My Favorite Things

The bride and me

Last Friday, my research partner Daisy and I went to visit a family that we’ve gotten very close to over the past four months.  The family wanted us to attend one of the functions being held for their landlord’s daughter, who was having an all-out, three day Hindu wedding. That morning, the bride had undergone the haldi, or turmeric, ceremony, in which she was smeared with turmeric by her family. For beauty, I think, or good luck. But as it turned out, the bride wasn’t the only person whose color was of interest.

When we walked into the bride’s living room, everyone stared at us. One of the bride’s aunties prodded and pinched my upper arm, perhaps wondering if the whiteness would rub off.  Other guests, alerted to the spectacle, rushed in to see us.  Or me. Daisy, whose parents are from the Philippines, blends in here. People tend to think that she’s from Nepal or Nagaland. “I’m like your satellite,” Daisy said to me at one point, and I know what she meant.

In the evening, we went into the house to say goodbye to the bride, and found her sitting with female relatives performing a puja, or prayer ceremony, with a plate bearing a coconut. An older woman was chanting into a microphone, her voice carrying out to the male guests in the yard, where enormous cauldrons of food bubbled over giant cookstoves. When we walked into the room, everyone turned to look at us, and the woman stopped chanting and an auntie said something very insistent to me in Maharati.

“She wants you to sing a song to the bride,” our family’s daughter explained to me.

I told her that I couldn’t.

“You must!” she said.

Everyone stared at me expectantly. So I took the microphone and tried to think of a love song, succeeding only in summoning the lyrics to “Killing me Softly,” which didn’t seem like an appropriate choice for a 19-year old bride entering into an arranged marriage. Even though no one there spoke English. Then it came to me. “I’m going to sing a song from my favorite musical,” I said, and launched into “My Favorite Things” from The Sound of Music.

Standing there in that room, singing away, I realized something very strange. Not only was I at ease, but the surreal scene felt completely normal to me — from the lovely tumericked bride to the giant vat of goat simmering outside, to my own place in the day. That is, I felt normal as a strange glowing white alien channeling Julie Andrews for a roomful of women in saris.

Three weeks before heading home to New Jersey, I’m finally used to being a foreigner.

My favorite things

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