Wedding in Pakistan: Pt 5- Reception

The day after the Nikkah, we woke up late.

Aside---Well, to be honest, we wake up late every day in Pakistan, unless the power is out and it's too hot to sleep anymore.  M's family, and from what I've heard, many Pakistani families are like this, tends to wake up later, and stay up later.  Often, they don't eat dinner until nine or ten o'clock at night.  I've heard that Latin America is culturally similar in this regard, so perhaps it has something to do with how hot it is during the day.  People would rather be more active during the night when its cooler.----

The nikkah festivities had gone on long into the night before and we were tired, but excited about our reception that evening.  Traditionally, a Pakistani wedding includes multiple reception-type events, including baraat, rukh satti, and valima.  However, because my family was not able to be there, and because we would be having another wedding in the U.S. soon (more about that in the future), we decided to stay simple and opt for one reception instead of multiple events.  We just called it a "reception" on the invitations.

A couple of weeks before this whole thing went down, M and I and my sils had travelled around Karachi to various wedding halls and sites trying to pick the one that would work best for us.  We decided to have the wedding outdoors, which was brave, or dumb, depending how you look at it, since August is monsoon season in Pakistan.   We decided to just pray that the rain would stay away on that one day.  We looked at quite a few empty lots.  See, that is where outdoor weddings happen in Karachi a lot of times, big empty lots.  Sometimes they are kind of trashed and overgrown looking too.  When we first started looking for places, I couldn't believe that this is where they had wedding receptions.  I thought M and my sils were kidding with me.  But they assured me that within a day of the reception, the site managers could clean it all up, roll out the (literally) red carpets, string banners, lights, and set up the food, stage, tables, and flowers to make it look gorgeous.  I was somewhat dubious, but I went with it, and it turned out to be breathtaking.

Our Reception Site, The Fleet Club, Karachi Pakistan

Here you can see what the stage looked like.  That is my sil giving me a gift. 

For the reception, I went to the beauty parlor in the Marriott to have my hair and makeup done.  The lady who was doing my makeup has a salon in Karachi and in London, and flies back and forth between the two.  She was really good, and I loved both my hair and make up for the reception.  She wound strands of jasmine through my hair in the back.  Then she helped me put on my jewelry and sari. Not that many brides in Pakistan wear saris, but I decided to do it because M likes saris, and M's mom, who is from East Africa (Gujurati Indian ethnically), has always worn saris, and wears a sari every day.  So I liked the idea of wearing one to honor her as well.  I thought the simplicity of the banarsee silk sari ended up working great for me and was really happy.  I wore a filmy red duppatta on my head, with tiny bells that jingled softly when I walked.  (Although it was so long that it touched the ground, and M managed to step on it a couple of times as we were walking, leaving me to be comically jerked backwards unexpectedly).  After a couple of hours in the salon, my sils came to get me.  When I walked through the lobby of the Marriot, everyone was staring at me.  My sils were regretting that they didn't bring a chador or something to cover me up, what with all the jewelry and stuff and the unwanted attention we were getting.  We rushed through the lobby, and jumped into the waiting car, and the driver sped off, as a hijra  knocked on the window, asking for some money to bless the bride.  We hurried back to M's house to take pictures before heading to the reception.

You can see my jewelry and hair pretty well in this picture

My sari

The reception was literally that, a reception.  M and I sat on a stage, while people came up to greet us and congratulate us, take pictures with us, then go get food and eat at tables.  I should mention that we also had quite a few uninvited guests, which were a whole bunch of stray cats, who were fighting and mewling quite loudly under the stage, and at times ran out to snatch food off of unoccupied tables, while the wait staff tried to discreetly shoo them out of the tent.  There was no music, like there is here, although there was a Christian wedding reception on the lot behind ours, and we could hear the muffled beat of bad Eighties music from our stage.  Many, many pictures were taken.  After that, my eldest sister in law and her husband did something which I have been told is somewhat unconventional for Pakistani receptions, which is they took M and I around to every table, and we said hello to everyone and thanked them for coming.  M shook hands with all the guys and I got hugs or nods from all the women.  It was actually really fun, but exhausting.  The whole thing really didn't get going until around 10:30 p.m. and by around 1:30 a.m., the crowd had thinned out and we actually got to sit down at a table and eat.  The food was delicious, including a lot of my favorite things, chicken biryani, palak paneer, sikh kabab, kulfi for desert, and diet coke!  As we were finishing our food, and everyone else had gone, we felt the first few drops of rain hit our faces.  It had held off for the whole reception, just as we had hoped.  We gathered our things and left before it began pouring, thankful for a beautiful reception and no rain.

Here I am holding M's cousin's little baby.  His family told me it was good luck for the new bride to hold the youngest baby in the family. 

Enjoying my diet coke before the rain started coming down.  Wouldn't this make a great ad?  I'm holding the bottle with the label turned just the right way, lol!