Wedding Portaits

Here are some still portraits from the wedding. Hooray! 

Bob and Joy, Mikolo, Me, Mom, and Jean

In the picture above my mom is wearing a scarf and crown on her head that they put on both mothers as part of the ceremony. I don't actually know what it symbolizes, but they later put them on me and Deepal during the ceremony.

My Mom:

Bob and Joy: My Marriage Encounter Parents :)

I picked out everybody's clothes. They just had to show up and wear 'em. :)

Vidhan (cousin) with Shlok and Rhea (Dipti's kids), and Arisha (Priyanga's child)

Deepal

Deepal

Deepal and his older sister Dipti

Dipti and Deepal

Deepal and his Dad, otherwise referred to as Pa. :)

Ma and Pa, a great example of a loving marriage

Ma and Dipti

Ma and Pa, Dipti and her husband Gaurav, their two kids Rhea and Shlok, my mom, and Deepal and I.

The Doshi family: the very close family of Pa's brothers and their families.

Ma's side of the family. :)

Dipti and her husband Guarav

Guarav, Me, Deepal, and Dipti :)

 
 The Happy Couple:

Wedding Day 1 : Henna Function/Sangeet

      A very traditional Hindu wedding can last 5 -7 days. Every day there's another function or ceremony all in preparation and celebration of the final wedding ceremony at the end of the week. In our case we had just a "small wedding." It was two days and about 250 people attended. To my western mind it was a big wedding.

      The first day of our wedding was the Henna Function/Sangeet. The Henna Function was an opportunity for all of the family and close friends to get henna on their hands in celebration of the wedding. My incredibly elaborate henna was done the day before and took 8 hours to put on. The bride's henna is the most time-consuming, and by doing it the day before I was better able to enjoy the festivities at the Henna Function. 

Here is the room we rented for the Henna Function. It has a bunch of mattresses on the floor with some pillows and some chairs along the side. Pretty much everybody sits on the floor. Although chairs were a general necessity for my western family. This is early morning before everyone came. About 5 or 6 women came who put henna on all the guests.  

Here our families are praying before the henna function began. Both Hindu and Catholic prayers were offered for the day. And then while we waited for guests to arrive there was a bit of discussion about what Jains (a sect of Hinduism and what Deepal's family is) believe.

Here I am cuddling with my new niece, the very lovable Rhea, while we wait for guests to arrive. Then...

Let the Henna Begin!

To put Henna on the guests took about 20 - 40 minutes a person depending on the design. My family all got Henna for the first time. I didn't mention that it tends to look like an odd skin disease once it starts to come off. hehe. I'm sure they would have indulged anyways. Right? :)

Rhea getting her Henna. Her parents asked special permission from the school to allow her to wear it since it is typically against the rules.

My sister had two women working at once, one on each arm. As a result she had two different designs for each arm. They were both nice, though, and there's no rule about matching designs.

My mother had the same henna artist as I did do her henna. It is just as important for the mothers to look beautiful as it is for the bride. So my mom's henna was more elaborate and took around 45 minutes to finish.

Here is Joy showing off her henna.

Once you have Henna on your hands you have to leave it there for a good 2 hours or so. And you can't touch anything or you might smear it. So this meant that I fed my mother and sister their lunch. Most of the guests arrived after lunch, though, so there wasn't a lot of feeding to do. ;)

Deepal's Ma and Mikolo

Mikolo was a good sport and even got henna on one of his hands. The guy design of a circle in the middle of your palm with your pinky and ring finger nails also covered. No one told me that it doesn't come off your nails until they grow out, I swear. : D 

Here's Bob showing the circular design on the palm of his hand.

Here Ma, Dipti (Deepal's sister), and I are being silly and remembering the old tradition of covering your head. As a new member of the family, traditionally I would always have to keep my head covered. And in her youth, this was what Ma had to do all the time, even while cooking in the heat.

Part of the henna festivities was to have this woman come and play the drum and sing. Prior to the event she gets a list of everybody's names and relationships and then she makes up songs about everybody present using the tunes of popular bollywood songs. Everyone really enjoyed it. I couldn't understand what she was singing, but people would explain to me, and generally she was making fun.

If she sang about you, you had to get up and dance. And it was pretty funny to watch us westerners try to follow the moves of the Indians, I'm sure.

Here I am trying to follow Deepal's aunt, Shimta Kaki. She was great for coming up with lots of dance moves, and she coached me from the side a number of times when I had to dance with other people. :)

Here Deepal is dancing with his mother. We were supposed to kind of act out what the singer-lady was singing, and here I think he's begging his mother for permission to marry me. hehe.

Haha, I'm playing hard to get in one of the songs. :)

Before the wedding Deepal's mother spent hours making bracelets and necklaces for my mother to give to people at the henna function. If my mother were a typical Indian mother she would have known the protocols, but since she's obviously not, Deepal's family took great care to take care of her and the things she was supposed to do at the wedding. Here she is handing out the bracelets to some of the women.

The Sangeet

The Sangeet portion of the function happened in the evening after everyone had already done their henna. We served everyone dinner, and then the dancing began. :) Traditionally the sangeet would be a whole function all by itself, and families can spend thousands of dollars on entertainment for their guests, hiring outside professionals to do dances, magic, just about anything. Our very loving cousins took the time to learn several dances for our entertainment and made a show for the whole family to enjoy. 

This was one of my favorite dances. :) The guys were really great.

The next couple of pictures are of the dance Deepal and I did for the show. We only had time to rehearse about 3 times before we had to perform it, and one of those times was about 15 minutes before we performed. woo. It went well, though, and everyone really enjoyed it.

Here I'm doing a lifted cartwheel with Deepal. The expression on Priyanga's face while we did it was really great. :) Deepal and I wanted to do a little something that showed our training. ;)

Here's a couple more pictures of the dances our cousins prepared. :) They made the evening really fun. :)

First cousins in Deepal's family and many other Indian families are actually considered to be more like brothers and sisters, and are often referred to that way. It was a little confusing in the beginning when Deepal told me he had one older sister, but then would speak about his brothers. Now that I've met everyone I can see how close they are and why they would refer to each other that way. :)

After the last dance it was time for everybody to get up and dance. :)

Next came some speeches. Pa always writes a poem for special occasions, so he read a poem he'd written for Deepal and I. Then completely unexpectedly the microphone got passed to everyone in my family (Mom, Jean, Mike, Bob, Joy, and me) and we all had to say a few words to everyone. Nice of them to let us know that was coming... ;P

At the end of the evening my mom gave gifts to all the brothers and sisters of my new parents-in-law. This is part of tradition. We decided to give hand-mixers. It was a tough choice to decide because pretty much everyone already has everything. 

As part of the gift giving process my sister gave each family member a tikka. Daughters have a lot of social obligations in a family. This was one my sister was happy to learn and do. She placed a red dot on their foreheads with some rice. It's a traditional thing to do at any ceremony.





After the Henna Function was over most of the family went to the nearby hotel where the wedding ceremony was going to be held the next day. We had to leave the henna room by 10:00pm or so, but the party was far from over. Everyone goes to the hotel and shares rooms and stays up all night talking and joking.  People don't go to bed till 3 or 4 in the morning sometimes. It's like one big sleepover. I was a bit of a party-pooper in that sense. I knew the next day was going to be very long for me and I was in bed much earlier. No good yawning and having dark circles all the next day!

Well, that was pretty much day 1 of the wedding festivities. Stay tuned for pictures of the actual wedding ceremony. :) 

Henna Process

People seem to have a lot of questions about the henna, so I decided to make a post dedicated to just that process.Here's a step-by-step process for ya:

1. DAY 1:  Henna application is best done by artists. You have to draw out the design, and perhaps cake decorators would be the most comfortable because the henna comes in a tube that you squeeze that is not unlike cake icing.

The silver thing in her hand is the little tube of henna she's squeezing out. It's really important that it come out smoothly and they'll often get it started by squeezing some out on their finger and then wiping it in their hair.
 

You can see on Dipti's arm how when they initially put it on it looks like a line of brown paste: 

Later as it dries a bit it looks darker, like this.

2. It takes time. Of course, it depends on the design you want. My wedding henna took about 8 hours to apply. That's definitely on the wayyyy-long end of the scale. A simple design could take 20 minutes. It depends what you want done. But once the design is on, you should leave it there for an hour or two. Keep it moist by dabbing it with a cotton ball with a mixture of lemon juice and sugar. That way it can soak into your skin better and leave a darker stain.

This was taken probably 3 1/2 hours into the process. I am pretending to sleep in this photo, but later I did actually nap just like this. Probably around hour 5 or 6.

Here you can see the orange color starting to appear underneath the henna. The shininess is caused by the lemon juice and sugar. And the heart detail on my fingers has a D for Deepal and K for Kathryn. The artist also hid our full names in the henna, and Deepal had to play the game of finding them.




3. No touching!! Once it's on you're not supposed to touch anything. This usually means that other people feed you and you don't do any chores. Woot.

4. Scrape it off. Once it has sat there for awhile and it's all dry and crackly you have to scrape it off. Don't just uniformly rub it off as fast as you can because you could still smear the design and lose some detail. You might take a dull knife and kind of shave it off delicately. It will get all caught in any hair you have, and that can be a bit painful.

5. It makes a mess. It doesn't all come off easily and generally there's still bits and patches that fall off later.. all over your bed and home.  hooray!

6. Rub oil over your skin. This helps the dye to set and keep the heat in. The hotter your skin, the darker the stain of the henna.

7. DAY 2: STILL no touching!!.. water that is. You're not supposed to touch water for the whole next day.  Dry objects are ok. I hope you showered before you started.

8. DAY 3: STILLLL no touching!!.. soap. 3rd day you can touch water, but still no soap. For me, that meant having my sister and brother wash my hair for me in the sink before the wedding because I couldn't do it myself. Smaller detail will be more apparent now as the dye settles and darkens.

9. Your skin takes on the color of the henna gradually. The first day or so the color will look very orange. Then over the next two days it will darken to whatever color it will be. A popular tradition believes that the darker the color comes, the more your spouse loves you. Deepal's mom would actually compete with me to see whose hands were darker. heh. And pretty much everyone who came to the wedding would grab my hand and look at it's palm to see how dark my henna was. When they saw how black it was they would give me smiles and pats of approval. The darkness of the color really depends on the heat of your skin. The warmer your skin temperature the darker the color comes. For that reason the palms are usually the darkest part of the henna and the forearms are much lighter.

Here is the color of my henna on the 2nd day during the Henna Function. It was really hot at the henna function, and that probably helped my henna become so dark by the next day.

This is the color my henna became by the 3rd day, the day of the wedding ceremony. One hand is yellower than the other because I had tumeric rubbed on it as part of the wedding ceremony.

10. After about a week it starts to come off in patches, and can begin to look like an odd skin disease. Anyone in India probably doesn't think so because they're so used to it, but to us Westerners it tends to look like you're sick or just plain dirty. Don't you wash your hands? These patches can last for several weeks. It's been over a month now and I still have henna on my feet. Hands go much quicker than the feet.

Here's some more pictures of my wedding henna design: 

Another heart with Deepal and I drawn in the middle. Our names are hidden on my pinky fingers. I don't know if you can see them in the picture, though.

My sister Jean and I showing the color of our henna. Looks like our husbands really love us. :)

Close up of the images drawn on my forearms. It is supposed to be Deepal and I. Drawings of people and instruments are traditional for the bride's henna. 

Mike, Mom, and Jean's henna

Joy, Mom, and Jean's henna

P.S. The title of my blog comes from Improv

"Yes And" is a catch phrase in the Improv world. It refers to saying yes to everything your partner does, accepting it and moving the scene forward from there. The theory is that a scene will go much farther if you accept your partner's ideas rather than reject or block them or be negative. I decided to title my blog Yes, And Now India as a reminder to myself to accept whatever my new scene partner, India, gives me, and move forward from there. I never really explained that before, and since I just came back from the Improv workshops it seemed like a good time.
In an ironic twist of fate, I learned at the Improv workshops that it's not always best to accept everything your partner gives you. hehe. Well, that was probably always going to be the case, anyways. It's me and you, India.

I'm baaaaack!!

So. It's been awhile since I've posted anything. I was in Canada attending some Improv workshops, and they were really, really great. I met some life-changing people, and my heart is still full of the lessons I learned.
I have lost count of how many camps, workshops, projects, classes, and shows I have done over the years. All of them brought a disparate group of people together for an intense period of work/play (some for a week or two, some for a year or two). And I have to say that despite years of "practice" my heart still breaks every time I have to say goodbye. Damn, it's hard.
Improv people are some of the most open, friendly, fun-loving people I've ever met. And it has been my privilege to meet and learn from them. Here are my three favorite lessons:
1) CHEAT! : D  
2) Be Average!   Because when you're "trying your best" you're trying too hard.
3) Fail! 
Pretty much everything else is a corollary to those. Cheat means questioning the rules, bending them, breaking them, just not boxing yourself in by what you're told is possible. And being average means getting out of your own way. You are enough. Doing your best implies fear of not doing well, and fear keeps us from taking risks and failing. Failing is when we learn! I'm still scared of failing, though. heh. But maybe not as much! SO there.You know I've had a couple of these lessons before. Certainly the last one at Dell Arte, but I don't think I've ever enjoyed learning them so much before.