This Is One Way to Dance

by Sejal Shah

  When I asked him about the ceremony later, my father-in-law said, “Look at the wedding book. So much is explained.” Still, he relented and answered my questions. Why were we wearing turmeric-stained yellow thread strung with a gold coin wound around our forehands? (Gujaratis don’t do that.)

  Email response:

  The mother in law by tying [a] pattam to her new daughter in law gives up the management of the family, so far held by her, in favor of her daughter in law (assuming the daughter in law knows how to cook).

  That’s a shot at me. I email back, “Ha, ha, Dad.”

  My in-laws consulted astrologists: the only date in June for a wedding was one Friday at 8:30 a.m. My parents and I wanted the wedding to take place on a Saturday. A Friday morning wedding and Saturday evening reception would require multiple nights in a hotel room for our out-of-town family and friends. Gujaratis think of budgets, cost. Three nights at a hotel is not thrifty.

  My father-in-law: “Hindu weddings don’t take place on Saturdays.”

  “That isn’t true,” I said. “My parents married on a Saturday in India. They’re Hindu. Every Hindu wedding I’ve attended took place on a Saturday.” (Except my brother’s. My sister-in-law is also South Indian, and their wedding was on a Friday.)

  My father-in-law: “South Indians only get married on Fridays or Sundays. Tuesdays are possible, but not Saturdays.”

  “I’m not South Indian,” I said. I didn’t say: “I’m the bride.” I thought it, though.

  I didn’t count. It was not my wedding.

  We married at the moment my husband tied the yellow thread of my mangalsutra around my neck. We didn’t have rings. On the mandap, my brother, my parents, my in-laws, my sister-in-law, the priest, my husband, and I leaned in, tottered. My father almost fell off the platform—it had been built too small to hold so many people. No one’s clothes caught on fire, though there had been some concern about this. Three, then four garlands of white, pink, red, and purple carnations and roses covered most of my sari. Jasmine flowers decorated the lamps for the puja. Strands of fragrant white jasmine were pinned in my hair—this is a Tamilian tradition I love.

  South Indians (at least Tamilians and Kannadigas) have formal engagement ceremonies. R and I say we wish our engagement ceremony had been the wedding. The ceremonies are small: just family at the house with a priest. My father-in-law had a special document printed to formalize the engagement—it lists our names, our grandparents’ names, our parents’ names, and the date of the wedding. In retrospect, the day felt easy. My twin nephews roll their eyes in photos, skeptical. They wear blue and white Nehru collar cotton shirts I bought them in Delhi. They are growing fast, wrists sticking out from their sleeves. We framed a photo of R and me with our parents, the six of us beaming and relieved.

  We didn’t know how complicated things would get. We didn’t know about my grandmother’s stroke, still six months away; about my aunt’s cancer recurrence or that she would leave Chicago and move in with my parents, grandmother, and me that fall for her treatment. So much sickness and sadness.

  It always seemed to me that weddings had more to do with the bride’s side of the family. Not my wedding.

  Why must a Gujarati have a Tamilian ceremony? I didn’t want to. I’m not South Indian. I like South Indian food and dance, I studied Bharata Natyam and Kuchipudi, but I am Gujarati.

  Who makes these rules?

  Gujarati wedding sari colors: red and white, sometimes with an accent color of green. I didn’t know about the green until I went shopping—all the ones I’d seen were red and white. As was my mom’s.

  Tamilians don’t wear white at weddings (only at funerals). In a South Indian Tamilian Hindu ceremony, the bride leaves halfway through, exits the stage to change from her sari into one chosen by her in-laws, and then returns in the second sari, to symbolize her joining the husband’s family. I would not have agreed to do this, had I known the symbolism. I already had a family—now I would have two. I had no plans to take leave of mine.

  My aunt: “A lot of girls these days just wear gagra cholis or lehengas.”

  My father-in-law: “In a Hindu wedding, you have to wear a sari.”

  Gujarati brides wear one sari. Then something different for the reception—chuniya chori—easier to dance in them. These are made for Navaratri, garba, raas, dancing. I have never loved dressing up. Hindu ceremonies and Gujarati anythings involve heavy saris (literally heavy—embroidered with sequins, gold thread, mirrorwork, beading, borders). You have to suck in your stomach, pull the drawstrings of the petticoat tight around your waist so when part of the six yards is tucked into it, the petticoat doesn’t sag or fall off.

  I said, “I don’t want to change saris halfway through the ceremony. I don’t want to take out a thousand safety pins and change jewelry halfway through. Also, it’s not my tradition.” We fought over this up until the week before the wedding. I asked later what if I hadn’t changed.

  My father-in-law laughed. “But you did.”

  Both my brother’s wife, South Indian and Bangalore-born, and a college friend of mine from Madras explained that it didn’t count as a wedding if you didn’t change saris. Didn’t count to whom? Who counted here? What about the one wearing the sari?

  At the end of it all, I liked the sari my in-laws picked out in Chennai better than the one I bought. In my favorite wedding photo (the only one we framed), I wear the flame-colored silk Kanchipuram sari threaded with a design of gold lotus blossoms. R wears a jubba, a long shirt, salmon-colored, and a white veshti, a pure silk sarong worn by South Indian men. A few years after the wedding, when we looked at all the photos again, my father-in-law said, “The sari we picked out for you suited you better than the one you picked.” This annoyed me, but he was right.

  I liked my Gujarati sari, the cream-colored panethar with the red-and-green border. I liked the red silk Kanchipuram sari better. My in-laws spent months shopping while in Chennai for the winter; I spent two bitter days in February in Toronto (not recommended), the closest place to shop for wedding clothes. My friend P flew from Brooklyn to Rochester to help, and R drove us to Toronto. We could not use our phones—I had not remembered to research Canadian rates and plans—so navigating an unfamiliar, frozen city, finding store hours and directions, added an extra level of stress given how much we had come to rely on internet access.

  I hated the pressures and details of wedding planning, the long lists of to-dos for things I had never thought of. That was my life, then. I taught Romeo and Juliet to four classes of ninth graders and helped take care of my grandmother who had gone from making dinner every night to needing help to eat and to walk. She struggled to speak. My mother and aunt shouldered the round-the-clock heavy labor of caregiving, and visiting family and I took shifts, everyone stretched, exhausted.

  For the wedding program, my father-in-law commissioned an artist in India to draw each step of the ceremony, to explain what each ritual meant (walking around the fire, garlands, etc.). We saw the programs a week before the wedding, but my mind wasn’t on them—my half-stitched sari blouses occupied me the most—they didn’t fit, and this was an event where people would notice, and there would be photos. If something looked terrible, I would see it again. In all those other weddings, I had been a bridesmaid or a guest.

  The detailed program booklet highlighted some of the patriarchal aspects of Hindu ceremonies. (The “wedding sari” referred to only my second sari, the one from my in-laws.) The program cover listed four numbers: “1 auspecious* moment; 2 loving hearts; 3 solemnizing knots of the sacrament; 7 steps and vows of togetherness.” While reading through the booklet we remarked that the figures in the program resembled us. Then we realized the figures were us: the artist had based his drawings on photos of us from our engagement ceremony. My father-in-law had seen to so many details such as this that would never have occurred to us.

  My father-in-law recreated a typical South Indian temple from Tamil Nadu. It stood twenty-five feet tall,
trapezoidal in shape, bluish in color. In front of the temple, two tables held statues of Ganesh and Krishna. He had the hall of the convention center decorated with elephant tusks (not real), cloth columns, thoranam (“I don’t know the English name,” my father-in-law said; I learn it’s braided fronds from the banana plant). Four musicians—two played the nadaswarm (long wind instrument) and two played a drum you hit on both sides (thavil is the Tamil name; it sounds a sharp staccato).

  This, along with his whole vision of the wedding, made it into the most beautiful wedding I have ever seen or attended. I tell this to my father-in-law. He laughs and says, “You didn’t attend it. You were in it. It was your wedding.” The Gujarati weddings I’d been to had been lovely, but pretty interchangeable in design. My father-in-law focused on making something unique. He was especially focused because of his other son.

  My in-laws threw the only wedding they would ever throw. It had to be everything. Our wedding was as much or more for their older son, the one they had never written a matrimonial for. (Maybe they had? I don’t know; it’s not anything I could ever ask.) He was friends with everyone. No one said it, but I know—he wouldn’t have needed a matrimonial. He was outgoing; people were drawn to him. I never met him, but he lives near the center of my life now.

  My wedding was not about saris but about sorrows. Saris were easier to fight over than to address what was hardest: the absence of their elder son. My wedding was about R’s brother.

  One December night they were home. R was downstairs watching a movie, heard a noise. He went upstairs and found his brother unconscious, blood; he called 911. R rode with him in the ambulance; neighbors drove my mother-in-law. My father-in-law was in India. It was December 21, close to Christmas; all flights booked. It took him a week to get home. In 1999, R was twenty-two. My brother-in-law was only twenty-seven. He suffered a heart arrhythmia then lapsed into a coma. He never woke up.

  When we look at our wedding photos in their official books—two and a half years after our wedding—we see that we have no photos of our family all together. R isn’t in the series of photos taken before the reception with both sides of my family and all my cousins. He and his parents are in none of them. His parents were with their guru, who had traveled here from India. R was with them first, and then gathered his shoes, suit, and tie to go over to the hotel to get dressed. He had new cufflinks, decorated with small purple flowers. They are hard to fasten by yourself.

  We didn’t have attendants, because it’s not traditionally part of a Hindu wedding. Also, R could not imagine having groomsmen, which would only highlight that absence at the center of our wedding. If R could not have his best man, he wouldn’t have anyone. The core of what this meant: R was getting dressed for his wedding by himself.

  A photo taken at the end of the night, after the reception, shows my college friends with their spouses and me. We are in our hotel suite, sitting on couches or standing in front of the window. The city’s modest skyline glitters behind us. R isn’t there. He is downstairs with his dad settling a bill for the DJ. It is the sort of task an older brother would have taken care of. I know this because I have that kind of older brother, too.

  In his speech, my father-in-law said (and didn’t remember saying) that he knew R missed his brother but that I would replace him. At that terrible sweetheart table on the stage, with the two of us on display like our rose-colored cake, R burst into tears. I said I could never replace his brother. A sweetheart table is a table only for two (sort of incongruous at an Indian wedding), but a family table would only underscore who was missing. His parents had tried so hard—not to replace their older son but to find a companion for their younger son—to make sure he would not be alone when his parents were gone.

  My sister-in-law and R explained what I had not understood—my in-laws were doing everything according to custom, religion, astrology, and superstition so as to set their remaining son off on a good foot and to keep him, to keep us, from harm. My brother-in-law had been rushed to the hospital with no prior warning of illness. It’s something I can’t quite imagine. But six months before the wedding, when my grandmother had stayed in my room because her new bed would not arrive until the next day, she had a stroke. I had turned on the light at midnight and seen her eyes widen, her mouth open, and no words coming. “Ba?” I said. No words. I dialed 911 and then my fiancé. I called him because he knew.

  Life is not about weddings but about cooking and dishes, laundry and work, writing, parents, teaching, taking out the recycling. I know this now. House hunting, moving, drafting a will, taxes. Making the appointment for snow tires. Determining the compromise temperature, the maximum number of blankets and books the other person can tolerate on the bed. Life is not about colors and themes or even saris. I know this now, but still, weddings astonish me: the threshold, the intention, the cusp; the crucible, the gathering, the hope.

  [2019]

  *I did pursue a career, but it’s safe to say I also perused them.

  *Auspicious was misspelled, but everything went well. I would have caught that mistake had I seen the program beforehand, but I also would have been unhappy with some of the traditional aspects and explanations of the ceremony. So better it went the way that it went.

  Voice Texting with My Mother

  It has been nearly four years since our wedding. My grandmother’s passing—Ba—a sharp rending in my life; my cousin’s new daughter, a new life. We bought a house and are talking about curtains. After weddings are conversations with our parents, are still our conversations with each other.

  I was voice texting with my mother:

  Do you have Old

  sorrows I can use as

  curtains for a while in

  my bedroom

  Or in other places

  until we get curtains?

  If so can you put

  some aside and I can

  look at them when I

  come over? Thank

  you

  She texts back:

  “U mean saries?”

  My hands flew, typing, my third language, now voice texting. Mothers read daughters. I posted a screenshot on Instagram. One friend writes, “I want someone to use my old sorrows as curtains in a bedroom.” Another posts, “You can have my old sorrows!” I am pleased they write to me. “I have enough of my own sorrows,” I tell them.

  Saris and sorrows and weddings are one. These are stories to myself and to you (reader, writer, mother, mother tongue).

  These are letters to myself, and to my mother; words to my grandmother, who taught me to dance.

  These are stories we tell ourselves, stories we tell each other; weddings are stories we tell ourselves; we are stories we tell each other.

  By wedding, I mean an occasion to dance. By occasion to dance, I mean joy. I mean to move.

  Here is my booth at the carnival: What will stay, and what will go; Indian, American, and girl. The body; bones, raced, erased.

  Stories are an argument between some words.

  Weddings are a series of stories, a circle of stories, are bodies, streets, intersections.

  We wear our sorrows, they wear us, they wind themselves around us.

  This conversation still bears repeating: a circle of words is my companion, a circle of words with R, a circle of words with myself.

  Words are surfacing; this is one way to dance.

  Words are rising: this is how to dance.

  [2002, 2019]

  Acknowledgments

  Thank you to the following publications in which these essays first appeared, sometimes in earlier forms:

  “Skin” first appeared in Hanging Loose 82 (2003); republished online in Route Nine (2014); “Who’s Indian?” (originally titled “Where Are You From?”) first appeared in Catamaran: South Asian American Writing 1 (2003);

  “Married” first appeared in Waxwing Literary Journal 9 (summer 2016);

  “Betsy, Tacy, Sejal, Tib” first appeared in Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience R
ace in America, edited by Pooja Makhijani (Seattle: Seal Press, 2004);

  “The World Is Full of Paper. Write to Me.” first appeared in The Margins, December 8, 2013; it was reprinted in Mad Heart Be Brave: Essays on the Poetry of Agha Shahid Ali, edited by Kazim Ali (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017);

  “Kinship, Cousins, & Khichidi” first appeared in the Massachusetts Review: Food Matters 45, no. 3 (autumn 2004);

  “Street Scene” first appeared in the Kenyon Review Online (fall 2011);

  “Bird” first appeared in the Kenyon Review Online (fall 2010);

  “Walking Tributaries” first appeared in Wellesley, the alumnae magazine of Wellesley College (fall 2011);

  “Castle, Fort, Lookout, House” first appeared in the Asian American

  Literary Review (portraiture issue) 3 (fall/winter 2012);

  “Curriculum” first appeared in Conjunctions Online, February 26, 2013;

  “Your Wilderness Is Not Permanent” first appeared in Conjunctions 72: Nocturnals (spring 2019);

  “Thank You” first appeared in Brevity 44 (fall 2013);

  “365 Pelham Road” first appeared in The Big Brick Review 1 (2014);

  “There Is No Mike Here” first appeared in The Margins, September 15, 2015, as part of “After Yi-Fen Chou: A Forum”;

  “Things People Said: An Essay in Seven Steps” first appeared in Brevity 53 (fall 2016);

  “Temporary Talismans,” “Six Hours from Anywhere You Want to Be,” and “No One Is Ordinary; Everyone Is Ordinary” first appeared in the Kenyon Review Blog (on July 12, 2016; June 13, 2016; and April 1, 2016, respectively);

  “Ring Theory” first appeared in Strange Attractors: Lives Changed by Chance, edited by Edie Meidav and Emmalie Dropkin (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2019); reprinted in Literary Hub (2019).

  Many people and experiences contributed to this book, and there is no way to name them all. I wrote these essays over the course of twenty years; any list I make will be partial.