Hands up: Anjana and Rosa have mehndi (traditional henna tattoos) done for the weddings
This isn’t what I expected. Where dirty walls should be, there’s gleaming marble. Indira Gandhi international airport offers efficiency as well as elegance: our bags are waiting for us as soon as we sail past immigration, their un-padlocked zips still fastened and the contents unfilched.
Cousin Arun is here to greet me and my eight-year-old daughter Rosa, who is visiting India for the first time for two family weddings. Where are the chancers, beggars, unsolicited suitcase carriers and shouty rickshaw drivers that swarm around incomers, I ask him? All becomes clear as we leave the car park, which requires the purchase of a ticket before exiting. There are men on each floor to remind us to buy tickets, men to inspect tickets prior to exit, men at the barriers to insert the ticket. This is automation, Delhi-style.
Our hair-raising, seatbelt-less journey to Arun’s home in Gurgaon—a satellite city that has taken a decade or so to spring up on the southern rim of the capital—is a whistlestop trip through India’s ambition to grab a piece of globalisation. We speed past unfinished roads lined with rubble, swerving around jaywalkers. We soon come to national highway 8, lined with adverts for aspirationally named new-builds like “Dream Valley.” We pass the ghost town that was the site of the Commonwealth Games. “They’re trying to sell the flats off,” Arun says, pointing to the athletes’ village, a kind of Delhi Docklands ridiculed the world over for its plumbing. “But nobody wants to buy because of subsidence.” The developer of the 27-acre site has since enjoyed that most modern trapping of globalisation: a government bailout.
Further on, we reach Tower Block City, where tall white rectangles are stacked like dominoes against the grey skyline. In between are fabric-roofed shacks—the remnants of villages bulldozed to accommodate India’s burgeoning high-rise-loving middle class—and gargantuan malls.
Arun’s home is on the sixth floor. The Hindu priest will shortly arrive to perform pithi, in which the groom, Arun’s son, will be smeared with turmeric paste by female relatives. We ladies will then dance to the temple to collect holy water for Varun to cleanse his sins (and the paste) away before tomorrow’s wedding. Rosa is, I can tell, quietly pining for familiarity as we unload our cases. Apart from her brown skin, inherited from me, she is as resolutely English as her father’s bloodline in her language, clothing, love of Enid Blyton and chicken nuggets. Now her main ally is little Pratiba, Arun’s seven-year-old granddaughter, who speaks Hindi, is wearing an Indian suit and eating roti and dhal. I am suddenly overwhelmed by guilt at forcing her to confront this alien culture, but Rosa and Pratiba just get on with it: they raid Rosa’s suitcase to discover that footless tights and a Monsoon dress resemble an Indian suit; fried balls of chickpea flour become spicy nuggets; and—glory be to satellite television—they both speak the international language of CBeebies. By the end of the evening they are inseparable.
The culture is alien to me, too. I don’t speak the language (my Punjabi father married a Trinidadian, I was born in Britain and we spoke English at home). I’ve never worn a sari, nor cared for India’s arranged marriages, caste system or the second-class status of women. But starting your own genetic line sharpens the instinct to understand where that line meanders back to. I hadn’t seen much of my extended family since childhood, and two weddings within a week was the perfect opportunity. It was at wedding number two that I met the new India.
Where Varun’s event was modest and intimate, Parul’s nuptials were pure showmanship. The ring ceremony (a kind of last-minute engagement party) saw some 1,000 guests occupy an entire floor of the Kempinski hotel in Delhi, with waiters serving booze (most unusual) and an opulent Indian, Chinese and Italian buffet. The happy couple sat on thrones dressed in bespoke silk outfits; the bride also wore a tattoo. The hall trilled to the sound of iPhones, cleavage was abundant, and twentysomethings gyrated with their girlfriends and boyfriends on the dancefloor.
The wedding itself was jaw-dropping: an outdoor area the size of four football pitches, dressed with millions of flowers and thousands of candles, a specially erected temple, grass statues of elephants, and pink silk sofas with blankets and heaters. The bride’s outfit, heavy with gemstones, weighed 25kg. An army of white-coated chefs rustled up fresh curries—or pasta—for waiting guests.
There, I bumped into another cousin who was trying to persuade her IT-skilled, Time-reading son to leave Delhi. “Unless you’re super-rich, you can’t afford a really good life here,” she sighed. “And London is just as congested and expensive. I want him to go to Australia.” And there it was. Of all the surprises after my decades away—that both weddings were love matches, that I rather enjoyed wearing a sari, that Rosa adored her newfound family—this was the biggest eye-opener: Britain is no longer good enough for the Indians.
This isn’t what I expected. Where dirty walls should be, there’s gleaming marble. Indira Gandhi international airport offers efficiency as well as elegance: our bags are waiting for us as soon as we sail past immigration, their un-padlocked zips still fastened and the contents unfilched.
Cousin Arun is here to greet me and my eight-year-old daughter Rosa, who is visiting India for the first time for two family weddings. Where are the chancers, beggars, unsolicited suitcase carriers and shouty rickshaw drivers that swarm around incomers, I ask him? All becomes clear as we leave the car park, which requires the purchase of a ticket before exiting. There are men on each floor to remind us to buy tickets, men to inspect tickets prior to exit, men at the barriers to insert the ticket. This is automation, Delhi-style.
Our hair-raising, seatbelt-less journey to Arun’s home in Gurgaon—a satellite city that has taken a decade or so to spring up on the southern rim of the capital—is a whistlestop trip through India’s ambition to grab a piece of globalisation. We speed past unfinished roads lined with rubble, swerving around jaywalkers. We soon come to national highway 8, lined with adverts for aspirationally named new-builds like “Dream Valley.” We pass the ghost town that was the site of the Commonwealth Games. “They’re trying to sell the flats off,” Arun says, pointing to the athletes’ village, a kind of Delhi Docklands ridiculed the world over for its plumbing. “But nobody wants to buy because of subsidence.” The developer of the 27-acre site has since enjoyed that most modern trapping of globalisation: a government bailout.
Further on, we reach Tower Block City, where tall white rectangles are stacked like dominoes against the grey skyline. In between are fabric-roofed shacks—the remnants of villages bulldozed to accommodate India’s burgeoning high-rise-loving middle class—and gargantuan malls.
Arun’s home is on the sixth floor. The Hindu priest will shortly arrive to perform pithi, in which the groom, Arun’s son, will be smeared with turmeric paste by female relatives. We ladies will then dance to the temple to collect holy water for Varun to cleanse his sins (and the paste) away before tomorrow’s wedding. Rosa is, I can tell, quietly pining for familiarity as we unload our cases. Apart from her brown skin, inherited from me, she is as resolutely English as her father’s bloodline in her language, clothing, love of Enid Blyton and chicken nuggets. Now her main ally is little Pratiba, Arun’s seven-year-old granddaughter, who speaks Hindi, is wearing an Indian suit and eating roti and dhal. I am suddenly overwhelmed by guilt at forcing her to confront this alien culture, but Rosa and Pratiba just get on with it: they raid Rosa’s suitcase to discover that footless tights and a Monsoon dress resemble an Indian suit; fried balls of chickpea flour become spicy nuggets; and—glory be to satellite television—they both speak the international language of CBeebies. By the end of the evening they are inseparable.
The culture is alien to me, too. I don’t speak the language (my Punjabi father married a Trinidadian, I was born in Britain and we spoke English at home). I’ve never worn a sari, nor cared for India’s arranged marriages, caste system or the second-class status of women. But starting your own genetic line sharpens the instinct to understand where that line meanders back to. I hadn’t seen much of my extended family since childhood, and two weddings within a week was the perfect opportunity. It was at wedding number two that I met the new India.
Where Varun’s event was modest and intimate, Parul’s nuptials were pure showmanship. The ring ceremony (a kind of last-minute engagement party) saw some 1,000 guests occupy an entire floor of the Kempinski hotel in Delhi, with waiters serving booze (most unusual) and an opulent Indian, Chinese and Italian buffet. The happy couple sat on thrones dressed in bespoke silk outfits; the bride also wore a tattoo. The hall trilled to the sound of iPhones, cleavage was abundant, and twentysomethings gyrated with their girlfriends and boyfriends on the dancefloor.
The wedding itself was jaw-dropping: an outdoor area the size of four football pitches, dressed with millions of flowers and thousands of candles, a specially erected temple, grass statues of elephants, and pink silk sofas with blankets and heaters. The bride’s outfit, heavy with gemstones, weighed 25kg. An army of white-coated chefs rustled up fresh curries—or pasta—for waiting guests.
There, I bumped into another cousin who was trying to persuade her IT-skilled, Time-reading son to leave Delhi. “Unless you’re super-rich, you can’t afford a really good life here,” she sighed. “And London is just as congested and expensive. I want him to go to Australia.” And there it was. Of all the surprises after my decades away—that both weddings were love matches, that I rather enjoyed wearing a sari, that Rosa adored her newfound family—this was the biggest eye-opener: Britain is no longer good enough for the Indians.
