The Tam-Brahm Wedding — Three Days of Everything

A Tam-Brahm wedding was never just a wedding.

It was a three-day event, beginning with Varadham and ending with Kattisa Koodai, somewhere between several ceremonies, hundreds of relatives, endless food and conversations that seemed to have nothing to do with the bride and groom.

For us children, it was one of the great events of the year.

You got new clothes.

You ate.

You ate again.

You ran around the wedding hall with your cousins.

And if you performed enough namaskarams, relatives would give you money.

There was very little to dislike.

The adults seemed to have more complicated reasons for attending.

For the mamis, a wedding was also a fashion parade.

Every mami arrived wearing a newly acquired Kanchipuram saree, preferably in a colour that nobody had seen her wear before. The saree was only the beginning. There would be a new gold necklace, matching earrings, bangles and, if circumstances permitted, an entire jewellery set.

The interesting part was that everyone noticed.

A mami would look at another mami and say,

“Very nice saree.”

This could mean several things.

It could mean the saree was genuinely beautiful.

It could mean she had noticed the saree.

Or it could mean she was mentally calculating where the saree had been bought and whether her own collection required an upgrade.

The men were less complicated.

They sat in groups, discussed politics, government servants, transfers, cricket and the state of the country.

Every now and then someone would appear and announce,

“Next pandi.”

The men would immediately stop discussing the state of the country and go to eat.

Lunch itself was served in pandi—batches.

This was where another invisible hierarchy emerged.

You waited to be called.

Some people went early.

Some went later.

Nobody explained why.

But everybody knew.

If an uncle who had arrived after you was called before you, you understood that there were forces in the family hierarchy that had not yet been explained to you.

We children were less concerned with rank.

We simply wanted to get into a pandi before the vadai ran out.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about a Tamil wedding was that, even with five hundred people in the hall, everybody seemed to know everybody.

You could sit next to a complete stranger and within five minutes the conversation would begin.

“Which village?”

“Which gothram?”

“Father's name?”

And then the investigation would start.

“Your father is so-and-so?”

“Yes.”

“Oh! Then you must know Ambi.”

“Which Ambi?”

“Ambi from Mylapore.”

There were many Ambis.

There were also Suppunis.

And Kichamis.

Somewhere in the conversation, one of them would inevitably appear.

From there, a connection would be established.

A great-aunt's brother's wife's family.

Someone's cousin who had married someone else's niece.

A village connection from thirty years ago.

By the end of it, the stranger sitting next to you had somehow become a relative.

We had no idea how.

The elders seemed to have developed the modern ancestry test long before anyone had heard of DNA.

They needed only five or six questions.

Gothram. Village. Father's name. Mother's village. Grandfather.

That was usually enough to reconstruct your family tree.

Sometimes they would even tell you the relationship.

“You are related to him.”

“How?”

They would explain.

It would take five minutes.

You would listen carefully.

At the end, you still had no idea.

Then there was another ritual reserved for children.

You would be introduced to an unfamiliar elderly person by your parents.

“This is your uncle.”

You would say namaskaram.

The person would look at you carefully and say,

“Ennai yarunu theriyerodo?”

Do you know who I am?

There was no correct answer.

If you said yes, they might ask how.

If you said no, you had apparently failed an important test.

Fortunately, our parents usually knew this was coming. They would rescue us by explaining the entire relationship before making the introduction.

“This is your mother's cousin's husband's elder brother.”

We would nod solemnly.

The man would still ask,

“Ennai yarunu theriyerodo?”

We had learned not to take chances.

A wedding was also, quietly, a matchmaking operation.

Any unmarried girl around twenty and any unmarried boy over twenty-five became potential material.

People did not exactly propose.

They merely began gathering information.

“Whose daughter is she?”

“What is she studying?”

“Where is the boy working?”

“Is he in Delhi?”

By the end of the wedding, several families had acquired information they had not specifically requested.

The children remained blissfully outside this market.

Our concerns were simpler.

Food.

Money.

Clothes.

And cousins.

We stayed up late, running through the wedding hall until someone finally caught us, held us down and told us to sleep.

The next morning, we would wake up and start again.

By the third day, the ceremonies were becoming difficult to distinguish from one another. The adults were still talking. The mamis were still wearing their jewellery. The men were still discussing politics between meals. Someone was still establishing a genealogical connection. Someone else was still trying to arrange a marriage.

Then came Kattisa Koodai.

The wedding was ending.

People began packing their bags and saying goodbye.

For us, it meant the end of three of the best days imaginable.

We had new clothes.

We had new money.

We had eaten more than we could remember.

We had met cousins we had not seen since the last wedding.

And, somewhere along the way, we had been introduced to another twenty relatives whose names we would promptly forget.

That was the TamBrahm wedding.

It was a wedding, certainly.

But it was also a fashion show, a family reunion, a genealogy conference, a political discussion, a matchmaking bureau and, for children, a very well-funded three-day holiday.

And somehow, by the time it was over, everyone had eaten, everyone had met everyone, and everyone had discovered that they were related to someone they had never known existed.

Which, in a Tamil family, was perfectly normal.