Getting in the night before the wedding

We arrived in Calcutta the night before the wedding, on December 24th. Yes, the night before. I’m not in the photo above because, by that point, I think I’d fallen to the ground as a puddle of exhausted jetlagged organic matter.

We’d flown into Bombay the night of the 23rd (after exactly 22 hours of travel) to meet Aditya’s very pregnant sister, Didi. It was my first meeting with her; due to said pregnant state she wasn’t going to be at the wedding, so we had scheduled this stopover in Bombay to say a quick hello. The 18 or so hours we spent in Bombay mostly consisted of me trying to fall asleep during India’s night with little success, then nodding off the next day during, let’s see, breakfast, lunch, a brief car tour of Bombay, and dinner.

When we finally arrived in Calcutta I was greeted by lovely, warm weather and Bengalis galore in skullcaps (called monkey caps by the locals) and thick sweaters & coats. Winter in Calcutta seems cold only to those who deal with the city’s summer heat – to the rest of us it’s t-shirt & shorts weather. After a drive through mostly-deserted streets (it was late, but Indian cities never completely close down), we arrived in Aditya’s family’s home in Calcutta. The house was made for the extended family, but Maa and Baba have a wing of their own in it.

In the picture above you can see the flowers decking out the entrance from the street to the interior courtyard. The flowers, besides being very beautiful, announce to all the neighbors that a marriage is taking place in the family. Every time I emerged onto the street from the house everyone nearby would congregate to look at the bride. This wasn’t because I was white – new brides are considered very lucky generally in India, and everyone wants a look – but I’m sure being white added to my entertainment value.

There were also flowers all over the house in general, and about a million in the bedroom Aditya and I were sharing. Traditionally, of course, I wouldn’t go to my husband’s family’s house until after the marriage, but since we’d been legally married for over a year at the time, and I didn’t have any place else to crash, the bridal suite it was.

Through the courtyard and on to bed!

Here’s a picture of the indoor courtyard of the family house, before we entered the wing that Aditya’s parents occupy. Aditya’s older brother, Dada (who’d been in India for some weeks at that time), is helping out his poor, tired-out little brother with the luggage. Earlier that day my mother and uncle had stopped by the house to hang out with Baba and Maa – like Dada, Mom and Uncle Mark had already been in India for a couple of weeks. Uncle Mark tried his hand at cricket in the courtyard, and promptly broke a window.

Stop by tomorrow for pictures of the morning of the wedding! It’ll get more exciting, I promise.

The next part of this series can be found here.