A nightmarish wedding pandal

The rituals in Hindu weddings are complex, elaborate, noisy and even messy. A large apartment complex in which most of the residents are Hindu families is a nightmare world. Shanthi and I live in one. There are seventy families in our complex and most of them are Hindus. Needless to say weddings are a recurring nightmare in the community.

In the nightmare we are currently experiencing, we are direct victims. Seven days ago, at 7 o’clock in the morning, I was reading the newspaper on my balcony on the first floor when I heard some noise coming from the driveway below. I looked down. A decorated bamboo pole with a knotted piece of cloth at the top was being planted by two workers in the shrubbery along the driveway. The people around them, who were members of a family living on the third floor above my flat, were giving them instructions. Once the ritual planting was over, the family offered prayers to the consecrated pole.

‘What could this be?’ I asked Shanthi

Pandakkaal, she said. ‘But that’s Tamil. I think they call it raata pathatam in Telugu. A pre-wedding ritual to ward off the evil eye – to banish the demon of Drishti, you know.’

‘So, there’s going to be a wedding.’

‘Tomorrow.’

Once the raata muhurtam was over, the family turned to us. With them was a fellow-resident I knew well. ‘Sir, we’ll set up a pandal here.’

I smiled sheepishly without fully understanding what he was saying.

By 10 o’clock, the whole landscape had changed. Bundles and bundles of bamboo and casuarina poles and lorry loads of dried palm leaves had arrived. While some of the workers were unloading them, the others were planting poles for a wedding pandal.

It was then that I realised that I had made a mistake. The pandal ran along the entire length of my balcony from one end to another, with casuarina poles and palm leaves crudely jutting out onto the balcony. It was a crude shelter, a vestigial feature of our primitive past. And it looked positively ugly.

Just for a couple of days, I said to myself; once the wedding was over, they would dismantle this primitive structure.

At quarter past four next morning, the residents woke to heart-stopping beats emerging from the third floor. In a small enclosed place, a tavil drum can produce enormous, explosive noise. It was accompanied by deep, high-pitched, disharmonious sounds from a nadaswaram, making a poor attempt to capture Thyagaraja and Annamayya. The pellikuthuru ceremony had started! The apartment complex kept trembling for hours. At 9 o’clock, when I went downstairs, I found that vehicles had been cleared from the parking lot in which there was now an over-decorated pandal where the bride was being given mangala snanam. Needless to say that the parking lot was a mess.

I went back to my apartment. Shanthi asked me to open the balcony door, and I did so. There were swarms and swarms of insects, especially ants, crawling down the balcony wall from the pandal roof. What’s worse, the domestic help told us that the pandal would stay for ten or fifteen days.

I spoke to the secretary of the owners’ association, a former student.

‘It’s a delicate issue, sir… Religious sentiments…,’ he stuttered and stammered.

‘Sanatana dharma, I suppose.’  I sighed wearily.

Now, Deepavali, the festival of noise and noxious smoke, among other things, is approaching. A few days from now, sanatana dharm
is will be busy firing crackers. If one of them falls – accidentally, of course – on the pandal, there will be a massive fireworks display on my balcony.