Kashmir Diary: Wedding season is back in Kashmir

It's spring and the wedding season is back in Kashmir.

Actually, the major wedding season is autumn. That's when the rice crop, Kashmir's staple, is in; the sheep that Kashmiris prefer to other meats have been fattened through the summer, and chillies, onions and walnuts too are fresh.

Last September and October, it had begun to seem that the entire valley was getting married. One would daily pass strings of Maruti cars, comprising a barat (groom's party).

The car carrying the groom would be decorated with plastic flowers and the one in front of it invariably had a video cameraman crouched in the luggage space recording the journey to the bride's house for goggling posterity.

Kashmiris spend huge sums on weddings. The families of both the bride and the groom often purchase 500 to 800 kilograms of meat each for the feasting that lasts for at least a week after a wedding - and for several days before too.

It has become the norm over the past five to ten years to slaughter vast numbers of sheep and, at the end of the day, to waste a colossal amount of wonderfully well cooked food. This vast consumption is not an old tradition.

Even 15 years ago, seven dishes was the maximum anybody served, except perhaps the exceptionally rich and famous.

Older Kashmiris say that, particularly in rural Kashmir, only three or four dishes would be served at a wedding in the years before independence.

The new trend is no doubt a symptom of the pressure to keep ahead of the neighbours that comes with rapid socio-economic mobility.

At one wedding I attended in village Haripora near Kangan last October, the waza (chef) told me he was preparing 23 dishes for the barat that was to come the next day. The bride was the daughter of a milkman. The family business is evidently flourishing, since they have a well patronised shop in Kangan.

One of their neighbours estimated that they must deal in 500-600 kilos of milk every day, selling some of it as yoghurt and some as paneer (cottage cheese). Whatever their income, they were clearly spending lakhs of rupees on just the feasting.

The bride's uncle told me 700 kilos of meat was to be served. I happened to be invited as part of the barat too. When I arrived for the feast, I found that, in addition to the meat dishes, there was a paneer curry, a mushroom curry, a spinach preparation, a curry of Kashmiri apples and another of apricots.

Needless to say, it was almost impossible to get up after that gargantuan meal.

Like every Kashmiri feast, the guests were seated on sheets in a vast tent and a large platter, called a trami, placed between every four guests. Each trami was heaped with rice, over which was placed a curry made from a mince, in each quarter of the trami.

The trami is so large and the mound of rice so large that no one really needs to touch anyone else's food. The rice itself becomes a sort of dam separating each quarter.

Over the initial mince were placed two long seekh kebabs (grilled mince rolls), one large shammi kebab (round cutlet), two racks of ribs (singed into the famous tabak-maz), two halves of chicken grilled differently, a smallish raan (leg of mutton) and another large chunk of mutton.

All that was just for starters. Almost immediately, the wazas‚ boys began to make their rounds with one delicacy after another. These would be expertly tossed into the centre of the trami, from where each guest could pull whatever he wanted into the little pit formed by the rice in his quarter of the trami.

Gravy was dished out separately into each pit. I lost count but there were certainly at least seven meat curries, apart from the vegetarian ones I have already listed. Actually, the apricot curry wasn't really vegetarian. It too had meat in it.

On the side, the four guests around each trami were provided a large bowl of yoghurt, a two litre bottle of Coke, a couple of bottles of mineral water and a plate containing half-a-dozen chutneys, onion salad and pickles.

People still complained. It wasn't terribly well cooked, they said. One of my friends here told me that's just par for the course. If people can't complain about the variety of dishes served, they will make faces about the quality of the cooking.

That's one of the reasons hosts go to such endless lengths to provide a more than ample spread - although they know that perhaps half of what is served will be wasted.

At another wedding I attended, the four of us at one trami wasted a mountain of meat, which we kept tossing onto the plate on which the chutneys had been brought to us.

In this culture of wastage, it has become commonplace to carry back plastic bags full of whatever one is not able to consume.

The more intriguing aspect of all this, of course, is the fact that people clearly have more money in Kashmir, particularly over the last three or four years, than they know what to do with.

It has been generated over the period of militancy. Where it came from nobody is quite able, or willing, to say.