Prologue

India vacation was a much awaited vacation. In the past I had visited home (home has become a rather overloaded term. Here I mean where I grew up) every 6 months or every year if not more often. This time it had been 1.5 years since my wedding & the last visit home and so the yearning to visit folks had grown. Phone calls saying that this was too long a gap and I was too far … and the usual stuff that nri daughters hear their parents say were coming in. Ofcourse the timing was intentional, I wanted to go to Cochin in the winter and the only choices we had with Roshan’s vacations were between summer & winter break.

The Vacation

My port of entry in India was Mumbai and the airport looked better & bigger than I remembered. My first reaction everywhere I went was why there were so many people. And why the rush. People never respected lines and queues, whether it was to pay a bill or get into a shuttle or board a plane. Not like the plane would take off without somebody or the next shuttle won’t show if this one got full. This wasn’t anything new, I see it everytime I go and I get annoyed each time. I started sampling food at airport and was extremely pleased. Next few days in Cochin I was thoroughly pampered with lots of delicious food.

Cochin has the same roads but many many more cars and so the traffic is painful. I wasn’t driving but even being driven around was stressful. After a day or 2 I got used to the honking; towards the end of my trip if I didn’t hear enough honking I’d wonder if I was still on the main road. Cochin had 1 mall the last time I visited and this time when I visited, the city was suddenly springing with malls. Apparently, India’s (or was it Asia’s?) largest mall ‘Lulu’ is coming up close to where we live in Edapally. It was still in the works when I was there. I visited Oberon mall which is relatively a new mall in Edapally, it was impressive considering its predecessors - Bay Pride, Penta menaka and GCDA. Despite 3 or 4 floors of basement parking, in the evenings parking lot is full and vehicles park outside the mall on the road many times blocking the traffic. Talk about lack of entertainment options… its like the whole city is in the mall. All this when Oberon doesn’t have a multiplex, my brain explodes when I try to imagine the crowd when it has its multiplex up & running. In the past, the only entertainment I could think of in Cochin was to watch movies.

I was impressed with the changes the city has had. I saw restaurants (in Bangalore & Chennai too) that had menu items with diet icons indicating that they were healthy options (still no calorie count – I am happy about that), restaurants that had child seats and malls with a dedicated play area. Oh and also a decorated xmas tree with fake snow. Where was all this when I was growing up!?!

While many of the hoardings there still are of gold jewellery, I saw a lot of new ads mostly related to cell phone providers or homes for sale. GCDA shops make me wonder what they did before cell phones came around. Talking about cellphones, I was quite happy with cell phone plans in India – the ease and low cost are a huge plus. With high GPRS costs, a lot of the folk don’t have data plans. SMS is pretty big, 15 min after Roshan got a new SIM he started getting spam sms-es. My siblings and even my dad text a lot more than I do.

India is a lot more expensive than it used to be a few years ago. Prices of food, clothing, and groceries are 4 times the cost they were. I was quite appalled at the costs. There were several instances when I thought US was cheaper.

After 4 or 5 days in Cochin, Roshan and I headed to Bangalore for a few days. Bangalore looked completely different from what I remembered, the last time I was there was in 2004. I couldn’t recognize MG Road at all. All the outskirts were now a part of the city and were apparently more “happening” than the “happening” parts in the past. There were new flyovers and some cool looking public transport buses that were air conditioned. Metro rail construction was in the works. More coffee shops and more restaurants and more chain stores had opened up. All super pricey which makes me believe that people’s earnings in India have also multiplied many fold in the last few years. Going from Cochin, the driving sense felt a lot better. I had some really good food in Bangalore … oh Bengaluru.

From Bangalore we left for Chennai for 2 days. Chennai city looked extremely good – very clean, wide roads, huge flyovers etc. Marina beach looked much much cleaner and well maintained than it did a few years back. We had some amazing food in Chennai. We heard about a hole in the wall authentic Sushi place in Chennai and decided to check that out. It was pretty good, while we were there we didn’t see any other Indians. The weather in Chennai & Bangalore was just perfect. Only if we had that all year round in Seattle

We got back to Cochin in time for a friend’s wedding. I have been to only 2 or 3 weddings in Kerala and 3 or 4 weddings outside Kerala. For a person my age that is an extremely low count of wedding attendance. I probably just don’t remember how it used to be, but I was a little shocked to see people rushing to get food even at the wedding. Of course they wouldn’t run out of food, it’s an Indian wedding after all . My sister said that it was pretty normal as everybody wanted to leave soon once the wedding was done.

Next day, I visited Thodupuzha and Karimanoor with Roshan and his family. Apparently after you get married the newlyweds need to meet everybody in the family. Besides my parents, my relatives are mostly in Rajasthan and northern parts of India, I am guessing we’ll visit some of them during our next trip to India. This trip we tried to cover Roshan’s side of the family. The drive through the country side is beautiful. Away from the traffic, noises and crowds I could see why I loved Kerala growing up. The lush greenery, lakes and mountains even after all these years continue to mesmerize me. Each visit during this trip left my stomach fuller and fuller. I have not eaten so much meat in such a short span of time before. (Remember I grew up in a vegetarian family). I can’t complain, everything tasted so good

We got back to Cochin and 2 days later left for Wayanad. This was a family trip. We visited Bandipur National Park in Karnataka and Muthanga Wildlife Sanctuary in Wayanad. Both are good forests, we just had the wrong expectation that we would see some wild animals on the safari tour. We saw monkeys, deer, peacocks and chickens. Elephants too but they were chained close to the entrance and hence not exactly in the wild. Wayanad may be a good place for non-Keralites to visit but for somebody who’s grown up there, I was quite underwhelmed. Pookot lake, Sulthan Bathery Jain Temple, Sita devi Tears lake, Luv Kush temple etc were nothing out of the ordinary. The walk to Edakkal Caves and Soochipara waterfalls was fun. The caves themselves were quite good too. We ended our trip at the falls where students kept coming in batches and leaving. It looked like a popular excursion spot.

We got back to Cochin in time to celebrate New Year’s eve with friends and family. We spent the next few days eating and shopping. And before I knew the trip was over. All the plans of sitting down with my folks and having long conversations and playing the silly indoor games etc didn’t materialize. Oh well. Next time eh?

Epilogue

(Like a wise friend said) "The thing about getting married is that the no. of people you meet double, the no. of ceremionies and functions you need to attend double up but your time stays the same". I hadn't factored this in in my planning. So, I didn't end up visiting or calling people I normally would. On the brighter side I did travel within India, I did go back to Mullapanthal for the spicy food (and this time I had 2 glasses of the repulsive toddy), I did try a lot of food and many new restaurants and I travelled by air, train, bus, auto, scooter and car within India. Yay!

I figured why the Indian brides appear shy with their heads bowed down on their wedding day. I did too on my wedding day. Given that this wasn't an arranged marriage and that the groom wouldn't escape if he found out that I was not a traditional shy Indian bride, I had no reason to feel compelled to be *shy*. So no pressure of any sort. However, there I was ... looking & behaving like any bride I had seen. As a kid when I saw weddings I often wondered if the bride wasn't curious to lift her head up & look around, especially at the groom, after all in a typical arranged marriage you would expect high levels of anxiety. Even a kid knows that!

Nobody told me, and may be I am disturbing some layer of something somewhere in the whole Indian matrimony experience thing...by saying some of this, but here it goes. So, in my case I had to start getting dressed at 7.00 am for a 9.00 o'clock scheduled wedding that started after 10.00 am or so. Wait, I didn't have a watch on me, but that is what it felt like. I had some professionals help me with my costume, headgear etc  stuff. The first thing they told me was to visit the restroom as I would not be able to do that the rest of the day. Yeah surprise No. 1. Then the ordeal began. My hair is barely shoulder length and so they started attaching really long fake hair. This was my chance to see how I would look had I been a 18th century classical dancer. I don't know much about classical dance, and if you could tell that, it was no genius. They drilled a whole packet of hair pins & more, used thread to tie things together and pulled things left right & center to make sure things didn't fall off. A Maang Tika was also clamped on to me. The fake hair was probably as heavy as me, and I found it difficult to move my head up. It reached below my bottom, they plaited it and tied it with a parinda making the whole thing even longer. They then attached strings of fresh flowers to my hair to add to the weight and size of things. And thus I grew heavier. Oh and the chunni had to cover a part of my head , so they clipped that to my crown. And so the whole long hair thing was covered behind the chunni. Was there a point then, I thought. Then the whole series of ghagra, jewellery, bindis, safety pins etc followed one after the other and sometimes in parallel. A pull there and a push somewhere continued while I was hoping that I would emerge out of it all as a brave bride. I also had to wear a nose ring hoop with a little chain that was pinned to the side of my hair. The hair-do sort of took care of restricting the up movement, the nose ring would help in restraining the left right movement. That is a shy bride in the making. I had never worn a nose ring before, so it was awkward feeling some kind of metal inside my nostrils. I even wondered for a moment what would happen if I sneezed. Then the "being a brave bride" drive hit me and I was distracted by the photographer.

So, I looked down as I walked down the aisle balancing the weight on my head wondering why women had to work so hard on their wedding day when I lifted my head up to see the groom on stage wearing a turban and a feather standing up, a heavy sherwani, a shawl, a sword and the joothiya (uncomfortable shoes). Oh I forgot to mention it was hot on stage with the fire on and fans turned away. I walked up smiling.

"This is going to be so much fun" were my thoughts as I plunged into the whole marriage experience.