Wedding Bells Season

With the Music and Dance season drawing to a close, it is wedding season in our beloved Madras that is Chennai. Everywhere you see the banns being put up and people being united in holy wedlock. The Man from Madras Musings is simply flooded with invitations. Left to himself he would hide many of them and not go but his good lady, also known as She Who Must Be Obeyed believes that such invites are inviolate and have to be honoured. And so MMM dons his best and goes about being the typical wedding attendee.

Mind you, things have eased as MMM advances in age. He has now reached that stage where he hardly knows the couple tying the knot. The parents, sometimes of the groom, at other times of the bride, in many times both, are the ones who invite MMM and so he hardly bothers to stand in the long queue to greet the couple. A simple wave to the person who invited MMM and then a quick dash to the dinner counter is MMM’s motto. He of course wishes the bridal couple well but such greetings are from the heart and do not require the obligatory shaking of hand, the beaming smile and the posing for the photograph, the last of which always has MMM sporting a dazed look.

But what happens if on arrival at a venue there is not a single person from the bridal parties and the guests just mill around looking lost? That is precisely what happened last week when MMM attended a wedding reception. The invite said dinner would be served from 7.00 pm and so MMM went at 7.30 only to find guests seated around tables, indulging in small conversation and periodically glancing at the buffet counter where there was no activity whatsoever. Of the newly weds or their parents there was not a sign.

The father of the bride made his appearance by 8.00 pm. The dinner counter was at last ready. Of the couple there was still no sign. MMM beamed at the father who in all the chaos clearly had no idea as to who MMM was or for that matter who the other guests were. He just smiled at everyone and kept repeating that we had to have our dinner before we left. Did he not know that we had come precisely for that? And so we dined, and departed. Last heard, the newlyweds had still not arrived.