The Wedding Crashers

Tonight we crashed two weddings, and were invited to a third. It was an exceptional feat, really, to show up uninvited and actually make it inside two separate weddings. Our driver, the kind, beguiling Sayeed, unassumingly dropped us off at the first site of what we thought to be our friend's wedding reception. About 30 minutes into an awkward serenade and a room full of confused Indian eyes fixated on us, the wedding crashers, we received a call telling us we were in the wrong place... Wedding 1 consisted of multiple bands hailing the entrance of another participant, and the bride and groom atop gilded seats, sitting before the sparsely-populated auditorium.

When we showed up to wedding 2, we could not possibly conceive that the impossible would happen twice, but it did. Twenty minutes after piling food onto silver platters, aimlessly wandering and mingling with Indian guests, I again, received a call from Sayeed telling me that we had again arrived at, "the wrong wedding." The awkward impropriety to which we admitted during round one was becoming comical. The wedding director had approached me and asked how I was enjoying my food. Candidly, I told him that I was a bit lost, and he promised to have someone escort me around... and this was not even the right wedding! We surveyed the roti, curries, gravies and other delectable North Indian dishes, and escaped the less-than-innocuous paparazzi, making our way to wedding venue number 3... yes, 3.

Wedding 3 we half expected to be disasterous, but as we approached the table-covered knoll and thumping beat of music, we realized that our luck had finally converged with circumstance, and we'd found the right spot. Greg aptly likened our evening to Goldylocks... "The first wedding was too small. The second wedding was too big. But the third wedding was JUST right." We snapped a few photos with the groom and his girl, tipped back some Johnny on the rocks, bantered with the inlaws and their college cronies -- now behind the scenes in Hyderabad's finest uniforms -- and hit the dance floor.

Indian dancing is not something with which I have much experience, but even so, we proved ourselves to be the Michael Jacksons of the sub-continent, sans nose. Between the lightbulb dance, which consists of alternated, twisting wrists in the air, and rhythmic gyrations to thumping Hindi beats, we kept the cameras panning and helped incite a party. Indian dance is visceral elation... it doesn't get much better, especially when you get to do it at three weddings in one night, without provocation or consequence.

And to get a tase of what I'm talking about, YouTube a video by Shahrukh Kahn when you get the chance! In the words of my co-worker, this guy is so famous in India that, "He's like the Old Testament; He makes even athiests shake in their boots."