A MARRIAGE IN MANGALORE

Grey every which way, the sky, the waters and even the mood. It is like a gauzy grey veil has enveloped everything visible and, those not visible, those in the mind too. I feel more melancholia and less the supposed magic said to be there during the monsoon when you are on the beach. Could be because the beaches itself -Panambur and Someshwara look abandoned, as if at the slightest sign of darkening skies, everyone packed up and left, except a handful of goda wallahs literally trailing you, pleading you to take a ride. I rather die than add to the misery of the horses.

Can beaches look like deserted waifs? Fine,I concede that its stretching it a bit too far.The maudlin mood could be a combination of several factors- the seemingly endless travel from Delhi, first a somewhat turbulent flight to Bangalore (always the tongue trips trying to say Bengaluru); then the short but bouncy flight to Mangalore, sorry Mangaluru. Almost got claustrophobia because the furious looking black clouds were pressing their noses against the windows which, for some reason made me feel as if the air supply was being cut off! Pesky drizzle all the way to the hotel. Looking out of the car on the way, again for some reason, my eyes seemed to just zoom in on huge, ugly, probably torrential rain induced moss like patches on several houses. Made me want to  take a giant scraper and remove them all.

Come to think of it, the blame lies with Goa! I love the Goa beaches during the rains, its like off with the meddlesome throng of tourists and just you, the lashing rains, the dancing waves and some similar minded souls around. The Mangalore beaches are beautiful, one was told, you don't get the Goa kind of tourists, one was told. So the first thing one did was to head for the beaches - yes they are beautiful, you can't take that away, both Panambur and Someshwara, especially the first one had a tad rugged, natural beauty. But, and it is a big but, why did they look like as if they were not properly cared, not properly looked after. It's the rainy season, nobody goes to the beaches then, everyone even the shopkeepers pack up and move away. Sure, accepted, but the explanation did not help reduce the feel of desolateness.  So maybe it was all in the mind and maybe one needs to come back again after the rains have departed.

 

 

Why go in the first place, to just crib? No please. There are some precious moments in life when you can go anywhere to celebrate. And when that celebration is the wedding of a friend you have known forever, someone you consider a sister from another mother then it is unbridled happiness. Maybe the reason why I didn't get that sense of elation on the beaches was because I wanted the whole world to be bright, blazing sunny, bright blue skies and everything bursting with happiness.The initial disappointment soon washed away and it was laughter all the way.  Happiness does that.

That weddings in India is not just between two persons cannot be overstated. It was to be a low key wedding, just immediate family and friends. And it was to some extent. I say to some extent because you cannot, NOT have song and dance at Indian weddings. An intimate gathering all right and it began on a beautiful note with a dinner, the night before, at a quaint restaurant called The Village. There were toasts and tributes, tears and laughter and delicious Mangalorean cuisine with its fiery spices. There was that sense of complete contentment and bliss that my friend had not only found a loving partner but a wonderful, welcoming family. 

It was next morning, when we drove to her new family's farmhouse, nearly an hours drive away, for the wedding ceremony that the uniqueness of the occasion struck us all.  At every Indian wedding, the groom and his family, friends etc, the baraat as we call it, come to the girl's house.  Here it was reverse, the dulhan's convoy drove up to the groom's farmhouse. (I do have to confess that for a traditional Assamese ceremony the groom's party had already travelled all the way from Mangalore to Guwahati sometime back. So it wasn't exactly upsetting the apple cart of tradition). But the fact remains that we gave the dulha some moments of trepidation with our much later than scheduled arrival! On the way we drove by some of lush green forests and fields and the cloudy skies notwithstanding we felt covered in sunshine and romance.   

 

 

 

 

 

The elders in the family used to say, often with mock exasperation, Uff! we Indians, twelve months in a year and thirteen festivities. I guess if someone takes the pain to go through the festival calendar in India, the communities, tribes, religious denominations and what have you, there is more than a few festivals being celebrated everyday in several corners of the country. The cultural and religious diversity became more than apparent when it came to the actual wedding ceremony. She is Hindi Assamese and he is Punjabi Sikh.  Everyone was fine with a Sikh wedding, till it was found out, a few days before the scheduled ceremony, that the sole Sikh priest in the city was out of town. The solution was simple - two South Indian priests (Kannada Brahmans  as they said) did the honours while in the background bare chested, dhoti clad musicians played the orchestra complete with mridangam and shenai!     

It wasn't over, not as yet. After the South Indian ceremony, the prayer room in the house which holds the Sikh holy book was opened and for me, the most intimate and emotive moments of the marriage unfolded. There was reading from the holy book as per the custom, paying of obeisance and the distribution of kada prasad, small portions of semolina halwa redolent with rich ghee. I've always loved visiting Gurdwaras for the kada prasad and there was a time during school days when we would take a long detour on the way back after school, just to be able to drop into the Gurdwara for the prasad. A virtual feast followed.

It wasn't over yet, not yet! Without gaana, bajana and nacchna, no Indian wedding is. This is one function common to all Indian weddings, the address and opulence factors may differ but there is no dearth of fervour. Back in the city, we all wore our most colourful outfits and simply took over the dance floor at the reception hall. All kinds of songs played and irrespective of age, everyone rocked it. The only one person who stayed off the dance floor was the groom's 93-year old grandmother and not because she didn't want to but as she said, because her legs refused to go in tandem with the rest of her body! 

It wasn't over yet, not yet! How could it be, even as we jived, there was a feeling of a little something missing, something we couldn't put on our fingers on but felt it. It took a friend's husband to walk up to the DJ, hand over something and then bang,  the most lilting Bihu songs had everyone keeping rhythm. The Bihu dance of Assam, in plain term, rocks; it might seem simple but next to impossible to master and those who do, its like seeing poetry in motion. Suddenly all the ladies were on the floor, make that all the mekhe-chador clad ladies were on the dance floor and the swinging of the hips and the clapping of hands was infectious. 

It wasn't over yet... alas it finally was. Not because we chose to but because the hotel management said we had to wind it up. They told us we were too loud, they told us we had long crossed the deadline, they told us... Spoilsports.    

Next morning, it was time to pack up and head back to the pavilion. In the midst of it all, I looked out of the window and stool still. The water in the distance was a thin silvery glimmer and in the sky above, some rays of sunshine broke through the clouds reaching down to touch the waters.  Grey still, hazy but also soft, gentle and beautiful.
     

        

    

Conversing with Clouds

He pointed 'Meghalaya!' I saw a citadel of granite-coloured cumulus towering fifty miles ahead. 'You know what it means? Abode of the clouds. They are always there, sitting over the hills, almost part of the structural integrity of the place. It's the only Indian state that you can reliably pick up on the weather radar.

That's what the pilot tells Alexander Frater, author of 'Chasing the Monsoon', when he gets an aerial view of Shillong, capital of Meghalaya, as the plane heads towards Umroi, 'the tiny mountain strip that served Shillong'.  

Alexander Frater goes into raptures: "That awesome cumulus of Meghalaya sat over a range of hills so unimaginably green they seemed radioactive. The rising terrain ahead glistened in the morning sun, its wild, vibrant, primeval viridescence almost colouring the undersides of the clouds.....Meghalaya's clouds gave us a boisterous, turbulent welcome before parting to reveal a lovely perspective of rolling highland country embellished by dense copses, shadowy clearings and white-water streams plunging along so vigorously we could almost hear them. We could almost smell the wildflowers too. We couldn't see them, but these wooded hills and secret valleys gave off a queer, soft, starlight luminosity that might have  emitted by fields of lilies beneath the trees. We were flying over an abandoned, overgrown garden, and it wasn't hard to imagine a seed planted at dawn blooming before dusk'. 

That book came out in the early nineties and almost two and a half decades later, Meghalaya's cumulus clouds are at it again! Going from Delhi meant landing at Guwahati airport and driving up to Shillong, praying fervently that the clouds don't turn so ferocious black that everything outside gets enveloped in an eerie dark grey  ominous haze making you extra careful round the corner to avoid careening into another vehicle hurtling down the hills. July is not a good month in tourism parlance to visit Shillong, its monsoon which translates into endless downpours. It also translates into a spectacular light and sound show up in the sky with the clouds presenting shapes, shades and sides unbelievable, accompanied by deafening thunders and blinding lightnings. Its the rain gods at their furious best, raging ceaselessly. 

It had been raining intermittently too in Delhi and the two hours plus Delhi-Guwahati flight  was spent  looking out of the window at the capering clouds outside. Sometimes they were dark and threatening, sometimes flirty and streaked with silver glints from the sun hidden somewhere behind. At times they were wispy, willowy, barely discernible grey mists zooming past at lightning speed making one almost ask them what the hurry was all about.  Other times they gently glided by as if drifting off to sleep. Even the mighty Himalayas, so vividly visible from the left side of the plane, appeared to have given up the fight with the clouds with just a faint glimpse of snowy peaks here and there. 

Despite the passage of time from Frater's observations to now, the greens of Meghalayastill hold sway, though of course with 'progress' the lush forests on either side  show much thinning with human habitation taking over. But green it still is. Thanks to the fabulous work on the National Highway, the drive up to Shillong is a pleasure with broad two-way lanes (except for a few kilometres)   I hadn't been to Shillong during the monsoon for a long, long time. Of course, there were memories galore of Shillong during the rains- of gumboots, raincoats and umbrellas and still getting wet; of that musty smell permanently lodging itself in the house despite the 'agarbattis'; of clothes taking forever to dry; of praying earnestly to the powers above for a small break in the endless downpour during the day. Then, at bedtime sending up reverse prayers for heavy rains all through the night because there is no better feeling of warmth and happiness nodding off to sleep snug under the quilt while  the rains drum out a rhythm on the tin roofs!  In fact, I dare any insomniac to stay awake through that!
 

Would the memories of old hold true? Would the entire landscape be nothing but dark angry clouds looming right from the grounds and disappearing into the skies? I didn't have to wait for long, as the road climbed so did the intensity of the clouds outside and, at one point it looked as if we had entered a sci-fi zone and that at any moment some behemoth beast would lumber through seeking human blood! It was rainy season, a weekday and the morning hours, so the traffic was next to nothing, adding further to the feeling of being in the nowhere zone.

    

In Meghalaya or rather Shillong, I have forever heard the elders saying, don't trust the weather, it is like a flighty woman (I know that's sexist like hell and today I object, but then I plead guilty of tittering), which meant one couldn't go out unless armed with some sort of defence, generally a folding umbrella, to fend off the unpredictable rains anytime of the year. The unpredictability has remained constant and all through the drive it was a fight of dark and light, one moment like being in a cavernous grey hole with visibility barely there and the next, a gentle shimmery grey and you know that the sun would break through the haze soon. At times bits of the sky would be blazing blue even as rain bearing clouds rolled by.  More than often, the greenery too acquired a grey tinge, especially in the distance.

What was most fascinating was to watch the play of clouds across the hill, beyond the small church with the blue roof. Completely riveting. Even early morning seemed to appear like twilight and at all times it seemed to holding out a warning, keep your distance and don't take me lightly. It wasn't friendly skies by any imagination. But it was fascinating, it was nature at her fiery best.
 

The morning walks that I loved, almost up to the foot of Shillong peak, had to be abandoned. For some reasons the rains came down heavy in the mornings. But inclement weather or otherwise certain tasks had to be carried out.  So there was I one day almost speed walking down Kench's Trace- (Incidentally, everybody in Shillong calls it Kenchestris, the same way Jacob's Ladder is called Jackup's!) - when I realised that a small gathering was peering through the gates of an old house. Had something untoward happened? I traced back my steps and joined the group and strained to see what lay beyond the gates. It took me a few minutes to realise that the house, Jitbhumi, drawing such attention was where Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore had spend three months, May-June in 1923 and where he wrote the poem Shillong-er Chithi (Letter from Shillong) and the drama, Raktakabari.  It required the excited clattering of tourists to draw my attention and take a proper look at the house for the first time; I guess that happens when it is almost in your old neighbourhood. Two new buildings have cropped up in the huge compound, one bang next to the original house and somehow, they don't fit in.  

That's the problem with Shillong, like all hill stations the beautiful cottages of old, some like real story book ones, are vanishing fast. The replacements are monstrous modern constructions, some multi-storied, blighting the scenery with their ugly silhouettes. So much so, that coming across houses with a look and feel of the old cottages - however small and patched up with tin sheet s- makes one feel happy. Taking the small, uphill lane from Laitumkhrah to Fruit Garden, passing St Edmund's on the way, a friend and I stood not only to admire but hope fervently that those living in a cute red tinned roofed cottage wouldn't succumb to the lure of a several storied concrete structure. 

 

The grey grumbling skies and the constant rains notwithstanding, or maybe all the more for it,  I had one important mission - to visit the much talked about Cafe Shillong (Laitumkhrah) and the latest buzz in town, (Bob) Dylan's Cafe at Fruit Garden. Cafe Shillong, looking down on a busy road with the constant hum of traffic, was well, a trendy cafe, beautiful music playing and smart young ladies running the show.   The guitar strung on the wall and the frames of the local football team apart, it could have been another hipster cafe anywhere. Though of course, not every cafe in India now can feature a beef dish as its special of the day. That I loved! 

  

Music and Shillong go together, it's an accepted fact by now. To call it the rock capital of India, would not be stretching things too far. Almost every second person can play the guitar and belt out a melodious tune, or at least that's it is said. There is music of every kind, of every possible genre and then, there is Bob Dylan. Shillong has made the legend its own. It all started many, many years ago when a local musician (guitarist and singer)  called Lou Majaw - an icon now, him with the long silver hair and the shortest shorts- began to earn fame for his Dylan tribute shows and somewhere he began to be called our own Bob Dylan.  By the way, he was born four months and one day before India became independent!    

With its own Bob Dylan and with the hill station celebrating the original Dylan's birthday every year with a huge music fest, it surprises me that no one thought of it earlier, the Dylan Cafe that is. When I first heard of it, I feared that it might be a case of going overboard, but after the visit I came away applauding the venture. Located on the left band of the entry to Fruit Garden, with a narrow stream by its side, large glass windows letting sun and light, and decent sized terrace it is picture pretty. Packed with funky elements, it is indeed a homage to Dylan. And as expected, Shillong's own Dylan holds weekly performances at the Cafe. A unique feature is that guests are invited to add their own art work on the ceiling and I noticed quite a few graffiti, jottings and sketches on some of the ceiling panels . For die hard Dylan fans there are souvenirs on sale too.     

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What do you do first thing in the morning when you are in Shillong during the monsoon? You step out to check the skies. It was like greeting the clouds first thing in the morning and asking for a respite so you could manage a morning walk. Nah! didn't oblige most of the time. Not while I am up there, you can't do what you want to do, you have to go by rules, they seemed to chortle. You guys still there, isn't it high time you moved on, you are tempted to say. But you know there's no arguing with nature.

 

On a different note, what happens when a newly minted teenager and someone soon to cross into double digit age, remain confined to the house after school hours. They have to spend excess energy and they do so in a colourful manner, literally. Banished to their room and asked to stay put there, they find a creative way to entertain themselves - painting on the walls. The teenager took out her leaf collection, paint boxes and set to work diligently on the walls. Not to be left behind the younger decided to use her hands as the art instrument, leaving numerous multi coloured palm prints all over the wall, till the height she could stretch up to.

Last seen and heard, their mother was asking them to clean the walls pronto or else................. 

Outside the rains gurgled mockingly