All that glitters…

Now that I have lived here for nearly a year, certain images elicit different responses from me than they do for you. Let me give you some examples:

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Image: Unaccompanied children under the age of three wandering in the street

You: These children have lost their mother and she must be found

Me: Hey, kids! Have some candy!

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Image: Thick, hairy legs ending in high heels

You: Transvestite

Me: Average working woman

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Image: Wedding

You: Happiness and celebration of love

Me: Crying my eyes out

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I’ve been to two weddings in the last couple of weeks (’tis the season) and I hate to sound negative, but if I’m going to sound negative, I might as well go all out: I absolutely and totally revile every minute of them. It’s a good thing this is not my native culture, because everything is still blessedly interesting to me. I don’t think I’ll be able to manage any weddings next spring, now that I know what’s coming.

My good friend Naseeba got married first, a wedding greatly anticipated since the man who had been following her around in his Mercedes and unsuccessfully trying to woo her went over her head and won approval from her parents. She’d grown accustomed to the idea since then, and was utterly serene in her cream puff dress, but I was a wreckage of inner turmoil and my wedding toast was something along the lines of “I know you’ll make the best of this dire situation” (it was in English, understood by nobody, and I smiled charmingly throughout: give me an Oscar). She now wakes up at five every morning to scrub and cook and serve tea, and I’ll see her rarely, if ever again. That’s it: she’s gone. Weddings are to girls here what the cliff is to lemmings, what the vending machine drop is to a bag of chips, what the plank is to a pirate.

But nobody here shares my sense of tragedy. Nobody seems to care at all, really. The focus of a wedding is decidedly not on the bride and groom, but rather on the free food, the dancing, the entertainment. It wouldn’t be so tragic if other people were paying attention to the matter at hand, but their complete indifference only fans the flames of my agony.

Okay, agony’s a bit dramatic. But one of my closest friends here was just given away as a household slave to a family she has no emotional connection to, and all my tablemates talked about was when were we going to dance and please pour me some more Fanta. For the love of pita!

A week later I attended the wedding of my host cousin, and after the party a big group of women and I accompanied the bride to her husband’s house. She, unlike Naseeba, had actually dated the guy for three years and it was (more or less) her choice to be marrying him. But what tapped my tragedy reserves on this occasion was the manner of her delivery into a new life. Once she’d arrived at her in-laws’ house, she was seated in a corner of a large room, and in front of her was hung a large cloth to hide her from sight. Forty or so women sat near her, eating, drinking, and talking (not about her), and she fell asleep in her little fort. I’ve never been much of a fantasy-wedding-concocter, but I can tell you right now that hours after my wedding I won’t be falling asleep in a corner.

Uzbeks do a lot of things well. They host extremely well, they dance like royalty, their music is haunting, they speak a beautiful and creative language, they hold funerals and post-funeral parties that I envy for their raw release of emotion and unbridled outpouring of support.

They do not do love well.

And sometimes I want to scream: wake up! There is a large world out there in which many people choose their wives and husbands. In which people fall in love, break hearts, break dishes in fury, cry with happiness on their wedding day. Arranged marriages are fine, but in the same way that Hamburger Helper is fine. Arranged marriages are meant for societies that are struggling to survive, for which early marriage and lots of babies in succession are necessary reassurance that the generations will carry on. This society is rooted in that tradition, but things are not that way anymore. Yet somehow love hasn’t made it into the collective consciousness. It’s not talked about. It’s not longed for. It’s not agonized over. Which makes me wonder: what do females between the ages of 15 and 35 do all the time?

I miss love. I miss seeing people holding hands and going on dates and flirting. I feel its absence in advance for my little sisters, one of which said yesterday that she wants to be a bride, too, and I couldn’t swallow for a second because I was choked by the knowledge of what that will mean to her, and worse, what it won’t mean to her.

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I posted some photos and a video of the weddings. You can find the photos at the link below, and the video’s on my facebook page (sorry, I tried to embed it but it didn’t work!)

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=182329&id=647796540&l=d6ceff5efb