Why weddings cannot wait in Covid times
The coronavirus has forced many established annual rituals such as exams and admission to wait. The first lockdown came in the middle of Board exams. For a while, the hope persisted that subjects that were not examined in time would soon get the opportunity. Now, the Board has found other ways to declare the result. University and college exams are also being cancelled. These academic rituals are sacrosanct, yet the virus managed to dislodge them. Weddings, equally sacrosanct, enjoy apparently far higher status as social rituals. Exams can be paused; weddings cannot.
Perils of apathy
In Bihar, a bizarre tragedy occurred when an engineer failed to persuade his father to postpone his marriage last month. He was not well, he said, but his request could not prevail. News reports say that he died two days after the wedding rituals were over. Subsequently, more than a hundred guests present at the wedding ceremony were found infected with Covid-19. Recognising how tough it may be to deal with similar situations, the Bhubaneswar administration has issued an order requiring grooms from districts with high rates of infection to spend two weeks in advance locally remaining quarantined before getting married. It is not clear whether the bride’s family is supposed to shoulder this additional expense and how many people can the groom bring in his barat to the quarantine camp.
For now, however, these questions are only indirectly relevant. The wedding season lasted from June 11 to 30. No one seems to have analysed wedding-related virus dispersal that might have occurred during June. The weddings occurring in the last days of June can still affect infection rates because the Covid virus takes up to two or three weeks to manifest. It all depends on whether the guests wore masks and maintained distance. One suspects that even if some guests wore masks, they must have taken them off for the wedding dinner and photo shoots.
Social pressures
Though the permitted season will not begin till October, exceptions are always possible, depending on circumstances. Fortunately, international flights have not resumed yet; overseas grooms generally carry considerable weight in choice of a date. More than the couple, the two families create a compelling situation. In the Bihar case, both sides seem to have felt that the expenditure they had incurred on arrangements would go to waste if the groom’s suggestion of postponement were accepted. He had a fever. Unable to prevail upon his parents, he took paracetamol to keep the fever under control for a few hours.
What is it about weddings that they cannot be postponed, even for a few days, let alone a few months? The corona pandemic has dented so many aspects of collective life over the past few months, but weddings are a different story. Corona’s encounter with weddings has just begun. Let us hope the virus retreats by October when the wedding season reopens. Even at the height of the initial lockdown, in April, weddings did take place although with austerity. I must confess to having failed to stop a wedding in that period. The pressure to go through the ceremony came from the groom’s father. He was waiting for surgery and was not sure of the outcome. As it turned out, the wedding did contribute to his peace of mind and he survived the surgery. The new daughter-in-law is looking after him.
Parental wishes are paramount in most cases. More specifically, it is the father’s wish and insistence that prevails. The father-son relationship offers little room for the latter’s wishes. There is no point creating a stereotype; a lot of sons do rebel, but a cultural pattern does exist. In matters as significant as the choice of the subject of study at the higher secondary stage, boys tell you that they followed their father’s wish. The same answer is common about the choice of matrimonial partner.
Life vs custom
It is a familiar theme in fiction and films. A poignant depiction was made in Awtar Krishna Kaul’s debut movie 27 Down in 1974. Once you have seen this extraordinary film, you know why sons surrender to their father’s pressure. It is based on a novel by Ramesh Bakshi. It unravels the long and complex drama that begins during boyhood, imprinting the son with a sense of helplessness and burden in response to the father’s insurmountable dominance. More than forty years have passed since I saw this film. It comes back to me whenever I read a news item like the one about the groom who died of Covid-19.
(Courtesy of Mail Today)
Also read: Why Indian weddings should not be simple, but over-the-top