Accountant Adventures: Wedding Crashing

Outside the Victoria Memorial

Kolkata was boring so we decided to crash a wedding and despite there being no dancing and alcohol it was still a great time. This is the entry about how it happened.

The night we arrived in Kolkata on the way to our guest house we passed wedding after wedding along the rode. Apparently the beginning of July is a very auspicious time for marriages and as a result there are a lot of them. They looked like a lot of fun, with people fancily dressed and lots of lights and some even had fireworks.

After Kolkota we are planning to go to Praj’s part of the world, Sikkim and I really wanted to take the train, so we went to the train station to see about tickets. The advance booking office was crazy with people everywhere wanting tickets and there were numbers of trains over windows, we didn’t know what train number we wanted, so we had to wait in a very long line at the only other window labeled “inquiry”. When we got to the front it was also very complicated there are many trains, but they take different routes and most of them were full but there were two seats available for foreigners but we would have to go to the other office across town and the tickets were much more expensive than we had anticipated, so we decided we would take a 1 hour flight instead of a 12 hour train ride.

We met Praj’s high school acquaintance who lives in Kolkota for lunch at an Afghani restaurant. We found out from her that her father in law had been invited to a wedding at the most expensive hotel in Kolkata that night.

Next we went to the Victoria Memorial, a beautiful, on the outside, building. On the inside it’s a museum but isn’t decorated very nicely and no pictures are allowed, probably so people cannot prove how poor it looks to others. We walked around the area and Praj ate some street food and I drank some Limca. Then we went to meet up with Andrea, one of the girls from Mumbai who just got back to school in Kolkota. We hopped in a cab and told the driver where to take us, and he pointed across the street, we were already there.

We met Andrea and two of her friends and told them of our plans to crash the wedding. They wanted in and we formulated several plans and tried to anticipate the troubles we would encounter. Would it be easier or harder with a white foreigner? What would our story be? The final plan we decided was for Praj and I to dress up in kurtas and the girls would wear what they had on and we would all play it by ear and see what happens. Then we went to the local market just as it was closing to find two kurtas. We were lead to a shop that had just closed and then the owner reopened it and all the neighboring businessmen, whose shops had already closed came in to watch the spectacle. We found two reasonably priced kurtas and then went into negation mode, with each one of the five of us taking our turns to get the price lowered. Eventually the price came down and it wedding time was approaching so we accepted and got the kurtas.

Then I had to find some sandals because all I had on were tennis shoes. We went to several street stores but they were all too small for my feet despite the insistence from all of the store owners that the shoes looked amazing on me and I should totally buy them. It turns out that despite the stickers put on the shoes the largest size they actually carry is a US Men’s 9. I was stuck wearing the tennis shoes.

We went and changed into our kurtas and looked good, darn good! There was a problem though, my kurta stunk, it stunk really bad, if a fart and body odor had a baby, it would smell like my kurta. We went and bought some body spray and I drenched myself in the stuff, it didn’t really help, now I just stunk in two different ways.

We got in a cab and told him to take us to the ITC Sheraton. When we arrived we went to the front and asked where the wedding was, they told us to drive to the security gate at the side. When we pulled up we were told cabs were not allowed inside we would have to get out of our taxi and walk from there. We walked in smiling and looking guilty waiting for someone to say something, but no one did. We walked in and they had a huge room with a food buffet and then another room with chairs and several decorated stages. We looked around and surprisingly for such a nice wedding location, Praj and I were some of the best dressed men there. I was the only white person there and no one approached me or asked me a single question. We ate some food, talked with people and watched what was going on. It was amazing how easy it was. It made Kolkota fun, but it’s the only thing fun we found here.

At midnight we booked a ticket for Friday to fly to Bagdogra, the closest airport to Sikkim, we now head towards Prajwals home.