A Wedding and a Vision of a Better U.S.

A bright, colorful celebration.

Licensed from Nicholas

I’m not sure how I found myself arranging rose petals on the beds of the bridal suite. I’d only met the bride and groom once before. One minute, the mother of the bride was thanking us for coming. The next minute, my wife and I were arranging rose petals we’d plucked into heart shapes on pristine comforters.

Such was the warmth and welcome of the bride, groom and their families that we were treated not as guests who would observe but as part of an extended family who would partake in every facet of the celebration, down to its practical ministrations. As the schism in the U.S. grew wider following the assassination of Charlie Kirk, I lived an episode of a U.S. that exists only in pockets—bright, joyful, warm and welcoming. I saw a vision of the U.S. I yearn for at my first Indian wedding.

---

The women at the Sangeet, the pre-wedding celebration, dressed in silks and tulle that wrapped and flowed and draped over shoulders and arms, dappled with blinking sequins and textured with lush embroidery. Hardly anyone duplicated a color, every shade and brightness represented. A few of the bride’s family members chanted as other women, friends and family, danced in a circle on the parquet floor of the ballroom in which the bride had once had her Sweet 16 celebration.

I turned to the older man sitting next to me—a gentleman if I ever saw one, with a dark, fresh-laundered suit, a bright gold watch, and a purple neckerchief that matched his pocket square.

“What are they saying?” I asked him.

He grimaced before smiling. Earlier, I had thought him a crank, since he hadn’t cracked a smile through the opening festivities, but I was dead wrong. He melted around his granddaughter and gushed about his family.

“It’s just words,” he said. “It’s just for the sound.”

As a Spanish speaker, I understood that it could be difficult, if not impossible, to retain the precise intent of language in translation. Subconsciously, I had been searching in vain for words, but now I made an effort listen to the sounds.

“Like rhyming?” I ventured.

“Yes, exactly, rhyming,” he confirmed, perking up.

Later, when Daniela, who had been among the women dancing on the hardwood, returned to the table, he took the opportunity to put a fine point on what he’d told me earlier.

“What did you understand?” he asked Daniela.

“I don’t know the words, but the feeling was family and community.”

“That’s it,” he confirmed.

---

In contrast with the pageantry of the Sangeet, the Anand Karaj, the wedding ceremony, was austere. A golden-brown wood—walls, ceiling, exposed beams—featured in the Diwan Hall, where the ceremony took place. Two skylights and windows that ran widthwise on the far side bathed the wooden hall in natural light. A large crystal chandelier hung near the center. A cream carpet with a beige floral pattern blanketed the floor. A strip of red carpet skirted along the perimeter and bifurcated the floor in the middle of the hall, breaking toward a raised platform covered in white cloth with white fringe along the edges. What looked like a small wooden gazebo with a bulbous, crinkled top, shaped like a gourd, stood on the platform. Suspended above it was a fringed, white canopy. This was the takht, or throne. I couldn’t see it from the back, but this was where the Guru Granth Sahib, the Sikh holy text, was kept.

One could not help but feel reverence in the temple. Shoes were not allowed. Heads must be covered. Signs commanded us to turn off our phones in the Diwan Hall. Facing the throne, women sat on the left, and men sat on the right, which I learned when I noticed women surrounding me, prompting me to get up and cross the hall to my rightful place.

I felt like an intruder. I wasn’t Indian. I wasn’t Sikh or Hindu. I wasn’t from Punjab. I was a tourist in a sacred place. I wore a tunic that I bought on Amazon. Except for the five minutes in English at the end, I didn’t understand a word of the ceremony. There was an English translation on a TV screen, but I was distracted by the searing burn in my hips and the accompanying numbness in my legs from sitting cross-legged on the carpet. I didn’t want to stretch my legs lest I commit some unknown error. I was going to do it right and muscle through the ceremony without moving. I might’ve been an outsider, but I could show respect by not drawing attention to myself, by being still. I would be invisible.

I managed the pain by focusing on the voice of the solemn, turbaned man at the throne leading the ceremony: the Granthi. His reedy intonations warbled across the hall. His words seemed to exist out of time, calling to mind another time I experienced this sensation: the first time I went to Shabbat dinner, during which an Orthodox Jewish man recited the prayers and performed the requisite series of blessings. Those words conjured the image of a campfire long ago attended by those who wandered the desert. Sometimes, I imagine its predecessor, another campfire, a much older campfire. At the Diwan Hall, I saw the words of the Granthi spoken on the other side of the world, the words stretching across time and place.

After a while—how much time, I could not say—I noticed turbaned Sikhs around me stretching and massaging their legs. It wasn’t just me! I accepted this as permission to stretch and massage my own legs. When I stood up at the end of the ceremony, I had to hop around on one leg for a minute to avoid falling over. My entire right leg was fast asleep.

“You did well,” said a serene, even voice. It was the childhood friend of the father of the bride, a kind man who had helped me with my head covering.

“I almost fell over when I stood up,” I said.

He smiled.

“That’s why I leaned against the wall.”

He had noticed my relative stillness. I wasn’t invisible after all.

---

During the reception, Daniela and I sat at a table with the groom’s friends, including his college buddies. At that table, there were immigrants and children of immigrants from Ukraine, Bulgaria, Romania, Peru (Daniela), and Argentina by way of Spain (me). We ate Indian food, and we danced to Indian music. We didn’t know what all the food was called, but we knew how it tasted. We didn’t understand the lyrics of the music, but we understood the beat. This was no time for stillness.

People from around the world, who had traveled here, or whose parents had traveled here, united in this common space to celebrate the union of a couple— friends—and to partake in a culture that originated thousands of miles away a long time ago, a culture that survived time and distance. As guests of that culture, we also had a role to play, however small.

I think about that ancient campfire sometimes, in moments of reflection or transition or celebration, quiet moments and pivotal ones, when I stop fixating on the words and start listening to the sound. I think about the people around that campfire, people from long ago, our common ancestors, before recorded history, before civilization, warding off the night with their fire, speaking—through stories, benedictions and warnings—in a language long lost, moving from one place to the next but remembering where they began.

---