The time has come for us to go about getting that invitation ready for Ammu's wedding. So last weekend the task was to be undertaken by Sudha, Ammu and myself. I commented to Ammu that I do not even recall having seen what the invitation looked like for my own marriage and here we have her wanting to have a say in everything from the paper used, the color combination and even the wording!
The one thing we three were agreed upon was that it would be a simple, not-too-wordy invitation card. After a visit to a couple of card shops we zeroed in on the paper and general size and layout of the card and handed them the agreed upon wording which was to make references to the parents and grand parents of the bride and just the parents of the groom. These details were conveyed via telephone to the two grand mothers (my mother and Sudha's mother) before we set out for the card shop. By the time we got back home from the card shop my Mom was calling desperately to say that we had to have the addresses of the grand parents printed on the card or people may not be able to tell who the bride is! Sudha and Ammu would have none of this because they argued that the invitation would go mostly by hand or if it did go by post it would be followed by a telephone call so people would easily be able to tell who is getting married.
On Monday the proof arrived by email and it soon became clear to me that just mentioning that the groom was 'son of Nirmala and Lt. Gen G M Nair SM, VSM' would not do - people would want to know where they are from, which means that the details of their ancestral home will need to be mentioned! As I was thinking of this my mother calls to mouth exactly what was going through my mind - call it deja vu or whatever you may! She had a hearty laugh as she spoke of my cousin saying that if we did not give details of the bridegroom's parents 'people may think that Arun's folks have no address'!!
All this basically harks back to the ancient traditions of Kerala where a person is not just himself or herself, he/she is essentially also made up by his ancestry and therefore his/her ancestral home must be part of him/her. Thus, people are always referred to as 'Gopi son of Devaki of Thottakat House in Muttambalam' that description circumscribes the person in his entireity because it tells you who he is, who he is born of and the reference to the ancestral home provides a historical perspectives of the doings of that ancient ancestral home and its scions and therefore a character sketch of the kind of person he could be.
When Sudha and Ammu choose not to have those details appended to the grand-parents of the bride and the parents of the groom they will be breaking a mould that is many hundred years old. Iconoclasts these two young ladies are turning out to be!
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