( continues...) water, but Indian blood is thicker than crapshaite. I also had a small "Mota Bapa should be alive to see this" moment. Mota Bapa was my dad's older brother (and thus Mehulbhai's dad's older brother (he was the oldest of the three therefore Mehulbhai's Mota Bapa too)), killed last year in the stupidest car accident ever.
Inside, we filled the seats. Men on one side, women on the other. In the middle was a sort of gazebo. After a while, Mehulbhai took one of the seats. A sheet was held between him and the other chair. More blessings and prayers.
Ashabhabi had come out veiled, gone to the back of the venue, and then gone back into her house. We weren't sure what she was doing, but she finally did take her seat on the other side of the sheet. This was symbolism: first, you are separate.
When the sheet came down, both sides had relatives shooting Silly String at each other. This was symbolism: marriage is silly. Okay, no, it's just a thing, because now, there was a string tied around them, and they clutched two handkerchiefs that had been tied together. Now they were one.
At this point, my brother and I got to take seats up there. There was now a lot of gift-giving and blessings from both families. And ice cream. This was my first major interaction with my new bhabi, as she asked if I wanted ice cream and offered me her own. I had given mine to my brother since I'd tried some but he hadn't had any. I was about to take hers when a fresh one came for me.
Okay, so the shoes. There's a fire pooja, and you have to take off your shoes, cause, you know, God. The tradition is, the bride's brother (leader of her male side) steals the groom's shoes and makes him pay to get them back. The countertradition then, of course, is for us to hide his shoes before they can be stolen. We had a whole plan worked out.
I stood behind the chair. When Mehulbhai took off his shoes, he would kick them back under the chair, and I would take them and hand them off to my brother, who would hide them. But our plan was foiled! For as soon as he began to remove his shoes, Ashabhabi's brother ran up and started to take them right off his feet! Mehulbhai got one off, and I kicked it back to Kiran. No one noticed, as my sister created a diversion by trying to wrestle the stolen shoe away. But alas. At least he only got one.
The fire pooja involves the couple walking around the fire several times, and there's a great deal of religious symbolism. It's the last ceremony of the wedding. But not next to near the last tradition. It was time for her brother to negotiate his fee for Mehulbhai's shoe. Word was his target had been two thousand rupees. He only had one shoe, though, and he only ended up with five hundred, which was almost certainly more than the shoe was worth.
Now the families lined up, and the bride and groom received blessings from their families both old and new. I got in line to shake their hands. "Hello!" I said to Mehulbhai in Gujarati. "What's your name?" "Shut up," he replied in English.
This is when the crying began, as the end was nigh. You can say you're not losing a daughter, you're gaining a son, but they're thinking, "We are losing a daughter, he's taking her away to bloody America!" Although by chance, he'd picked a wife whose older sister lived in Grand Prairie.
Then, Mehulbhai and Ashabhabi went into her house so they could leave it symbolically. They both paid their respects to her deceased elders. After they walked out the door, they left their handprints on her house in red powder. The couple walked to their decorated escort and drove off.
This wasn't the end, though. They were being taken to nearby relatives of ours, who would give them water, etc., as per Indian hospitality. Her brother would go steal her back. Finally, we would take her from her home once again. It was being done this way for convenience, but to be hardcore, we would have taken her all the way to Toli, and her brother would have to go there to get here, and we'd come all the way back to (continued...)