by Katharine Elizabeth Monahan Huntley
Exotic India. Pungent streets steam after a tropical rainfall drenches. The multitude teems with disquietude, or pose silently with sacred grace. Over one billion in population and numerous states and religious sects daunt the outside observer’s comprehension of this incredible region of Southern Asia. Acclaimed Indian filmmaker Mira Nair’s Monsoon Wedding is an insight into one particular tradition in the Punjabi Indian culture, an invitation underpinned with the universal themes of responsibility versus commitment, hopes versus dreams.
A wedding ceremony in any country, at any time, is a perilous emotional undertaking. The reflection the family holds of itself, already flawed, is further fractured. In Monsoon Wedding, the Verma’s are a family portrait of jitters and jubilation against a background of caste and culture clash.
The film luxuriates in sensory explosions: a Bihari plucks the mango colored petals of glorious marigolds: he loves me he loves me not; sitars vibrate in sympathy with woeful young lovers; earrings dangle, bangles jangle. Aditi, the bride-to-be has eyes seafoam green and skin the “colour of butter.” She and her cousins are burnished beauties that slink in silk sari—shades of burnt sienna, pyracantha, magenta, midnight blue. For the wedding celebration, the bride is bedecked in jewels, her ensemble embroidered with gold threading. Attired in pale pink turbans and white native garb are the male members of the wedding party.
The betrothed couple is the focal point of the story, but not its true heart. It is the romance between P.K. Dubey, the “upwardly mobile, cell phone-wielding wheeler-dealer Tent and Catering” contractor and Alice, the Verma’s housemaid. Alice’s purity and solemnity compels Dubey to discard his pomposity. Their courtship leads to a true “love marriage.”
The heartbreak of Monsoon Wedding is Aditi’s father, Lalit — whom, amidst the jumble of endless details is anguished to discover a heretofore-trusted family friend’s past pedophile behavior with the orphaned niece he’s raised, Ria. A true dilemma: he must not only confront the man he reveres, but is financially obligated to as well. With great dignity, Lalit casts him out: “These are my children and I will protect them from even myself if I have to.” Lalit must also entreat Ria, who is poised to run away, to stay: “My family means everything to me. Please don’t leave us. Please. Ria if you go, everything will break.” Ria acquiesces; tears and rain wash away all evil influences.
Glass fragments painstakingly reworked into a new mirror image, the family rejoices during the monsoon wedding celebration, bound together once more by love and honor.