GORAKHPUR, INDIA — It was near midnight at the Railway Club, a posh spot at the train station in Gorakhpur, close to the Nepal border. Hundreds of guests had gathered four hours earlier to eat made-to-order dosas and Indian-Chinese fusion finger-foods, to watch green, red and gold fireworks explode over palm trees and to dance to bass-heavy Bollywood tracks.
My cousin's wedding would soon begin.
A family astrologer had recommended the date and advised that the wedding start after 10 p.m. and conclude before 4 a.m. Those last hours would end six days of ceremonies, the first reunion of my maternal family in two decades and my first full Hindu wedding. They would also end my uncle's efforts to arrange a marriage, and a future, for my cousin.
All of it -- the years spent selecting a suitor, the final minutes of anticipation, the newness of the couple, a man and woman not shaped by former loves and heartbreaks -- was romantic in a way I hadn't expected. Growing up in America for all my 25 years, I'd long ago given up on the tradition, but by midnight, I had started to wonder.
What I never realized, as a googly-eyed adolescent who had imagined eloping with a George Clooney type, was that "love marriage," as many Indians call it, is the aberration.
Arranged marriages are common in countries and cultures that came belatedly to Romanticism and rock 'n' roll and whatever else gave rise to what we call youth. It's difficult to quantify them because the term is such a broad one -- encompassing a childhood betrothal and a parent's mere suggestion of a vetted match.
My cousin's arrangement was closer to the latter. Her father found Vishal through one of my paternal cousins. Shockingly for this conservative swath of north India, sometimes called the "cow belt," he set a date for them to meet without a chaperon.
"He looked better in person than in photographs," Garima Upadhya, 26, said, recalling their first meeting. "He was always laughing and joking."
They next met at their engagement party in Gonda, Garima's hometown. Two months after that they would be married; the all-nighter wedding would be the most time they'd spent together.
That's still more time than my mother had with my father before marrying him in 1969, in the same house where Garima was raised.
They met face to face when my father looped a garland around my mother's neck at their wedding. They moved to the U.S. within months.
