Mountain Wedding

Himalayan view. Photograph Sudeep Sen

---

by Sudeep Sen

It was good to wake up to the silence of the Himalayas this morning. The shifting grey palette of the clouds was an antithesis to the recent tsunami of stimuli. The pleated, opalus ridges hid their pine-green veneer in obfuscating skies.

The festivities took place in my landlord’s house which is in Almora’s Dungadhara locality. The traditional Pahari wedding is now over. The family’s friends, extended family, neighbours and all the other guests have left. Life is inching back into a normal, everyday routine.

As my cottage, Kranti Kutir, is on a corner of the larger grounds, sharing the hill slope with the festively-lit set of houses. I had a 24/7 ringside view of week-long nuptial revelries. I heard the soothing prayer-chants of many pujas, I smelled the swirling aroma of freshly-prepared organic food, I saw the endless thronging of brightly-attired people, and listened to blaring religio-pop songs beaming off the air, punctuated by banal YouTube advertisements.

---

---

The buzz was palpable. The sparrows, spotted doves, red-vented bulbuls and blue magpies that visit my veranda retreated temporarily.

---

---

---

---

---

---

I enjoyed the intricacies of the local Kumaon rituals, and observed with amusement how elements of the ‘Big Fat Punjabi Wedding’ have now crept into the celebrational fabric of many different communities across India.

---

In the high latitudes skyscapes change subtly, without any public announcement. The light unfolds softly over layered hills. There is something about stillness that is healing.

---

I hear the familiar morning anthems sung by school children, rising from the valley below. I watch a parade of monkeys scurry across the front porch in unregimented platoons. My ninth cup of Earl Grey brews in slow motion on my study table. Its steam-curls rise casting a translucent sheen onto the pages of my notebook.

I reach for my grandfather’s gold-nibbed Mont Blanc and replenish it with the burgundy-tinted ink it thirsts for. As the sun breaks through, lightening the cumulous skies, handwritten scrolls of newly-shaped letters populate the unruled leaves of my diary with serif script.

The beginning of anything is considered propitious — the pre-dawn light, the morning dew-scented breeze, the wake-up call of the whistling thrush, my first words of the day forming, unforming, forming again — with all their loops and erasures.

---

Sudeep Sen is the International and Poetry Editor at Ars Notoria and a leading international poet whose prize-winning books include: Postmarked India: New & Selected Poems (HarperCollins), Aria (A K Ramanujan Translation Award), Fractals: New & Selected Poems | Translations 1980-2015 (London Magazine Editions), EroText (Penguin), Kaifi Azmi: Poems | Nazms (Bloomsbury), Anthropocene (Pippa Rann, Rabindranath Tagore Literary Prize), and Red. Edited landmark anthologies include: The HarperCollins Book of English Poetry, Modern English Poetry by Younger Indians (Sahitya Akademi), and Converse: Contemporary English Poetry by Indians (Pippa Rann). Blue Nude: Ekphrasis & New Poems (Jorge Zalamea International Poetry Prize), Rock, and The Whispering Anklets are forthcoming. His photography represented by ArtMbassy, Rome/Berlin, is part of private/public collections. The Government of India awarded him the senior fellowship for “outstanding persons in the field of culture/literature.” Sen is the first Asian honoured to deliver the Derek Walcott Lecture and read at the Nobel Laureate Festival.