The Wedding Dress
Wrapped in an old red polybag is the tattered wedding album of my parents. Everytime we flick through it, my mother recites the same old stories. Stories of how her pink lehenga was a change from the 'typical' red ones, of how she herself had selected it and made sure it didn't look 'tacky', of how the kum-kum and chandan make-up was popular back then, of how she only used kajal and lipstick since no one knew of anything else, of how my father's baraat came way early and my mother had to rush everything, of how you're not supposed to come on time to your own wedding, of how they could have waited a bit longer and let her get ready, of how he still rushes her up everytime they have to go out.
Even after thirty years, she has kept her pink lehenga intact. Whenever we take out our clothes for the season, I tend to fish through her old clothes and take it out everytime. It has a different blouse now. A gold one. It has sleeves of net with small flower embellishments. In its entire lifetime, the lehenga has only been worn twice by my mother. One was at her wedding and the other was last September.
As I did her makeup for the shoot that hot afternoon of autumn, I said to her, half jokingly, that today she is probably more prepped up than she was at her wedding. She laughed and started to recount the same incidents again before being interrupted. By when the lunch would be ready? she was asked. It was almost two by then.
Initially, in the shoot, we both had a hard time deciding how to take the pictures. But as we started to joke around and have fun, I asked her to pose as she pleases. Any poses she wanted to try, she could. And she did. I couldn't 'make use of them', but those photos were perhaps as truly happy and uninhibited as I have seen her. She wasn't concerned about how much her eyes squinted when she smiled, she wasn't complaining about how hot it was, she didn't care whether the poses 'looked good' or not, and she probably wouldn't have asked me to hurry up if she wasn't constantly asked 'By when the lunch would be ready?'
I let her go. And as soon as I did, she immediately took off her jewelry and set to make rotis for she had already prepared the daal and sabji before the shoot. Efficiency, she called it. The pink lehenga still lies neatly packed in a bag inside a box waiting, or wondering, perhaps, whether it will be worn again.
