dune gatta dune gatta dune di ahhhh

The title is a phonetic translation of my third of a call and response song led at a wedding reception by Kutchi jain hip hop sensation V. Maru, the charismatic older brother of the college friend whose beautiful wedding this weekend left me happier than I've been in half a year. Coming back from Danbury, Connecticut via The Bernadine Shuttle and the Metro-North, I resolved to (1) devote more time in my life to the people whom I love and (2) facilitate groups hang-outs and (3) spend more time on art and less time on frivolity. (Frivolity is, of course, a catchall encompassing all manners of literal and metaphorical masturbations, including filling in the columns of an Early Interview Week Excel spreadsheet labelled "Firms," "City," and "Why I Might Not Lose My Mind/Soul/Identity/Friends By Working For This One"--a long, boring, tortured story of divorce-induced anxiety and fear of independence, etc, yaddah, blablabla.) At this beautiful wedding, there was the entire jain population of central Connecticut bedecked in oceans of intricately threaded sari fabric in colors that I didn't know existed, mountains of tasty namkeens catered out for our delectation, and virtually non-stop dancing, although I had to take a break during the raas garba because I thought one more minute of dandiya and I'm gonna dizzily spin myself like the tasmanian devil through the door--so I very respectfully lowered my sticks and fled to the bathroom to begin the fifteen minute process of preparing to pee, which involved dupatta removal, one handed dress-hiking, pants-lowering, etc. You see, it was the first time since my clarinet recital in 1996 that I've worn a dress -- really, it was! -- and while I felt as if I've been steadily femming since my butchy zenith (or nadir, for those gender crusaders among you) in 2001, apparently I have not been and I gave my friends a couple rounds of healthy giggling with my appearance. I just don't feel like myself unless there are cloth tubes around my legs, meeting at my taco in a zipper! (I forgot resolution #4 coming out of the wedding: refer to my crotch as a taco on every blogpost henceforth.) I'm kidding of course -- not about calling my crotch a taco, but about not feeling like myself, because even though I got a "sir" today while waiting in line at FedEx I still feel like I'm presenting more female than I ever have, and dresses are not a problem. Unless you have to pee; eh, whatever.

Apologies for the digression. What I really want to write about is the euphoria that I felt all weekend in the midst of a 55-hour hangout some of my favorite people in the world. The bride and groom, in the tradition of frantic massive Indian weddings, could not spare time from the rigid schedule of outfit changes, dance preparations, mehndi applications, etc. and therefore like giant squid only appeared in passing and in folklore. I think I shouted the same twenty-second conversation back and forth between Sheela and Duncan on three separate occasions, which went something like this: "Congratulations! How do you feel? You look beautiful/handsome/not unclever! Are you excited? How has the week been?" and then "HOORAY!"s all around. But though they were absent, they cultivated an atmosphere of generosity and lovingkindness and silliness among their guests and united three hundred and fifty people in celebration. I know it's dicey to use a word like "lovingkindness" but I feel no self-consciousness in using it to describe a couple like Sheela and Duncan. As much as I reeled in appreciation for the ceremony and the celebration, what really floored me was the love I felt from the community that Sheela and Duncan were able to create. Waahh!

(Ooops, I reread that and realize that warrants a translation. "Wahh!" in Mandarin is not a lachrymose onomotopoeia but an expression of wonder, admiration, delight. As in "Waaaaah! You got into medical school at Ha-voor!")

The recap:

Friday we gathered at the Maru home for dosas and mehndi and an impromptu illegal fireworks display and some homemade folk entertainment (singing, dancing, jokes at the Smith-Rohrbergs' expense). We'd gotten up to Connecticut again via the Metro-North to the Bernadine Shuttle, an hour-long ride made short by conversations about Bernie's racy love life and anal sex in one's first year of law school. At the Marus, Bernie and I kept each other entertained by making the same jokes about our mehndi'd hands over and over again: pretending to backhand one another in the face with it, pretending that the designs were our names spelled in "Indian," saying we should tattoo matching prints on our faces so it would look like we'd been slapped, etc. I challenged Roona to talk through her teeth until midnight for a dollar; she refused. Brito sneezed and when Raj asked if she was sick and she said, "No, I just overate." Out on the lawn Roona told me that gullible was written on the ceiling and I looked up to find it. After we left for the hotel, I finagled a free beer from a German man named "Astro" on the middle of the dance floor of the "club" on the first floor of the Holiday Inn in Danbury, Connecticut, and I only had to refuse two invitations to grind and accept one in order to secure it (a prelude to the gender dysphoria to come). A couple of us obviously excited to be in each other's company wanted to hang out and lay on the carpet in front of the third floor elevator bank and whispering/guffawing until a paunchy moustaschioed man in his undies burst forth from room #303 hollering "Take your party elsewhere! Some of us are trying to sleep!" (door slamming, deadbolts locking) and then we moved to the stairwell and guffawed more freely therein.

The next day, Raj won the game of Scrabble we played with Rishi, Jennie, and Roona at Friendly's, but it was a close game (his well-placed QUERY, for 45 points, probably won it for him in the second to last round of the game), and Jennie and Rishi got their game on with their mad Telephone Pictionary and Psychiatrist skillz. Bernie and Brito spent the morning and afternoon "studying" in the nearby Dunkin Donuts -- Bernie for the MCATs, Brito for her biology doctorate exams -- but really all they did was wait for our crowd to walk by and spell words with our bodies for their deciphering by the side of the highway. (Bernie mistranslated as "PORKY" our more fitting "DORKY" semaphore.) Jennie and I got nekkid in the hotel pool at 3:30am on Saturday after an exhausting raas garba catered to evoke Mumbai street food (cf. earlier paragraph about dancing until tasmanian devil-like), and after half an hour of innuendo and inhaling chlorine and swimming underwater with my eyes closed so as not to dislodge the contacts we clambored back to our respective hotel rooms, where the evening's round of "Truth or Truth" (the grown-up version of "Truth or Dare") lingered into pillow talk with four people in the dark. I realized then that I know the best people in the world.

Sunday we managed to pack up and drag ourselves out of bed for the ceremony, held at the Waterview, which was indeed a view of water over some unnamed Connecticut river where speedboats towing tow-headed kids on innertubes sped back and forth, spraying wake. We were assigned to the groom's party, despite our knowing and loving Sheela and Duncan equally well, because Sheela had imported a banyan tree's worth of family ancestry to Danbury (cf. earlier paragraph about the entire jain population of Connecticut). This meant that we danced out with Duncan's entourage to the beat of a man in a red kurta banging on a two sided drum and shouting "Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh!!!!!" as another person orbitted dollar bills around his head. At this point we picked up sticks for an encore of the previous night's dandiya dancing, then dropped those in favor of wooden Chinese fans and bottled water, to make it through the two-hour outdoor ceremony under the July sun without dying of exposure. I and my favorite people in the world sat in a couple of rows near the front left, with Roona's mom sitting at the end of the row holding a parasol that kept dipping into the eyes of the people sitting behind us. I sort of left off of the ceremony at this point, because all 14 steps of the traditional wedding started blurring together. I realized at one point that I was totally singing unmelodious nonsense syllables while everyone chanted along with what must have been a familiar prayer; I don't know why, maybe because the spirit moved me, but most likely because I was so deliriously overheated despite the SPF 5000 lotion that I thought I really could speak Hindi or Gujarati or Sanskit or whatever it was everyone else was saying.

Sheela teared up during the seven steps and every feeling person in the audience lost it too, or at least I did, though I think I covered up by passing off my tears as errant drops of Raj's sweat. I sat next to somebody whom I was so happy to be sitting next to, and I don't mean the unknown Maru relative to sitting to my right. After the ceremony we peppered Dunc and Sheela with rice warmed in our palms and proceeded to the next six hours of cocktail tiffins and vegetarian feasting and some unbeliveably sweet performances, like the elder Marus doing the foxtrot before an audience dying of cuteness. I sat next to Bernie and Jennie in the East Asian ghetto at dinner and ignored all the healthy young Indians and Indian-Americans heterosexually flirting at my table. Bernie realized that her problem was just that she and her friends were just really weird and I responded by lifting the kameez of our homemade Kutchi dolls and backing it up into Bernie. Jennie made eyes at the babyfaced Casanova sitting next to her and we made a dash for the buffet line before our turn, since we had to leave early to catch the train.

Bernie, Raj and I left before I really got a chance to say goodbye to any of the people that I'd met, but I didn't mind, because I'm determined to meet them more than once a year at somebody's wedding. We drove back to White Plains, finishing off the last round of Botticelli (Raj, trivia master, was impossible to stump and so we never revealed his person; Dostoyevsky) with me feeling sedate, warm, and happy. I don't mind the sadness of coming back into subterranean New York if it comes after the sweetness of a long, sun-baked weekend with the best people in the world. I've been more or less useless today, daydreaming about open water and thinking about all the things I want to say. Thank you, Duncan and Sheela. Live forever!