Marriage of True Minds

As Hindus marry those of other faiths, the ceremonies are often vibrant examples of mix and match.

BY: Lavina Melwani

If someone had told Steven Fleming, an Irish Catholic, that one day he'd be wearing a bright pink turban and silken kurta pajamas while dancing a Punjabi folk dance at his wedding, he would have said, "You must be joking!"

And if someone had told Gurpreet Bajaj, a devout Sikh, that she would be marrying someone outside her religion, she would not have believed it either. "I never thought I'd ever marry a non-Sikh at all. It would be just too complicated," says Gurpreet.

But Steven and Gurpreet fell in love, and the unbelievable and the complicated became part of their lives. Steven comes from a family of conservative Catholics. Gurpreet, who had never ever been inside a church, went to one for the first time with Steven's mother. She recalls, "It raised a lot of doubts in my mind. I'm a very religious Sikh person-deep down, I like to pray, I like to go to the gurudwara [Sikh house of worship]."

For Steven, too, entering into an alien world was not easy. "When I used to talk about the upcoming wedding ceremony in India, it used to freak him out totally," says Gurpreet. "He couldn't understand why he had to remove his shoes to go inside the temple. I told him, 'We can't have a wedding if you can't remove your shoes, if you can't sit on the floor, and if you can't cover your head.'"

Steven, however, turned out to be a quick learner. He and his family flew to New Delhi for the traditional Sikh wedding at the gurudwara and five days of accompanying celebration. His entire family dressed in Punjabi clothes for the wedding, with all the men in turbans. Steven, like any good Indian son-in-law, touched the feet of all Gurpreet's elder relatives and calmly walked around the Holy Book (the Guru Granth Sahib) in the traditional 'pheras' [circling] that solemnize a couple's union.

Recalls Gurpreet, "He did the pheras better than an Indian would. Even the priest said, 'I have never seen anybody walk so beautifully, with so much dignity, without any rehearsals."

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