On matrimony - mine (or ours)

I guess I could begin this blog by quoting Anthony Burgess' first line in his Earthly Powers: "It was the afternoon of my eighty-first birthday, and I was in bed with my catamite when Ali announced that the archbishop had come to see me." But there would be problems: First, the line would fit not I but, say, the venerable Arthur C Clarke; I have no ganymede since I am, unlike Burgess' Toomey, unrepentantly heterosexual. Second, I am a bit more than half of Toomey's age. Third, the archbishop isn't going to come bustling to see me - I'm going to go meet a purohit, a priest.

That's what one does when one's getting married. And I am, later today.

But Toomey's apprehension and anticipation and petulance at having had his accustomed life disturbed are no less mine. All of it comes from about two decades of being (repentantly) single and a certain insensate, intangible and often exclusionary of people lebensraum that is the lot of men who thought (and think) that they aren't good enough for permanent partnerships and, so, keep expanding their "space" - and then when all hope of populating that space is nearly, but not entirely, lost, embark on a dreamboat. (Is that word "dreamboat" used for women alone? If it is, I wonder why. Would someone kindly provide me the etymology?)

Ah, crud, I've digressed again. In point of fact, the woman I am to marry has been my dearest friend for five long years, and I hers, and it is only three months ago that we discovered that what we felt for each other was more than a sharing of daily personal chronicles of office political Olympiads and books - hers on sociology and fantasy fiction, mine on everything and thus, consequently, nothing - and films and gender issues. Impecunious as I am, I have never had a more resurrective benediction in my life: her beauty - and she is sublime - is held together, as if by a centripetal force, by her mind. She is physically younger by a generation than I am, but emotionally and intellectually older by a generation than hers, and so we are united by an attraction in which chronospatiality can go roll a hoop. (Just goes to show that one of Einstein's many brains was working like clockwork - even before the goo was bunged into a jar of formalin.)

As the days to the halcyon D-Day - if there be such a thing - rolled closer, both of us understood, for the first time, the absolute juggernaut implacability of that anachronism called Hindu tradition. We're both atheists (although I sometimes catch glimpses of that absoluteness being deflated in her by insidious intervention), but the Indian registered marriage system is fossilised enough to be palaeontological and wouldn't accept the latest government-issued identification papers as proof of anything at all. So, in came the Arya Samaj, which is a lot more liberal and trusting - and the purohit seems to be more amenable to skipping a heartbeat or two when I intend to threaten him with kneecapping if he doesn't keep the interminable Hindu Vedic rituals - fire, ghee, scads of smoke and all - down to a half hour or so. There's ethical hypocrisy lurking around in the shadows like one of Lucifer's minions here, of course: What are two atheists doing having a Hindu wedding? But, I tell thee all, use the system to crumble its crenellations.

Doesn't wash, does it? Hell. But I'll rationalyse all that when my beloved's hand upon my fevered brow leads me to think that I inhabit an arbor of sweetness and gentle green instead of a bedroom toppling over with thousands of books whose solemn, inexorable lines brought me to this psychotic pass, in the first place.

More on the wedding - it's been hijacked: by relatives, relatives of relatives, relatives of relatives of...Augh!...each with some kind of affiliation to one or more, or many, many more, of India's 300 million gods and goddesses (pardon the political incorrectness, but millions of years of Hindu tradition, when the first modern human walked Earth just 100,000 years ago, is nothing to sniff about). And each with a brand new, possibly neologistic, idea of how many rituals to include in order to keep the newlyweds as far apart as possible for as long as possible. Some of the rituals are so abasing that we've decided to excise them from the "thy wedded bliss" rant altogether (which is where the unimpairment, or otherwise, of the purohit's elbows now comes into the picture), and some are chants guaranteed to induce nuptial narcolepsy and are more or less incomprehensible to the priest himself. Millions of years of tautology, etc. Rote. Mug.

Mugs, both of us. And all we wanted was a quiet, whispery affair - well no, not exactly: but an ambient veena, a mild woodwind section, clones of Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa doing a mad drummers' jugalbandi (Providence alone knows how they'd weave it all together, but if the fusion group Shakti could do it, so could they) and Janis Joplin, yep, definitely Janis Joplin.

But, heavens, it's our families getting married to each other! We're just the bonfire around which they're doing their triumphal wardance.