Noon
The ceremony started, and there was a lot of noise. People were chatting, and I couldn’t hear what was going on at the front. As I sat and watched I wondered if Indian weddings are massive because of the amount of people in the country. Watch a Bollywood movie and it has a cast of thousands. Nothing is ever a small, private affair. If you’re a bloke and you go to the doctors to let a nurse check your bollocks for lumps she probably does two fellas at once. I doubt there’s such a thing as a one-on-one here.
12.05 p.m.
I got dragged into the canteen area to help prepare the food. There were twenty-five items of food to be handed out to each guest. I was put in charge of salt. Again, more evidence that there are too many people in the country – where else would someone be given the job of handing out salt? I know I haven’t got many skills, but I didn’t feel like I was being used to my full potential. I’d spent the morning making sure a hat was on straight, and now salt.
12.30 p.m.
Promoted to serve poppadoms.
1 p.m.
I gave a helping hand to the naan bread man but got told off for giving three naans to a few people. The man in charge of the kitchen said I mustn’t waste food or there wouldn’t be enough for everyone. Waste food?! He’s having a laugh. There’s about a hundredweight of rice chucked all over the temple next door, and all I’ve done is give away six naan breads.
1.30 p.m.
I got a glimpse of Vik and Deepa on stage while people got up to have photos taken with them. They were starting to look weary. I served fruit salad and ice cream to five hundred people before leaving.
6.30 p.m.
Divya and Vithika showed me round the grounds of the party venue. It was about the size of Old Trafford. There was a drinking area with around fifty tables, four hundred seats were in lines in front of a stage where Vik and Deepa would come and receive blessings from the guests, and a food area where there were too many stalls to count serving every type of food you could wish for. My jobs for the evening included making sure candles on the tables were always lit, that everyone had peanuts and clearing away any rubbish. Jesus. I doubt someone had the job of taking care of peanuts at William and Kate’s wedding.
7 p.m.
Some cameramen were setting up to record the blessings. A huge pole with a camera on the end, it was the sort of thing you see at the Baftas or the TV Quick awards. I don’t know why things like this get recorded, as I doubt anyone ever gets round to watching it back. They can’t even say they’re recording it for people who can’t make it, as Divya said they were expecting around five thousand people, so surely that’s got to be everyone they know.
8 p.m.
Vik and Deepa stood on stage with their family as guests queued to shake their hands. No wonder the divorce rate in India is a lot lower than in other parts of the world. I can’t imagine that many people would want to go through with all this fannying about a second time. Just because you have a big celebration it doesn’t mean the relationship is any stronger, does it? Look at swans. They don’t have a big party, but they’re known to stick with their partners for life. Saying that, I’ve always wondered if that’s because they all look the same, so there’s no point in them running off with another swan.
9 p.m.
I had a break from candles and peanuts round the back of the venue near the car park, and had a knockabout with a football with some taxi drivers. This is where the toilets were. They only had two portable cubicles. Five thousand people, $200,000 and yet there’s only two toilets. With the amount of nuts that had been consumed this was definitely going to cause problems later.
10.30 p.m.
Vik and Deepa were still on stage shaking hands. Most people say your wedding day is the best day of your life, but I just can’t see this being the case for them. Vik and Deepa didn’t seem like show-offs, so I doubt they were enjoying all the fuss. After so many days of it, surely everyone has had enough. You can have too much of a good thing. It’s like when I bought the box set of The Sopranos. I loved the first few, and even though it was still good, after that I just couldn’t take any more.
11 p.m.
The food area opened, but people were still requesting nuts. Two men in fancy outfits and headgear welcomed people – imagine a type of over-the-top, drag queen Ronald McDonald with a Freddie Mercury moustache. I didn’t see the point in this. Stuff like this is just to give people something to talk about. It’s like ice sculptures. No one really needs a six-foot ice sculpture of an owl at a party. They don’t come cheap either, and these days with global warming they don’t even last as long as they used to.
1 a.m.
I finally got to use some of my skills and DJ for twenty minutes. I used to do this at social clubs when I was younger with my mate Makin. We called ourselves Pilkies Makin Music. We had business cards made up on shiny blue card with a gold font, but we never gave them out as they were too expensive. We’d hand them over to people wanting to book us and then get them to write down the phone number so we could have the card back. I didn’t have any Indian tracks on my iPod, but I dug out a few songs I thought any culture could dance to.
1.30 a.m.
Had a bit of a dance. Suzanne always says I’m not that good at dancing, as I don’t know what moves are gonna come. I suppose I dance in the same way that plankton swim. They just go where they’re taken. That’s how I do most things in life. Unlike this whole celebration.
GETTING MARRIED THE PILKINGTON WAY
After everything I had seen during this trip, it made me think about how I would do things if one day me and Suzanne decided to get married. I know for sure that I wouldn’t be up for a massive wedding like Vik and Deepa’s in India. It seemed like they hadn’t had any control over their day. As soon as there are wedding planners involved, it’s no longer a personal or unique experience. You’re getting the same package they sell to everyone else, and then it just becomes about spending money on things that really aren’t important. The fact that I’d spent the whole evening wandering round their reception checking that everyone had enough peanuts proves my point. Did giving people peanuts mean it was a better night for everyone? Has anybody ever come back from a wedding and said, ‘Yeah, had a lovely time, the bride looked nice – no bloody nuts, though!’
The thing that did strike me as interesting on this trip was the pheromone party I attended in LA. Since I’ve been back home and looked into it, I’ve found out that bees, lizards, beetles and loads of other creatures meet their partners through this method, so there has to be something in it. I’ve never liked women who smell like they’ve had a bath in perfume. It’s too much. Maybe it’s because I can’t smell the ‘real them’, which makes me suspicious and wonder what they’re trying to hide. It’s no coincidence that the women who spray perfume all over themselves are always the ones with an orange tan too. I put it down to the fact that all the CFC gases they pump out burn up the ozone above their heads, so the sun tans them the most. Obvious, innit.
I know I didn’t find anyone who could’ve been a potential partner at the pheromone party, but that’s because they weren’t there that night. If it was that easy I probably wouldn’t believe in it so much, but I’m sure if I attended a few of those events I would find a match. And to be fair, the women my nose picked were pretty good. If anything, the problem was they were too good. My nose has high standards. I don’t think it realises