November 2005, Kolkata, India

A young man and a woman dressed in plain, unassuming Bengali clothing, stand at the banks of river Ganga facing the holy shrine of Dakshineshwar. A short, scantily clad priest at the temple has offered assistance in an extremely simple ritual of offering flowers to the God and the bliss of vermilion, a ritual which this silly young couple has taken as their marriage vow. The man looks into the beaming stars in his new wife’s eyes, an island of woods and trees which speaks to him through hidden cliffs, as he readies his camera to take a few shots of this moment of eagerness and fantasy. In his mind, he becomes the anchor, and in his robust arms, he wants his love to make her way to the island, through the mist, haze and darkness that has surrounded her.

The new bride, dressed in a beige colored cotton sari with scarlet borders she has secretly bought for this occasion, a small, shining nose stud and a cheap pendent of stone hanging between the folds of her sari, wistfully remembers her old ties and old promises of love which had been buried by the merciless hands of time. Here, standing in front of her was a new tie, the touch and intimacy of new hands that had squeezed and stroked hers, only through the geographical distance between continents. She was standing at the brink of a life marked with the forces of her sadness, and watching, with eyes wide open, how she could climb through a gutter of darkness, through the blur of heads and hands and voices that were once her life, to find her way back to a world of sanity that had evaded her for long.

The guy standing in front of her, taking pictures of her was a real man, emerging out of the dusty memories of virtual rendezvous over the phone and on the internet. The guy, dressed in a milk white, embroidered kurta pajama she had bought for him in anticipation and glory of this moment, is more real and tangible than her first real date, her first tears of love and its consummation, the string of crashes and thuds of her heartbreaks which she had latched on to, for years. Getting married to this guy, or any guy that her family would have chosen for her, for that matter, she knew, would mean an endless pandemonium of Bengali wedding rituals, a reception bringing in flocks of people chewing on scrumptious food and admiring the bridal wear and jewelry who would know nothing of the serenity and pain that gave birth to this communion. Both of them knew they would have to surrender to all of this for restoring love and peace, at the end of which the bride would find herself stranded in a suffocating 5’ by 7’ room in the old, narrow alleys of Calcutta, while her man would fly away ten thousand miles, to the everyday occurrence of their crazy, long, untimely, distant calls and correspondences. The man and his wife wedded secretly, ardently in the most unceremonious occurrence in their lives, watched the crimson rays of the setting sun on the bank of the river, hand in hand, as this sacred day devoid of all grandeur and lavishness passes away into a mist of oblivion. This twilight moment that has blossomed in their lives will soon be eclipsed by a world of flesh and bones, a world where the power and beauty of such an unassuming day wouldn’t matter anyway.

The new bride feels the faded crimson hues of vermilion in her forehead, a moment of pride and temptation in its simplest form, and as she rubs the color of love off her hair parting with a cotton towel, she thinks of this simple fairy-tale of her life where she found a joyous dance in the light of love and life, a fairy-tale in which she found peace and salvation which no prayer could offer her. She rubs off the traces of vermilion and the first, tensed, unskilled kiss of her man planted on her cold, shivering lips on her way home and prepares herself for a string of Hindu marriage rituals to follow in which parents, relatives and friends would intervene to solidify her union with this man. She knows both of them will have to live with the dragons of the archetypal Bengali festivities of give and take, with the smoking fire and wood and the holy Sanskrit chanting of the priest that will testify the purity, validity and permanence of their union. In her mind, she is the mermaid, her fins and tail set deep in the ocean of pure, unabridged trust in this ordinary day of communion, while with her hands and upper body, she struggles in the sandy crag mire of customs and traditions she has grown up on. The trembling, sincere hands of her man leaves hers on the verge of both of them returning home, where they will soon be devoured by the frenzy and sights and sounds of their “ayeeburobhaat”, their last grand meals as a bachelor and a spinster.

The mermaid and her man of the land see off each other as their eyes contain both the sea and the land. The scent of gardens that had filled their bed at sea was real, they could feel it was real even when they found themselves three days later at their nuptial bed decked with flowers when at the end of all festivities and a lavish dinner party, the wicked grins and hush-hush of young women in the family reeked of sanctioned sex and proximity.

A not-so-young-looking woman wipes the thin grains of dust at the surface of a wooden picture frame that lovingly locks a picture collage of their wedding and reception in Kolkata, India. She looks into the separate images of their big fat Bengali wedding day when she was draped in expensive bridal clothing, jewels and the bright scarlet glory of henna adorning her hands and feet. She looks into the smiling, victorious face of her man wrapped in a dhoti, the same robust arms that held her close in Dakshineshwar as he applied the vermilion once more on the hair parting of his new bride’s head, while an elder cousin sister holds her veil and covers her head with an extra piece of ensemble to preserve the chastity and modesty of the bride. Tucked in the extreme left of the wedding collage, the young woman, pure and demure in her simple beige color sari with scarlet border, her shining nose stud and the cheap stone pendant looked out at the setting sun and the rays of love that settles in his eyes. He, to whom she silently said: “For God’s sake, hold thy tongue and let me love”, he, with whom she has dived along.

Parents, relatives and friends call and write to them every year and wish them “a happy anniversary”, trying to hold on to the sanctity of the day which held them together, in fire, rituals and festivities. All of these years, love has held itself in words and in silence, in indifference and in recognition, in estrangement and in reunion, in silly late night bickering and in the sillier moments of surrendering. The not-so-young man and woman rarely stop to walk in the clouds of the heavenly sky of the day they became man and wife, when no ritual, no aura of festivals surrounded them. But somewhere, deep in the ocean, the mermaid and her love of the land tug at each other and dive deeper. Never wary of the crashing waves, they build a world in the turquoise blue waves of the ocean. They float in the ocean, free and safe from the burning embers of fire and the chanting from the Vedic scriptures that had locked them in a ‘holy’ matrimony.