My story of the grand feast

Much has been and shall continue to be talked about the extravaganza of ‘wazwaan’. Historically the ruinous expenditure incurred on all the razzamatazz of its showbiz would all along be criticized for causing affliction and sufferings to the common man. In future too, theatrical gestures would be performed and cliché ridden double/bubblespeak(s) cracked for an encore----guest control/2008 & 2010 (forced) kind of ‘nikah’ ceremonies, (minus guests/ostentation/razzamatazz) measures taken & seminars and conferences held on the subject, never mind, half-baked and innocent of sincerity and willpower to go austere. Weirdoes’ would keep on adding outlandishly strange kind of dishes to the menu. Symbolic of celebrating the orgy of destruction/annihilation of resources (and sheer wastage of money) people would dismiss wazwaan as something aimed at to make a vulgar/ostentatious display of status /wealth. But as it is always, guys would shrug off, try ostrich and see themselves get going with their kind of idiosyncrasies when the turn is theirs.

My story of happenings of September 1984 is rather in sync with the Frankenstein’s monster, wazwaan. That fateful day, the Srinagar city bustled with thousands of marriages. My elder brother’s marriage was the first of its kind in our family. Restricted movements due to the famous Gul-curfew bouts, some days earlier, had pitched us all headlong into despair. While most of the chores connected with the marriage were complete ‘Just In Time’ (JIT) but then we seemed to have somehow erred.

On the much awaited morning of ‘yenivoul’ the air was abuzz with a cacophonic excitement. Men, women and children, dressed colourful, frolicked here and there. In a corner of colourful ‘shamiana’, a group of ladies swung into singing ‘wanwun’, the song of welcome. A fifty something lady seated near a copper samovar, that emitted the aroma of boiled tea, would pour the sweet smelling ‘kahawa’ into the cups and hand them over to the bevy of jubilant young ladies who would bob up and down to serve them to the guests.

Someone who had visited Wazzapur in the morning, wormed way through the crowd to confide father, the ‘yezman’, kind of bolt from blue, that untraceable wazza was not cooking our feast. The knee jerk reaction was that the panic stricken team of father & a few responsible persons called in on wazza’s residence and the wazza association chief to find solution to the problem. Much to our disappointment, the plausible solution was not at all there to be had. It was not many hours before the brigades of elders and youngsters set on in different directions as a part of the quest for alternatives for the big feast (lunch) to be thrown on Vathal (walima) the next day. The feast of Vathal without wazza-(waan) was beyond imagination. It required at least 24 hours cooking the feast by a team of skilled cooks. Among the most distraught was the bridegroom whom there was none to spruce him up for barat. Till date nobody knows who did his grooming for the event.