Monsoon Wedding

For the last 2 days, I've been playing the soundtrack from Monsoon Wedding, one of my favourite CDs of all time. Singing: aaj mausam bada / beiman hai bada / baiman hai aaj mausam, to mock the rain, each time I step out the door. No other CD I have rides the spectrum of emotion so fully, from the aching poignancy of Aaj Jaane Ki Zid Na Karo to the get-your-groove-on of Babbe Karade Ishq, all in the space of 40 minutes.

For a while after that film came out, it was the Generic Line To Hit On An Indian Woman. As in "You're Indian, right? I gotta tell you, I loved Monsoon Wedding!". I got adept at a blank-stare response: "Monsoon Wedding? Umm - is that a song? Excuse me, I need the restroom."

Which bugged the hell out of me, because I'd loved the film too. Few things are more annoying than having to disown what delights and nourishes you, when it's co-opted in an attempt to fetishize you. Monsoon Wedding made me cry. Twice. First when the father of the bride expels his elder child-molesting brother from the family, just as the wedding guests are arriving. He chooses truth over the facade of family honor. Then again, when he crumbles into sobs in bed, utterly vulnerable in his shorts and vest. The film doesn't protect us from his heartbreak, both over losing his brother, and having failed, as a surrogate father, to protect the niece who was sexually abused.

I couldn't count the number of Indian weddings I've been to. They were a standard weekend feature of my childhood - sometimes two or three in the same weekend. As a teenager, I loathed everything about them. I sulked in the corners of wedding halls, muttering about grotesque ostentation and perpetuation of the patriarchy. As an adult, I have a more nuanced critique of the complex sociology and gigantic industry that feed the production of Indian weddings. But I'm also better able to tap into the dreams they represent, the archetypal myths they re-enact, the pleasure of ritual and festivity. Monsoon Wedding did a fabulous job of capturing both, right down to the tongue-in-cheek irony of the bride and bridegroom being the least important, and least developed, characters in the story.

I went to see it, when it came out in the Bay Area, with my partner at the time. Walking out of the cinema, I asked him: "So, do you think they'll be happy together? The two who got married?"

"Are you kidding?" he said. "Did you totally miss the significance of that scene where he asks her to meet him at the gym, early in the morning, and she's half-asleep? He's a morning person, and she's not. They're doomed, I tell you. Doomed. Like, don't their families check that out before anything else?"

Years later, that still makes me laugh.