Shefali weds Pavan, and everyone is invited

Destination Wedding

by Diksha Basu.

Bloomsbury.

Pages 286.

Rs 499

Aradhika Sharma

This is the story of Tina, a 32-year-old Brooklyn girl and daughter of expatriate (divorced), affluent parents who wants “to feel Indian. Really Indian.” Not Indian in the sense of attending a yoga class in Brooklyn. She wants to know the real India, not the swanky, upmarket India which is generally presented to her on her visits to her home country.

Tina is a part of the upwardly mobile New York Indian community that can afford to dash around the world in business class, wear designer clothes, carry branded accessories and be entertained at the most expensive joints. Working as a streaming network executive from New York, she is, in fact, living the Great American dream. We meet her first as she waits for her flight to Delhi in the airport lounge accompanied by her friend Marianne Laing. Travelling on the same flight are Tina’s mother Radha along with her boyfriend, David and her father, Neel, who hopes to use his Indian visit to explore the idea of dating again (an experiment that doesn’t pan out exactly as he expects it to).

Thus, the privileged circumstances and Manhattan-ness of the protagonist is established in the first few pages, somewhat setting the stage for her conflict later in the book regarding which India does she belong to? The ‘real’ India or the ‘American’ India.

The book is mainly an extravagant narrative of India seen through Tina’s eyes. Although Basu tries to bring out the contradictions that constitute the Indian socio-cultural-political landscape, yet hers is an extremely western vision, one that reminds us of the drama and glitz of the high-class wedding movies. Since the book is based in upper class, affluent Delhi, where Tina’s cousin Shefali is getting married to Pavan, the déjà vu (of watching a Bollywood film or a serial on the digital platform) is further strengthened.

The flamboyant bunch of relatives and over-the-top wedding festivities prompt Tina to make a reality show on the big, fat Indian wedding and what goes into transforming the nuptials into a mega event, at the centre stage of which are the bride and the groom. To do so, she teams up with the ambitious wedding planner Bubbles Trivedi. The premise of the show is to turn Bubble’s life into a reality show. The readers are thereafter treated to the extravagant details of a society wedding — of “fairy lights, huge balls of marigold flowers, candles” and Bollywood dances by actual celebrities”; parties at farmhouses, ceremonies at heritage destinations, premium food, wines and designer clothes and jewellery, bachelorette parties, demure brides who aren’t above taking a swig of booze from the bridegroom’s flask. Basically, Basu uses all the possible tropes associated with society weddings.

In her quest to seek out the dissimilitude of India and its “madness, contradictions, beauty and chaos”, Tina contacts Sunil, a Mumbai (Dharavi)-based, handsome physical trainer and percussionist whom she had once auditioned for a reality TV show and who probably represents the only major character who is an outsider to the affluent class that Basu portrays. At the same time, Tina is attracted to her old fling, an Australian called Rocco Gallagher, also present at the wedding.

Though the novel is breezy and undoubtedly escapist, Basu is always humane. And she’s funny. Her characters, though privileged, indulge in some introspection from time to time and a sense of conflict, though not of an existentialist nature, does emerge as topics of belongingness, love, relationship and conservatism vs modernity come up for observation and comment.

An interesting facet of the book lies in the characters who get a second chance at love as some of Basu’s important characters include people who are no longer young but are willing to invest in new relationships.

“Destination Wedding” is a nice, comfortable, feel-good book to snuggle into on a rainy day, especially in these days when ‘feeling good’ is of the utmost importance.