# A Family Invitation The letter arrived on a Tuesday morning, crisp and white, with "Mrs. Ashok Mukherjee" written across the envelope in a hand that leaned slightly to the right. Inside, embossed script announced that we were invited—the whole family—to dinner. Not to a wedding. Not to celebrate some triumph or occasion that demanded witnesses. Simply to dinner. At their house. In three weeks' time. My wife held the card at arm's length, as if the distance might clarify its meaning. "They've never invited us before," she said. "Not like this. Not properly." She was right. In the eight years since Ashok had moved next door with his wife, we'd nodded at each other over the garden wall, exchanged the sort of pleasantries that neighbors do—comments about the weather, complaints about the servants, observations about the price of fish. Once, when their son was ill, I'd sent over some soup. Once, when my daughter's bicycle tire punctured, Ashok appeared with a pump and fixed it without being asked. These were the small courtesies of proximity, not the beginnings of friendship. "Perhaps they want to be closer," I ventured, though even as I said it, I didn't quite believe it. My wife made a sound—not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. She set the card down on the mantelpiece, where it propped itself between a photograph of our children and a small brass elephant my mother had given us years ago. "We'll have to find something to wear," she said finally. "And we'll have to take something. You don't arrive empty-handed at a dinner like this." Over the following weeks, the invitation became a small stone we both carried in our pockets. I'd catch my wife staring at it while she poured her morning tea. I found myself studying the Mukherji house more carefully—its whitewashed walls, its neat garden, the way lamplight spilled through the windows in the evenings. What were they planning? What did they want from us? A week before the dinner, my wife became certain she knew. "They want to sell the house," she announced, appearing in my study with the certainty of someone who has solved an ancient riddle. "That's why they're being nice. They want to leave the neighborhood, and they're softening us up so we won't be difficult when the new people come." "You're imagining things," I said, but I wondered if she was right. On the evening of the dinner, we dressed with unusual care. My wife wore her good sari—the pale green one with gold thread—and pinned her hair up in a way that made her look like a photograph of herself from long ago. Our children, whom we'd left with my sister, had been bathed and dressed as if we were taking them somewhere important, though they would spend the evening eating sweets in my sister's kitchen. The Mukherji house looked both familiar and strange when we crossed its threshold. The furniture was arranged as we might have expected—heavy wooden pieces that spoke of generations, of established families and settled lives. But there were also flowers everywhere: tuberose in the hallway, marigolds on the dining table, jasmine in a blue vase on the sideboard. The effort of it struck me suddenly, the care that had gone into these small arrangements. Ashok's wife, whose name was Malini but whom everyone called Malu, greeted us at the door. She was a slight woman with sharp eyes, the sort who seemed to be adding up the details of your appearance even as she smiled. Tonight, however, her smile seemed genuine. "I'm so pleased you could come," she said, and she took my wife's hand in both of hers. The dinner itself was elaborate—more elaborate than occasion seemed to warrant. There was fish, and chicken, and a vegetable curry made with coconut milk, and rice, and pickles, and three different chutneys. Malu had spent days, I realized, on this meal. We sat around the table—the four of us, for Ashok and Malu had no children—and for a while, the conversation followed its usual paths. The heat. The rains. A scandal involving the postman. The rising price of everything. It was pleasant enough, lubricated by wine that Ashok produced with a kind of nervous pride, as if he wasn't quite sure he'd selected the right bottle. Then, toward the end of the meal, Ashok set down his fork. "We wanted to tell you something," he said, and I felt my wife stiffen slightly beside me. Here it comes, I thought. The sale. The goodbye. "We're thinking of moving away," Malu said quietly. "To Bangalore. Ashok's company is transferring him there. We've been thinking about it for months, but... well, we finally decided." I waited for the catch—the request for help, the appeal for a favor. But Ashok was looking at us with an expression I couldn't quite read. "The thing is," he continued, "we're going to be here for another year at least, getting things organized. And we realized that we've lived next to you all this time without ever really getting to know you. We wondered if... well, if perhaps we could change that. Before we go." My wife's hand found mine beneath the table. "We thought," Malu added, her sharp eyes softening, "it would be nice to have friends here. Real friends. When we leave, at least we'd know we were leaving something behind that mattered." There was a silence around the table. Outside, the evening had deepened into night. The flowers seemed to glow in the light of the lamps. "Yes," my wife said finally, and her voice was small and sincere. "Yes, I think that would be nice." After dinner, Ashok walked us to the gate. The night was warm, the sky full of stars obscured only slightly by the city's glow. For a moment, we stood there together—four people who lived on the same street, separated by a wall of stone and brick and habit. "Thank you for coming," Ashok said. And this time, I knew he meant it differently—not as the polite formula of a host, but as something deeper. A genuine gratitude that we had accepted not just the invitation, but the reaching out that lay beneath it. On the walk home, my wife held my arm. "We should invite them next month," she said. "For dinner. For real." "Yes," I agreed. "We should." And I thought about how rarely we take such risks with our neighbors—how we build our walls and accept them as inevitable, how we mistake proximity for knowledge, and courtesy for connection. How all it takes, sometimes, is an invitation written in a leaning hand on good paper. How all it takes is the courage to say: *I would like to know you before I leave.*

When a wedding means spending eight to ten lakhs of rupees, or more, to feed one or two thousand people, perhaps more still, I can think of no greater waste. The more guests you invite to your wedding, rest assured, the more money you pour into feeding unnecessary people—often downright useless and harmful ones at that. Every happy couple I've encountered so far, not a single one had a particularly grand or elaborate wedding. Extravagance at weddings would rank near the top of any list of squandered money.

There are plenty of people who labor for years on end, almost inhumanly, scraping together money just to spend it on a wedding. Some take on crushing debts; some have even sold off land and property simply to finance the occasion. The bride's family, more often than not, bears the brunt of this burden. Sadly—and this is the real tragedy—it is usually the groom's side that imposes this upon them. Why? Ask them, and they have ready-made answers lined up: Don't we have a reputation to uphold? Are we uncivilized? The scriptures demand it. (I once heard my uncle claim that some religious text actually prescribes that the couple spend their first night on a bed sent by the bride's father's house!) So-and-so invited us to their wedding; how can we not reciprocate by putting on a show? Our son is a precious gem; surely the bride's family should bear this expense! This is custom, social convention—we can't step outside of it! Besides, the ornaments and furniture are all going to the bride anyway; where's the hardship? And so on. People never run short of such lame justifications.

# Dear Groom’s Family

Dear groom’s family, charity done with another man’s money is not charity—it is sin. Merit earned through another man’s purse is not merit—it is transgression. Unless the rupee comes out of your own pocket, you can spin any number of scriptures, quote them till the cows come home! If you wish to observe dharma, observe it with your own money! What does performing religious rites with someone else’s money even mean? Will the merit accrue to you? Or have you embarked on some grand mission to thrust virtue upon people, forcing them to earn merit whether they wish to or not? Do you think God is a fool?

But let me ask you this: why is your family’s prestige in such a wretched state? Is it so fragile that it needs another man’s purse to maintain it? You are surely not antisocial people, but if you have the courage, why burden the bride’s father with the responsibility of protecting society? Why not shoulder it yourselves? The scriptures contain so much more. How many of those customs do you actually follow? Or is it simply more comfortable to perform the rites of the dead with someone else’s coin? Don’t these hollow fatwas trouble your education or your sense of propriety? By the way, where exactly in the scriptures is this written? And even if it is, why should the bride’s father bear the burden of some scripture-writer’s arbitrary rule? Besides, wasn’t the bride’s father not even invited to so-and-so’s and such-and-such’s celebrations? Then why must he empty his wallet to fill your belly?

If the bridegroom doesn’t perform the shraddha of money at his wedding, will this precious gem of a boy turn to dust? Brother, your gem, I see, is counterfeit! So this is the state of your son! Keep your customs tucked in your own pockets, will you? If you possess even a shred of self-respect, uphold your own customs with your own money. A tradition that requires you to gape open-mouthed at another man’s pocket with your tongue hanging out—is that tradition, or is it beggary? The way you speak about what they will and won’t give when handing over the bride—you needn’t be a rocket scientist to understand what that means. There is a difference between a gift and a dowry. If you had any self-respect and dignity, you would hesitate to accept even a gift. But when someone demands it or brazenly insists upon it, that, in plain Bengali, is called shameless greed. Look at some of these boys and you genuinely cannot tell whether they have come to marry or stepped onto the street with a beggar’s bowl!

This enormous sum of money is spent simply to feed a crowd of people—people who are neither starving nor destitute. Out of the thousand or fifteen hundred or more people you feed at such exorbitant cost, if you pay attention, you will find that except for one or two, not a single one of them will stand by you in your hour of need. When disaster strikes you, most of them will refuse to even pick up your call—yet you consider them indispensable to your celebration! The very VIP guest whom you call two days before the event to remind him, humbly and eagerly, of your gathering—when adversity befalls you, you will see a different face entirely! The guests you summon to your event with such earnestness—when you are in trouble, you will be amazed at how suddenly busy they all become. Here’s something even more amusing to consider. If you think about it, eighty percent of the guests who attend your celebration—invited or uninvited—you will never lay eyes on again in this lifetime! Think about it: whom are we so eagerly and hopefully inviting to our events? Of course, there is little point in saying all this. As they say, a fool’s happiness exists only in his own mind!

# Wedding Expenses and the Price of Kindness

Just to put on a show, to arrange even a single meal for guests—many a father of a daughter has had to bleed himself dry scrounging for money. I’ve seen people lose everything trying to bear the costs of a wedding. Yet it would make sense to keep things modest, spend little, finish the affair quickly, and preserve that money for the couple’s future instead of frittering it away so recklessly. But things work out the opposite way. Because of such unbridled wedding expenditures, many find themselves paying off loans years and years after the marriage. What meaning is there, really, in spending lakhs and lakhs of rupees just to show off, or to feed belly-full some random acquaintances or half-known people you’ve had to drag in? Think about it—at weddings, people feed those who don’t even need the extra food, those who sicken themselves with overeating! The ones who go hungry, the ones ravaged by want and want-born disease—nobody feeds them at weddings. In this world, people stuff food into the mouths of those who need it least.

Instead of throwing away lakhs and lakhs on unnecessary people at a wedding, wouldn’t it be better for the marriage if that money took the young couple on a few trips to places they love? Instead of spending eight or ten lakhs on a wedding, wouldn’t it be far more auspicious for the future to use that money to start a new business or expand an old one? Why slaughter cattle by the dozen to feed guests? That money spent on livestock could be invested somewhere; then the family could enjoy the returns together, go to restaurants or on picnics, and eat biryani of their own choosing. The money we spend at weddings feeding so many half-familiar, unnecessary people—with that very sum we could easily feed ourselves for years. We feed at weddings those very people, many of whom are responsible for much of our sorrow. Here’s the funny part: when it comes time to spend on the wedding, every expense seems necessary, and later, we end up laughing at ourselves!

Money that isn’t spent for one’s own happiness, or one’s family’s, or a dear one’s well-being, or for the good of people—that money simply flows away into nothing. The more money someone has and is willing to spend, the more people flock to them like cats. Money vanishes, and so do the friends! Let me speak from my own experience. In this life, leaving aside other wasteful spending on people, I’ve spent streams of money picking up restaurant bills for people—and not even half a percent of them have ever once bothered to ask how I’m doing, let alone stand by me in times of trouble. People for whom my dying would mean nothing—I’ve still spent time and money on them, foolishly; yes, I still do! Many of them have put me in danger or tried to. A person who does nothing for anyone in life, who benefits no one—nobody chases after such a person, nor does anyone harm them much either. People cling to those who have helped them. But even insults are reserved for the helpful. And those who do good for people without expecting payment—their lives are inevitably, necessarily full of sorrow!

# On Wasteful Weddings

A few hours of showing off in expensive clothes—the money spent on them could buy decent garments for several poor people. That sari, that lehenga, that Punjabi costing lakhs, worn for a wedding—when will anyone wear it again? That single day’s arrangement rots away in the corner of a cupboard as a priceless memory for a lifetime. I’ve known people who spend hundreds of rupees printing each wedding invitation. Those who squander lakhs on renting a wedding venue often don’t have even ten rupees to give to the poor! When food prepared for hundreds of uninvited guests gets thrown into the dustbin, how many people say, “We didn’t need to invite so many!” Yet we ourselves, having poured out money like a river, sometimes sigh and say, Oh, if I had a bit more now, I could do that work!

In times of crisis, people can betray you, but money never does. The people for whose sake we fling money around—we never find them in our hour of need. We lose that money too, as a bonus punishment. Because we perform the last rites of money in the wrong places, our hands never have enough left to spend in the right ones.

The very people you want to impress—to whom you lay out expensive platters, beef curry, mutton rezala, roasted chicken at weddings, paid for with the sweat of your brow or the sale of your land—those same people will eat their fill, rub their bellies satisfied, and as they leave, grumble: “The cheap bastards didn’t put enough salt in the meat!”