began to enter the ballroom, I noticed that every single woman wore an equally
elegant dress. Tailor-made and bejeweled.
While I was gazing longingly at women’s dresses, and feeling ever more
ashamed over mine, the ballroom filled before my eyes. As guests funneled into the ballroom they naturally
self-segregated by gender, women occupied the
entire seating area to the left of the stage, while the men occupied the seats
to the right of the stage. [Author’s
note: Gender
segregation was such a natural part of life in Pakistan that it was not
something I had initially even noticed.]
Nearly all of
the faces in the crowd were strangers to me. I had not recognized anyone from
the Sangeet or the Saat, but soon I spotted some of the bride’s cousins. Fully dressed and made up in their gowns, they led me
by the hand to the cushions encircling the stage. When we sat on the floor I
realized why the fabrics had been laid out. Although I would have rather taken
a chair, I could see that sitting with the family on the floor near the stage
was an honored seat. We had the best view of the dance floor, which no one in the
audience had after the third row, and it somehow felt like I was part of the
in-crowd.
I was so
comfortably enclosed in womb of cushions that I didn’t notice at first when the bride and groom arrived at 10:50pm, almost three hours later than their invitation
stated. All 500 of the cushions were occupied and people spilled
out into the aisles, so that when the bride and groom-to-be arrived, the walls inhaled people at both sides, forming a narrow aisle in the center leading towards the stage, and
as soon as the bride
and groom emerged, the room seemed to exhale and filled
to the ceiling with people.
 |
| mehndi selfie |
What progressed
was not the formal ceremony, instead the bride and groom were lead to a seat on
the stage, where they watched their friends and relatives perform. The groom’s
side of the family went first. At that point, I had not met them at all yet since I
was staying with the
bride’s family.
Each dance
lasted only two minutes, and all the songs were clips from popular
Bollywood movies. The
dances were all choreographed and rehearsed by the
performs, who were all members of the family. The order was also important. It started with the groom’s side and then the bride’s, first the bride of the oldest brother, then
the youngest. One of the more romantic moments came
when the groom's parents danced to a duet. It was a slow dance, filled with the kind
of subtle passion that still lingers have thirty years of marriage. Smoke and
strobe lights added to the mood of the dance, and with each song that ended I
got close and closer to my solo performance and was dreading it every more.
I had no time
to rehearse, having only arrived in the country four days before, and it
appeared that I was the only one who would be doing a solo. Suddenly there an
abrupt silence, followed by cave darkness. The power had been cut. There was an
audible grown from the audience, but it seemed this crowd was all too used to
power outages, and we waited in the darkness for almost a minute until a
machine-like sound brought the strobe lights and music back.
 |
| outdoor banquet |
I watched the bride’s
sisters and cousins perform the dances they had rehearsed in their living room,
and when it was my turn I completely improvised my dance to “Sheila”, until I
noticed that one of the
bride’s cousins had jumped onto the stage to save me,
and we danced together, first two, then three, then four of us. It didn’t matter
that I hadn’t practiced. It didn’t matter that I couldn’t dance. We were a spectacle. We were fun.
At 12:30am the bride’s youngest sister pulled me out into the courtyard where the buffet dinner was being
served. As promised, there were at least ten vegetarian dishes and ten meat
dishes. I was eager to try al of them, so I took small portions of twenty
things and piles the onto my paper plates, which resembled a kaleidoscope.
There were no tables, chairs, utensils, or napkins outside, so the guests stood
holding their paper plates in one hand, and eating with the other hand. I saw the groom’s
sister-in-law, who I had first noticed on stage dancing, now wiping her dirty
fingers on the white table linens of the buffet.
“It’s Pakistan,”
she said, in Australian accented-English. She and her husband had been
living in Australia for the last year.
I
followed her guidance and wiped my hands on the table cloth as well. I realized
when I stepped out to the buffet that most of the guest had come through
and eaten already. Many things, particularly the bins of coke bottles and
dessert table were sparse, but there was still food to be served. I got one of
the last gola-ganda - snow cones - before the vendor packed up and left. The snow
cone was blue, green, and red, and was likely made from the same syrup that was in the green milk I had been drinking every night before bed.
 |
| buffet dinner |
The bride’s
family, who dominated the dance floor, and beckoned me to come. I danced along
side her cousins, her elderly aunts, and her tiny nieces. It was fun, it was
freeing. I have never been so sweaty and sober in my life. I cannot remember
have more fun dancing to better music with anyone, anywhere, ever.
We returned to the bungalow at 3:00 am. The girls quietly removed their dresses and jewelry, and we took
turns washing our faces in the bathroom, before making our beds on the floor in the giant living room. I had found a desirable
spot and laid out a blanket and pillow for myself, but when I returned from the
bathroom I found a small child asleep on that spot. So I found another blanket
and pillow and lay beside her. The ground was as hard as concrete. In that hard
darkness, I drifted to sleep.
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