Indian weddings

Ludhiana is India's capital of industry and boredom I'm here for a friend's wedding. She has spent the whole day having her hands and feet painted with henna ink as traditional decoration for the ceremony. There is to be no white to be worn or white colored gifts given at the wedding. In India, white is the color of death as opposed to the color of virgins. It's naturally assumed that the girl will be a virgin at marriage anyway, but seeing that her life will pretty much be over after she's married, I tried to convince her to wear as much white as possible.

Today is the engagement. I'm having a suit tailor-made, from scratch, for the occasion. All for the handsome sum of 65 pounds. But for the wedding I'll be wearing traditional Indian dress... male dress. I'm not sure how to pronounce it properly, but I just say Sharmani and everyone seems to know what I'm talking about... basically Armani with a Sh.

The wedding will only be family and close friends, hence only a small gathering of 900 is expected. This is relatively small compared to weddings of 2,000+ guests. The bitch is that all the wedding invitations have to be handed out personally by the parents. Each wedding invite is a box of candy and a fancy card, each amounting to 3 pounds. The total projected cost of the wedding is in the neighborhood of 18,000 pounds... and that's without the dowry, for which the bride's father is all responsible for. The dowry usually covers everything the couple need to get their home up and running... furniture, electrical, clothing, white goods (preferably in another color) etc. It actually does sound more appealing to have a funeral.