Over the years, I have cultivated a mildly worrying addiction to advice columns. It’s not the advice itself that interests me, but the problems. Far removed from my own life, each dilemma is a little soap opera scripted in less than 100 words. There is a strange comfort in reading these internet stangers’ problems. They are like aquarium fish in the middle of a busy shopping mall — exotic, sad, untouchable. What to do with ex-step-sons-in-law, neighbours who have noisy sex, the dynamics of pet ownership…

The one thing guaranteed to hurt feelings and cause confusion all around seems to be weddings. Specifically, the destination wedding, which involves transporting entire wedding parties to fairytale settings. Reading these problems I feel a sense of great relief that I live in India, where a destination wedding involves, more often than not, a small town, a fairly long and uncomfortable journey, and the kind of warmth and hospitality that you will remember for years to come.

By the time my college days were beginning to wind down, I had earned the reputation of being something of a wedding junkie. I did not like the awkward affairs in the city where I would have to stand and eat my food in freezing banquet halls, my ability to eat largely hampered by the enormous weight of those five-star plates. Indifferent food was served by bored, indifferent waiters. Though these weddings were a great excuse to get out of the hostel at night, they were not much fun once you actually got there.

The out-of-town weddings, now those were things I loved. The more obscure the town, the better. I crisscrossed south India (Kozhencherry, Rajapalayam, Vijayawada, Nagercoil) in dirty jeans and a backpack stuffed with two saris, heels and a slightly crushed wedding gift.

When you arrive in a small town for a wedding, you are treated like a celebrity. Everyone smiles at you, as if they have heard of you and longed to see you. There is an excitement in the air that is contagious and inescapable. There is too much food, and the smell of sandalwood and crushed damp roses drifts above everything else. You see people — uncles and aunts at their giddy best. They can reinvent themselves when they meet you, a stranger from far away. They can be funny and kind and spontaneous in a way that is impossible to be around people you have known for too long. When you visit for a wedding, and just for a wedding, you don’t know the petty quarrels of the past, the awful things that might happen in the future.

Children follow you around and fight over who gets to sit next to you. You are photographed with people you will not meet again. At some point, you start thinking about never leaving this small town. You could become a schoolteacher, a bank teller, the owner of a small tea-shop. You would never be in a traffic jam again, you could rent a house for less than what you spend on your tiny apartment. As the last bus of the day bounces you out of town, you leave these thoughts behind and try not to think too hard about your need to travel and to never stay too long.

Years later, I would anonymously drive through the same sprawling south Indian towns, and the towns would pass me by. The girls I had watched get married were long gone. Living on the other side of the world or in high-rises far removed from everything else. I remembered how when I was a compulsive wedding-attendee, everyone loved me. I was well-fed, and people I didn’t know smiled at me and held my hand as we talked.

When I got married, I knew it had to be in the dusty old temple town that I pretend is my hometown, Chidambaram. I made my glamorous friends travel by bus and suffer through our power cuts and inadequate air-conditioning. Through the haze of incomprehensible wedding rituals, I could see them in the distance, thoroughly charmed by every inconvenience they encountered. The hotel rooms straight out of a 1980s’ Tamil movie, the tiny bakery that was the source of those baffling sugar-coated murukkus I would bring to the hostel.

There are days when I try and think up problems for advice columnists in the aftermath of an Indian wedding in a small town: I was treated like royalty and it made my socialist self uncomfortable. Or I was fed so many sweets that my clothes wouldn’t fit.

I felt like I travelled back in time to a kinder, simpler world. I laughed and cried and danced with strangers. I wish I had never left.

Snigdha Manickavel is a Hyderabad-based writer

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