A Covid wedding to remember

Without exaggeration, it was the most unusual wedding I had attended. The purohit’s voice — sonorous under normal circumstances — struggled to escape through his N-95 mask. I pitied the bride and groom who earnestly leaned forward to intercept some of the muffled mantras. Even in the pre-Covid era, couples getting married barely understood anything of what the purohit chanted, but somehow managed to repeat his incantation through lip-reading. Sadly, Covid made matters worse by eliminating that option.

The parents of the bride, being senior doctors, had zealously followed the Covid protocol. They picked a ‘safe’ date for the event, expected to fall between the first and second waves. With some deft astrological jugglery, the mid-August date zeroed in on scientific grounds, and was declared equally suitable on religious grounds. The parents arranged the ceremony in a small outdoor mandap in their garden. It was a traditional South Indian marriage where alcohol was forbidden, but its deficiency compensated by its abundance in foot-operated sanitiser dispensers.

Their most challenging task was to limit the number of invitees as per guidelines. They finalised a list of 50. Short of handing over PPE kits to the guests, they implemented every precaution. My wife and I found ourselves in the elite club.

Everyone complimented the parents for the extraordinary arrangements. Nobody noticed that the wedding date, though it had passed the tests of epidemiology and astrology, backfired when it came to meteorology.

After the sky suddenly darkened and a downpour ensued, the risks of an outdoor wedding became apparent. Since there was no plan B, the hosts stoically continued with the open-air function, and the guests sportingly followed suit. Half-drenched, they huddled under hastily procured umbrellas, as if the coronavirus had miraculously lost its virulence. Since a full-fledged sashtang namaskar was tough to execute (with all the mud), the couple was granted the licence to perform an abbreviated pranam.

But nothing could dampen the enthusiasm of the attendees. How often do you get a chance to attend a wedding where you incessantly battle the forces of nature — both epidemic and climatic — and emerge victorious? After the nuptials, the bride’s mother exclaimed with justifiable pride, ‘Despite everything, we did it!’ Wringing some rainwater from her Kanjeevaram, the bride remarked, ‘Maybe we didn’t propitiate the weather gods sufficiently enough!’ ‘Or the god of viruses,’ quipped the groom.