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After assuring the guards at the enterance of the Air Force Club that we were indeed
invited guests, we entered the Indian Air Force Base grounds , not an easy task for
foreign nationals. Of course, our passport numbers were submitted months earlier
and we assume the Indian government was able to thoroughly ckeck our 'bonifides'
back to the Year One.
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Little by little people wandered in. I envisioned an evening of unrelenting boredom
broken only by occasional plates of good food, an evening of being polite to people I didn't
know and smiling for hours at
conversations in a language that I didn't really understand
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Instead, the ladies from yesterday's pooja and their families wandered in. (Well who da thunk!
They're relatives!) After them, a cousin from Lucknow, where I first lived in India 42 years ago,
wandered in with his wife. Theirs was the first Indian wedding I ever went to. Their grown
children and little grandchildren were with them, a most happy meeting. My sister-in-law's relatives
from Punjab came. We'd met them on a previous trip, too. We knew almost everyone.
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Before long we were all talking in "Hinglish" and laughing away. Soon someone started singing
folksongs (somewhat more tunefully than the Bhajans of the day before...but not by much). We've
kind of lost the art of entertaining ourselves and each other here in America. We go to concerts
to hear music, or turn on some piece of electronics. The skill is still alive and well in India
and we sung with abandon (my early years as a Catholic has given me the skill to fake singing along
with any song...as long as one isn't listening too closely). Not having a tamborine, I was none
theless, an enthusiastic hand clapper.
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Some of the men got up and danced. None of us should
give up our day jobs, but it was a lot of fun.
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Then Neelam's (my SIL)elder sister's husband (Vijay Sagawal from Krukshetra....say that 5 times fast)
started to sing what he called 'just a love song'. If music could feel liquid, this one did. If music
could taste sweet, this one did. In the dark of the night, the trees lit by tiny twinkling lights
and Indian clay 'luminarias' shining along the pathway, we sat listening, enchanted by his meltingly
sweet song.
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And then we ate and it was good.
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The clan assembles.
