She spoke of ceremony and bonds. But looking at her face, and listening to her voice, I heard only the word love. I thought back to the long years of conflict, but also to the deep, shared passion for the art of cooking, eating, and offering hospitality. That daily tableau of the table, I now saw, was neither duty nor obligation—it was love, but a tormented version that found no expression except through food.
Soon after, I went away again—back to America. After my father’s death, I decided to bring my mother over to join me, and for ten years I watched as time and distance failed to wipe out her regrets and sorrows. In the absence of the one person with whom she had argued and fought and eaten, she totally lost the pleasure she once took in cooking. Even her enjoyment of food seemed sadly diminished.
The wedding I am attending in calcutta—an arranged marriage—is in the evening. By now, I am in a pensive mood. The tatto has been put away, the fish consumed by the family. In the large rented hall, a canopied enclosure has been decorated with red cloth and tuberose garlands. In front of the chief actors, seated on a carpet, is an array of items necessary for the complex Hindu ceremony. I see the bowl of snowy white popped rice, the bunch of ripe bananas, the conch-shaped sweets on a terra-cotta plate—and my mother’s words ring vividly in my ears: “Marriage is a lifelong undertaking to eat together.”
First the bride’s father has to give her away. The priest guides him through the Sanskrit mantras, while he holds his daughter’s hand and places it on top of the groom’s. It is a solemn undertaking, since the “gift” is not simply a daughter but also a woman now endowed with her share of the family property. The pinched look on the father’s face demonstrates the effects of a daylong fast. Earlier, I had seen him at home, closeted with the household gods and one of the priests, making sacred offerings to both gods and ancestors, asking them to bless his daughter and son-in-law.
In my mother’s time, the bride, too, had to fast all day. But this 21st-century bride had been allowed a little snack in the middle of the day. Wrapped in a gold-embroidered red silk sari (red being an auspicious color in Hindu culture), decked out in intricate gold jewelry, her forehead decorated with patterns of sandalwood paste, she seems an icon of happy expectation. Had my mother, too, looked like that on her wedding day?
Once the bride has been given away, the father leaves the scene—a symbolic gesture of renunciation. Now it is the couple’s turn to wind their way through further intricate rituals, guided by two priests. Several times they make offerings to the gods: flowers, leaves, unmilled rice, a type of grass called durba. But the crucial—and most spectacular—part of the ceremony comes later. The pair rise and stand, she in front. His arms come around her and he places his palms underneath hers so that they can jointly hold a plate laden with foods. One of the priests quickly builds a fire in a large copper vessel and the couple pour offerings into it. The popped rice is the first. As it falls, the flames rise up with a whooshing sound, as if Agni, the god of fire, is welcoming the tribute. Item by item, all the food is submitted to the flames. Finally, the two walk around the fire seven times, the shoulder end of her sari knotted to his shawl, reciting the Sanskrit couplets that express the undertaking of a lifelong bond. But this first day’s ceremony (weddings are not complete until the end of the third day) is not over yet. Tradition requires them to feed each other sweets from the same plate. As they do so, I am struck by the tenderness with which he brushes the crumbs from her mouth.
Throughout the long ceremony, guests have come and gone, sampling the wedding feast in another room. When most people have left, the bridal pair sit down to dinner at a large table with a group of friends. I wish them happiness and say good-bye to the family. From the landing, I look back one last time. Amid the laughter and chatter of the friends, the groom is placing a spoonful of pilaf on the bride’s plate. She, still feeling shy, looks down, but the flush of pleasure on her cheeks and the upward curve of her mouth are unmistakable.
Suddenly, I imagine my parents in place of this couple. In my vision, their faces are fresh, expectant, and youthful, instead of marked with half a century’s wear and tear. I see my father, his handsome face topped by the conical groom’s hat, serving portions of food onto his new bride’s plate. I watch my habitually stern mother transformed into a bashful bride who smiles with happiness under cover of her veil.
I walk away, but as I go I wish for the young couple that today’s shared communion will be allowed to blossom, that the shining bride will have the uninhibited freedom to say she loves her husband and children every time she serves a meal, and that the groom will find a way to reciprocate. I wish for them a home where two people live an ordinary life, its disappointments made bearable by the leavening of laughter and the communion of food. It does not seem too much to ask.
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