Oaklandish
Plump, grey-haired Punjabi matrons in bright saris ululate like teenagers. Hot Indian grad students grab dates or mates who are Russian, Vietnamese, black, and white. Amritsari fried fish mixes with tamales; nan sits next to sopas. Women line up for Henna tattoos as kids run around and the music gets louder. A few overweight middle age dancers twirl like Sufi at Sema, mimicking the dervishes. An astonished, well-dressed bride's family from San Francisco by way of El Salvador gapes, eyes wide open. Some of them decide to dance when an Indian guy in a polyester suit unfolds an organ and starts singing Bollywood classics. Different parts of the room speak Hindi, Spanish, and many variations of English. Folks in their eighties sit back, smile, joke, and pinch the babies.
The crowd quiets when a Kathak dancer delivers a jaw-dropping chakkarwala tukra, with precise heel spins, fast footwork, tightly controlled head movements, and hula hands that recall a long forgotten story. The pacing is careful, the style fast but deliberate. Slowly, the dance becomes emotional — almost frenzied. Easy to see why the colonial Brits outlawed Kathak as anti-Victorian lewdness — but privately loved it.
The dance looks Persian or Arabic — recalling Northern India's Mughal past. The dancer maintains the vertical control, footwork, and complex rhythms that look a lot like Flamenco. A bit of research confirms that 11th-16th century gypsies moved between the Arabs of the Magreb through the Moors of al Andalus and Persia into what became Mughal India. Some argue that these gypsies provided the antecedents to Northern Indian Kathak, Spanish Flamenco, and eventually Salvadorean Cumbia. So it is possible that Islam is the cultural common denominator of this Punjabi-Salvadorean wedding.
The next evening, we join the Baraat — the procession of a hundred shouting, whooping, conch-blowing friends of the groom who escort him into the wedding hall. A Hindu priest performs Sanskrit purification chants while the priest's daughter,
a brilliant Berkeley PhD candidate, makes a violin sound like a
sitar for three hours.
When the priest has finished, the bride's parents make a knees bent sales pitch describing the enticements of their daughter (who, for the record, does not remotely need their help. She is smart, well-educated, and whiplash beautiful). At one point, by tradition, the groom bolts from the room declaring that he will seek a life of abstinence. It falls to the bride's parents (our good humored Salvadoreans) to restrain him while describing the pleasures that await his decision to accept their daughter. He manages not to laugh.
The groom relents and dons a hysterically silly three foot tall white hat. His bride enters the room covering her face. She is carried by her brothers around the large room seven times while the groom's family boisterously attempts to confuse them and persuade them to walk extra laps. Eventually, bride and groom eyes meet as wreaths and tender words are exchanged (in traditional Indian weddings, of course, they are literally seeing each other for the first time). I try and fail to imagine what it would be like to see my wife for the first time in front of several hundred people just moments before marrying her.
The priest performs the ritual of the Phere. He ties the groom and bride's clothes together and chants as they
walk slowly around a ceremonial fire seven times. The big moment comes when the groom rubs a bit of sindoor powder (vermilion) along the part in his bride's hair, taking care to spill just a bit on her nose. The priest declares them married. For the second time — since a Catholic priest had done the same thing in a somewhat starchier ceremony in a local cathedral a few hours earlier.
We chat with a couple from Brazil moving to Providence, a Chinese American student heading off for field work in Uganda, a Japanese friend who helps lead a famous research institute in India. A dark-skinned. long haired, Indian man with a strong accent tells me about taking
Hispanic and Black juvenile delinquents from their detention camps into
the coastal wilderness, getting them scared and excited, teaching them about
animals and fire. The key, he assures me, is to take away their shoes first. "They live in cities –
they have never been without shoes."
By 11pm, we are done dancing to salsa and Hindi/Latin rap. We get in the car, realizing once again that parts of the world are collapsing inward very, very quickly.
At one level all that matters is that two wonderful friends got married. But in 1960, you could not have attended this event anywhere in the world. Not only were foreigners in the American melting pot regarded as les estrangers, but our countrymen were culturally and legally far more segregated than now. Interracial marriage remained illegal in many parts of the US until the Supreme Court handed down Loving vs. Virginia in 1967. Now events as heterogeneous as this wedding happen every weekend in Northern California — it is not at all remarkable.
Unless, of course, you think about it.
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