It is pretty easy to forget that the the rituals we celebrate in the West are not common place around the world. If one were to state, “I went to a wedding this weekend”, most of us would probably conjure images of teary audience members, open bars, and a general sense of happiness for the couple to wed. Cynthia Gorney’s recent piece on child brides in National Geographic reminds me that our concept of the wedding is not the norm, and that such ceremonies can set entirely different moods in other countries.
Gorney’s piece opens with a description of the pre-wedding scene of a secret late night wedding to take place in India,
“… it was well into the afternoon before the three girl brides in this dry farm settlement in the north of India began to prepare themselves for their sacred vows. They squatted side by side on the dirt, a crowd of village women holding sari cloth around them as a makeshift curtain, and poured soapy water from a metal pan over their heads. Two of the brides, the sisters Radha and Gora, were 15 and 13, old enough to understand what was happening. The third, their niece Rajani, was 5. She wore a pink T-shirt with a butterfly design on the shoulder. A grown-up helped her pull it off to bathe.”
