There
is much to worry about these days, so that occasions for unalloyed rejoicing
are to be fully indulged. I just
returned from one in Birmingham, Alabama, and despite the torturous
circumstances of the returning flights, I’m stoked with optimism about our
country’s human capital. I was
last in Birmingham in the late 1950s.
I seem to remember a rather dull and shabby small southern city, though
it had not yet fully achieved the infamy soon enough to be bestowed upon it by
its racist police chief. What I
find now is a biggish metropolis with biggish buildings, and lots of
“multis”—multi-lane highways, mutiplex theatres, multi-million dollar suburbs,
and a multi-cultural population moving if not at a gallop at least at a canter.
I
was in Birmingham to attend the wedding of my friend and one-time student
Sanjiv Bajaj (Princeton, ’02) and his gorgeous bride Snehal Desai. Sanjiv has been the head of the ultrasound section of the radiology
department at a New York teaching hospital. (Incidentally, somebody needs to get the word to Garrison Keillor that many of the nation’s top doctors were English majors.) He will now pursue his burgeoning career in his hometown of
Birmingham in proximity to his close-knit family of origin.
The
venue for the wedding was exquisite--the Birmingham Botanical Gardens--and the
weather, in refutation of Mr. Google, bright and sunny, very. For this special
occasion, the benign, elephant-headed Ganesh, atop a small column, greeted
guests as they entered the area of the reflecting pool. All the principals in the wedding were
spectacular in their apparel, though some of the guests were merely
magnificent.
There
were many parts to the wedding, but I was able to follow pretty well with the
help of an enlightening printed program. So far as I was concerned, the real action started
with the baraat, or ceremonial
arrival of the bridegroom on a walkway some seventy yards or so from the
reflecting pool enclosure, where the ceremony and feasting were to take
place. Amid a throng dancing to an
insistent drumbeat, his face masked by a veil of pearl-beaded threads, the
groom began his slow ceremonial progress toward the distant bride. Both of Sanjiv’s highly cultivated parents
are physicians, but they sure know how to boogie. (His mother told me that ceremonial purity would have
demanded that the groom have a horse.
Unfortunately the only horse in the state of Alabama specially trained to
the loud drumming had recently expired.)
Driving
in a strange city, I had given myself lots of time, and arrived rather early. So I entered the gardens and sat
down to read a bit on a bench near an imposing sycamore tree. Soon I was joined by an amiable elder,
out for his daily constitutional, who engaged me in conversation. It turned out that we were exactly the
same age and fellow Episcopalians—which is the sort of thing that seems vaguely
portentous when strangers are talking on park benches. He told me that the tall sycamore was a
“moon tree”—that is, that it sprang from one of the seeds taken by Stuart Roosa into space on the Apollo 14 Mission to the
Moon in 1971. It later seemed
rather poetic to me that the groom’s dancing procession should start in its
shade.
This
was my first Indian wedding, and I cannot avoid the kind of comparisons that
are the necessary recourse of the unsophisticated. The liturgies of all the Christian sacraments, certainly
including matrimony, reflect the old Roman legal mind. In this connection a student of
comparative religion must notice both striking similarities and significant
differences. In this Hindu
ceremony the contractual theme was obvious, but it was only one element of a
rich spiritual allegory that honored those material and domestic realities that
actually define married life.
There was a good deal of emblematic feeding and eating. The bride’s mother greeted her new son-in-law
by washing his feet. The
father-in-law crowned him with sindoor, rice, and flower petals. The showering of flower petals, indeed,
was extravagant, and by the end the floor was a floral carpet.
Amidst
the impressive solemnity there were delightful playful moments. For instance, at one point the bride
and groom must “lasso” each other with flower garlands. As though to impede this process,
their family members make them more difficult targets by raising them high on
their shoulders. One feature that
struck me is what I will call the reverent nonchalance of most of the numerous
guests. The actual nuptial
ceremony, as distinct from its marvelous ritual preparations, took more
than an hour. Joined by several
friends, the close family members, all of whom played important ceremonial
roles, gathered in a square around the havan,
the relatively small space in which the wedding couple sat enthroned and in
which the priest presided. The
large majority of the guests were scattered about under the tents or around the
reflecting pool. They chatted
happily but quietly. Some were
snacking and sipping tea or ice-water, from time to time directing their
attention to what I will call “center stage”. There was
something of the vibe of an Eastern Orthodox Eucharist. Everybody recognizes that something transcendental
is going on, but the level of active participation is to some degree
optional. At the moments of
ceremonial emphasis, of course, the entire crowd joined in the applause and
communal blessing.
The
overwhelming feelings communicated by this event are not hard to
summarize. The first is the power
of love, so beautifully expressed in many parts of the ceremony. A second is the solemnity of the
marital state, the awesomeness of which is not however compromised by frequent
interventions of the ludicrous. A
third is the affirmation of the indispensable social context of human marriage. Sanjiv and Snehal come together in all their unique
individuality, but powerfully inspired and supported by ancient tradition and
cohesive community. This is a
context that aligns the achievement of individual fulfillment with the broader
social good, and it is something our country desperately needs. My warmest best wishes to this
delightful couple, and my warmest thanks to their generous parents, the
founders of the feast.
This post was made possible
by photographs supplied by my fellow guests Ben and Amy Markham, college
contemporaries of the groom.
