Hindu Wedding

This has been a busy week. Monday afternoon was the wedding of my language teacher Basu that I mentioned in my last post. After class we went with the other language teachers to the temple. The wedding was already underway (guests come and go for Nepali weddings, as they last 4-5hrs), and were glad to have the teachers with us to explain where to go and what was happening. There were about a dozen weddings going on at the temple we were at (apparently it was an auspicious day for Hindu weddings). We finally found Basu and his wife sitting in the middle of a crowd of people, with the priest pouring water over their hands, and chanting.

After this, they went into a small open temple, where they sat in front of a fire, with many offerings that were thrown on the fire at different points in the ceremony. The part of the ceremony where they are finally married occurred near the end (naturally, I suppose). A sheet is stretched out from the bride's head to a priest at the other end. He places coloured powder on the sheet and the groom moves the powder up the sheet, and onto the bride's forehead and along the part of her hair. This marks her as his wife, and they are married. After this, they walked around the main temple (clockwise) several times, then went inside for a short while.

Afterwards, they gave out tikas – a Hindu blessing that involves putting red powder on everyone's forehead. We knew that Nepali Christians don't take the tika, so we refused. Instead we were offered the powder, a flower petal, and an envelope (which turned out to contain money!) in our hands. And then it was all over. We had eaten earlier on while the ceremony was going on, so we went home. I don't seem to be able to post pictures on my blog tonight, but you can see pictures of the event here.