Filed under: Uncategorized
These last two weeks have been spent flying from DC to London to Khartoum to Istanbul to Ankara to Khartoum to Juba and today back to Khartoum again. It’s a tough life I lead.
I was in Ankara for a close friend’s wedding. For the signing of the wedding contract the guests gathered in a room decorated with a bower down the middle and two thrones on the centre stage. As we sat gossiping and frantically trying to revive the batteries in our cameras (me, my camera, "the brick", dates from the 1900s) the lights went out, suddenly, dramatically. Music started to swell, and the pathway through the bower shone in the new darkness with a soft blue light radiating from below it’s pristine glass surface. Mood created, the doors opened to reveal the bride and groom, they entered and a smoke machine began to billow forth. On the wall behind us a slideshow appeared; photos showing their slow evolution from childhood to coupledom. The point of the smoke machine soon became apparent as the couple proceeded through the bower, a laser show danced over the billowing smoke guiding their way to the dais at the centre of the room.
The whole thing had a rather understated feel to it.
Despite this beginning the actual wedding itself was very simple and very touching. Seeing a very close friend getting married is strange, regardless of how mature you feel it seems like you are watching them leave the life you know to become something more serious than you are, more committed and slightly alien. Or at least if you are as immature as me that’s how it seems, their world is now a world in which the general compact is an acceptance of shared living arrangements, a mortgage perhaps, children are now in the equation and their partnership is no longer an aspect of their social lives that they shared with you but is the core of the life they have chosen. It’s like a club that I never thought I wanted to join but now that my friends are all becoming members I’m slightly affronted that I haven’t been asked.
Perhaps it was this that led to events later in the night. After the marriage ceremony we had all decamped to change into our evening gear and parade ourselves to our best advantage at the wedding dinner, held at one of the Ankara hotels. Thrones were again in evidence, as too was a live Turkish band. Most of the night was spent ullulating (on my part, I have to admit very few people seemed to know what I was doing) and clicking your fingers together in the air in gestures of approval at the mass dancing that broke out (my ineffective attempt at this combined with the ullulating led to me briefly being a pariah until I clocked on and stopped). The wedding was unusual from most other weddings I have been to in that no-one made any speeches, which had a direct correlation with the high energy levels of the guests. The dancing and drinking went on for a considerable time until at last, in the early hours, people began to drift off, either in couples or in marauding hoardes heading for the late night bars to find opportunities to eventually couple off.
As the last core group of fifteen or so of us were beginning to say our goodbyes the bride realised she had forgotten to throw the bouquet. For some reason the groom, my friend, felt it incumbent on him to point out I was one of the only single females in the room, "Yoshi will catch it". They lined me up alone, though however disconcerting the moment was, my solitude was brief. Uncannily, the room that had been almost empty two seconds before, suddenly filled with females. "Throw it my way" was the general cry. This again was completely different from British weddings where in general admitting you actually wanted to catch the bouquet would be feasible only among the truly desperate.
I was standing next to a girl that I had sat next to at dinner; an incredibly sweet, young student who was hoping to do a masters in international relations because she wanted to help people. A sort of genuine Miss World candidate if you will. As the bride turned her back to us and you could feel the anticipation in the room become something tangible, she turned to smile at me. The bouquet at this point was airbourne and was sailing roughly in my direction, my competitive instinct started to kick in, almost in response to the obvious desire of those all around me to be the ones to catch it. I don’t know, perhaps it was partly this, maybe I just felt it was about time to be part of the club, but as the bouquet soared through the air and started to fall, now quite patently in the direction of the smiling girl next to me, something in me baulked, it might have been adrenaline. Disregarding entirely the propriety of it, forgetting for a moment that I was surrounded by people, being watched by old friends and new, all I saw was the bouquet and as she raised her hands, madonna like, I stepped forward, did a neat side step and caught the bouquet from in front of her, pulling it in to me with all the finesse of a cricketing legend fielding a fast leg slip.
There was a moment where I was triumphant, I had won, I had caught it, but that was fairly quickly subsumed with a realization of where I was and what I had just done. I spent the next couple of minutes salvaging my conscience by giving out the roses from the bouquet.
The next day I flew home, back to Khartoum.
It was at a certain moment last week after arriving home in Khartoum to a room subsumed under two inches of haboub dust (after three sweeps this was reduced to around half an inch), due to fly to Juba at 6am but unable to sleep because of the loudest and most elusive cricket in Sudan, that I realised something. The realisation came sometime around 3am while in chase of the cricket who had escaped by jumping at me as I was about to catch it in a glass, (causing me to squeal, jump backwards into the wall, knock my side table only to watch the last bottle of water I had in the house on it anoint the area around me). As I said, it was at a certain moment at 3am, sitting on the floor in the wreckage of my bed which I had broken whilst moving it, certain that the cricket was mocking me with it’s chirps from behind the headboard — it was in that moment while I was struggling with the archaic joint mechanism of the bed’s slats, hoping to mend my bed in the last couple of hours I had before I was technically supposed to wake up, as I gazed at the Hanzel and Gretel trail of dust free footprints around the pool of watered dust (mud) on the floor and their mirror image of dust laden ones on my sheets, (some even on the wall though for the life of me I don’t know how they got there), it was this particular moment that I realised that handing out flowers was just not going to cut it; karma has its own measure of what constitutes sufficient punishment for snatching away a young girl’s dreams of romance and this was it.
My only hope is that this, plus the blinding cold I have caught from too much travel and too little sleep, will have been sufficient.
2 Comments so far
Leave a comment
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>
that was f*cking hilarious
Jason 05.27.07 @ 9:01 amYou told either the wedding and your feelings so cute and realistic. But I think people -at least me- want to see the photos you had taken with your “brick.”
But I must add this: You didn’t catch the flowers -I was there, I saw-, the flowers had chosen you, because every people you had met there, liked you so much. Karma? Maybe it didn’t approve your handing out them.
Behcet 05.27.07 @ 12:52 pm