Come on, Show Yourselves!

Hooray! It's National Delurking Day!

What's that, you ask? It's for all you lurkers out there - those of you come 'round these parts but don't speak up - to say hello, if only once a year. And you hafta - it's the rules! I'm mostly a lurker myself, but I know I'll be up late tonight, finally responding to comments on every post since the beginning of our trip! I'm so behind. There are almost 2000 things to be read in my reader, too, so if you see me come by on a month-old post, you'll know why.

Happy Delurking Day, everyone! (That's Delurking Day Mubarak, I guess?)

Crying Uncle

As an English speaker, I say Uncle. It never occurred to me that there could be anything more than one kind of Uncle. But if you think about it, there are actually FOUR different types of Uncles. In Pakistan, people differentiate between these types of uncles, and there's a different word for each of them. The four different types (and their Urdu equivalent) of uncles are:

Your father's brother (Chacha)
Your mother's brother (Mama)
Your mother's sister's husband (Khaloo)
Your father's sister's husband (Poopha)

I remember when I was telling one of M's friends about my Uncle and he asked me "Which uncle? On your mother's side or your father's side?" I answered him - it was on my mother's side - but I also secretly  wondered why the heck he needed that information. What does it matter? An uncle's an uncle.

Why is this topic in my mind today, you ask? Well, we have a new character to introduce to you fine readers here at The Gori Wife Life. M's brother, who you might recall was recently accepted into a Ph.D program at an University very close to our school, is called Chachoo by my son - it is his father's brother after all. And I decided that could be a good pseudonym for him on this website!

And the reason why THAT is in my mind today is because tonight, M, the baby, and I stood in the international arrivals area of our local airport for three hours until Chachoo walked through those doors and into our life. We then brought him back to our house which is now his house too, and showed him to his new room. (Well, "his" room until my parents or grandparents come to visit, then he gets kicked out to sleep on an air mattress in the laundry room.)

He starts school in a week and tomorrow I'm driving him all around town to get his last minute affairs in order. Then, later in the week we'll start the tour of close-by family members' homes/cities. I'm assuming there will be interesting stories as a result of this new development. Which means we better finish up those posts about traveling in Pakistan so we can move on to this juicy topic!

What I'm Wearing in Pakistan - Wedding Edition

I really wanted to be dressed fashionably for the various wedding functions. I'm usually very unfashionable, both in America and in Pakistan, unfortunately. In Pakistan, I like things that are typically seen as cheap or low-class. I wear mostly cotton outfits and I usually forget to accessorize or wear jewelry; I almost never wear makeup. My style is so cheap that M calls it "Lalukhaity style" named after one of the lower class markets that I like to shop at.

But for this wedding, since it's the wedding of the youngest and the last chance I'd ever get to dress up this fancy until possibly my own kids start marrying, I really wanted to look fashionable. Up-to-date fashionable, too, not the 1 year later cutting edge that we get in America. Buying Pakistani clothes in American shops means that there's a lag in how recent the fashions are. I wanted to go straight to the source.

I have one great resource for this. One of M's younger cousins, we'll call her Oonie, is so fashionable. I love every single outfit that she wears. She's so kind to me and she speaks fluent English, so whenever I am in Pakistan, she helps me buy outfits. I've dragged her around to stores for hours at a time and she's always ready and willing to help me. Everyone suggested that I just have her make outfits for me and they'd be ready and waiting when I arrived just a few days before the wedding. (Since we were arriving with so little time, my wedding clothes had to be ready before I even showed up.) But I couldn't ask Oonie to make my wedding clothes for M's youngest brother's wedding. I couldn't because a few years ago, there had been some talk that the youngest brother and Oonie should get married, and I was concerned that asking her to make clothes for the wedding - for his wedding to another girl - was too cruel. Everyone said I was wrong, there was no problem, even Oonie's elder sister, but I just felt too bad about it.

Ammi had another plan. She asked the bride to do it. The bride! Who already had so much work of her own wedding planning to do! But she's so nice that she agreed, and she's very fashionable too, so I knew anything she would make would be very lovely. And they were, of course.

There were four outfits for each of the different functions. The first was a green & orange 3-piece shalwar kameez. That's baggy pants and a long shirt with a big scarf called a dupatta that can be drapped around in different styles. It was embroided all over with sunbursts in different colors, and it had rows of little circlular mirrors sewn into the border of the dupatta, sleeves, and cuffs of the pants.

The neckline these big brooches sewn into it, and they had bells on them. I just love anything with bells on it. Five years ago, when shopping in Pakistan, I bought a pair of flip-flops that had bells all over the straps and I loved them so much. That was the first time I ever found out that my sense of style is considered low-class, because M eventually told me that the flip-flops were not nice. Those flip-flops are why he coined the Lalukhaity term. But now, it seems bells are in fashion! I think perhaps I'm just five years ahead of the fashion curve.

Unfortunately, one of the brooches broke, I think from being stuffed into our luggage and thrown around various airplanes. I saw this little piece of broken jewelry and I saved it because I couldn't figure out what it was from until I started taking these pictures of my clothes and realized it had broken off of this shirt.

You can see that my mehndi has entered that stage where it just looks like my hands are dirty.

The best part of this outfit is the dupatta, which is orange and covered in hand-embroidered sunbursts of all different colors, with mirrorwork as well. It's so beautiful and I don't know what kind of fabric it is, but it's the kind that easy to wear and drapes nicely to make a nice silhouette (as opposed to fabric that's too silky and is always slipping, or fabric that is too stiff and sticks out to make the wearer look larger.)

For the second Mehndi, I had asked for something that would be the traditional Mehndi colors of yellow and green. My new fashionable sister-in-law also found some blue and silver, but it ended up being one of my favorite outfits ever. It's a green silk kameez with yellow jamavarr border at the sleeves, hem and neckline and silvery and blue ribbon accents. I noticed that ribbon is everywhere there days, it's the in fashionable way to design outfits, I guess. This outfit has a straight blue trouser style pant as opposed to the baggy shalwar style, and the dupatta was very sheer yellow silk with the same green, blue and silver border.

This was the first outfit Pakistani I'd ever owned that came with a tag in it. I don't know who this designer is, but I definitely like the outfit!

For the nikah, I had the fanciest outfit yet. It was a gold, red and black outfit. The kameez had a slit from the bottom up the middle, which is also in fashion these days, as well as some beadwork all around the neckline and down to my waist. This waist-deep beading or embroidery is one of the current fashion trends that I think is fantastic- all that stuff is so pretty, why not have more and more, I say!

The bottom of the trouser also had some red handiwork on it, but one of my favorite parts of the outfit was the neckline which was cut really high in the back and stuck up a little bit almost like a shirt collar. It was a really nice look, I thought.

The dupatta was also really nice, I don't know the kind of fabric though. It was lighter weight than jamavaar, but with that same kind of embroidery. My SIL had the sides beaded with two different kinds of beading.

For the Walima, I'd asked her to pick out a saree for me.  A saree combination of a tight blouse and a long (like 9 yards long) piece of fabric that you wrap around like a skirt, making a few pleats at the waist, and then keep wrapping into different styles of drapes. It's difficult to wear, and it's a very traditional women's wear. I love wearing it because it's so elegant and it really helps a gori wife look like she has mastered wearing these kinds of clothes.

The saree my SIL bought for me is a new kind of "catalog saree" that I also saw being sold in the market. I guess some designers have succeeded in marketing their own line of sarees and sell them in these kinds of packaging. This particular one was made up of several different panels of differently colored fabric so that the pleated section is all multicolored. I really liked it.

And Then There Were Tents

The last bit of preparations (there were a lot of preperations) before the big Mehndi parties was getting a tent. We needed some tents. There were two parties planned. First, the groom's family would go to the bride's house on the first night and there would be the bride's Mehndi party. Then second night would see the reverse - the bride's family would come to our house for the Groom's Mehndi party. Oh, except the bride! Because they weren't supposed to see each other before the wedding, neither the bride or groom could attend the other side's party. Their families got to party in their honor, just without them.

The bride's family lives in a really nice new development of "flats" - I guess that's the American equivalent of apartments. The rooftop of their apartment building is apparently a common space and people throw parties there, so that's where they had their tent setup. M's family lives in a different kind of area though, with no posh common space for parties. Instead, they just take over the entire alleyway. This happens often, and generally neighbors don't even ask each other before doing it. M objected to me writing that last sentence, saying that he'd "informed" his neighbors beforehand - but I say that "informing" isn't asking, now is it? His point, though, was that "sometimes they block your front door without even telling you beforehand, and then you can't get out of your house and a fight starts."

Just one day before the party, the groom went to a place up the street that arranges for these kinds of tentings and set everything up. The morning of the mehndi, about 6-7 guys showed up with a small truck full of bamboo rods and fabric rolls. They spent most of the day setting up the tent, tying perilously tall bamboo rods together to make a huge frame and then unfurling roll after roll of yellow fabric (and the occasional green one) over the frame. Then they set up tables, chairs, catering and buffet tables. They also catered the whole thing and then stayed well into the next morning to take it all down. The whole thing - a full day's work for 6 men and food for 150 - cost 18,000 rupees. That's about $212.

We woke up in the morning and through the front door you could see the tent being set up.

One of the tent guys was the defacto electrician and wired up the whole tent with twinkling lights. He did this by hooking up to the live wire in the alleyway.

The electrician.

Setting up the tables and chairs, you can see the rolls of fabric lying on the ground.

Getting closer.

Setting up a frame to make a pretty entrance.

One of the guys takes a mid-day nap in the place that will soon hold the center stage groom.

All set up, wired, and ready to go.

The entrance to the tent.

Now they switch to caterers out back.

The groom on his throne, with all the sweets that he'll soon be eating.