A Toast

Here’s to an incredible wedding.

Here’s to the over 1200 people who attended the wedding, and here’s to being related to at least 70% of those people.  (After my cousin and her husband were actually married, I suppose I was related to everyone there. For the record, tracing family trees with random people to find common ancestors is a surprisingly fun game.)

Here’s to feeding those thousand people for a week, to starting a buffet line – with a menu! – and handing out the happalas, to standing and wondering if that line will ever end while sneaking milk treats (kind of like ices?) to beat the heat.

(For those of you who don’t know, the buffet is a new trend; meals at these events are traditionally done a la banana leaf. Come meal time, chairs are quickly stacked away and long mats are rolled across the floor. Banana leaves are arranged in rows as people sit down to eat. (For the record, sitting down cross-legged while wearing a sari is a lot harder than it looks.) Once everyone is seated, men carrying large vats of rice and curries and vegetables start running up and down the rows, dumping mounds of food on everyone’s banana leaves. For the next forty-five minutes, people hunch over their leaf, eating as quickly as possible, pausing only to ask for more food – or to try stopping the servers from putting more food on their plate. Late at night, after the majority of the guests have gone home, the family members spend hours chopping buckets of cucumbers and squashes and vegetables-whose-English-names-I-don’t-know in order to prepare for the next day.)

Here’s to playing “Howsee-Howsee” a game kind of like BINGO but really not at all like BINGO. Here’s to sitting with my baby cousins and my uncles and aunts alike trying to poke holes through a piece of paper as a man with a big moustache yelled out numbers  like “sweet sixteen” and “retirement-age sixty”.

Here’s to spending so much time with my extended family, to talking and laughing and learning about their lives and dreams – so I might possibly live without any contact for another two years.

And here’s to my grandmother, who practiced sitting in a wheelchair for months, so she could last the entire day and watch her grandchild get married. So she could talk to all of her family – her sons and daughters and grandchildren and greatgrandchildren – without getting tired. She’s probably the cutest grandmother on the planet.

And most importantly, here’s to Preethi Akka and her new husband. May their lives together be as wonderful as this wedding has been.

-June 19th