Before their ‘pyebaek’ ceremony in Udaipur, where the bride formally greets the groom’s family and pays respect to elders, Aerin Lim Vohra and Rahul Vohra were nearly two hours
behind schedule. For Vohra, this was not alarming. He had grown up with a family rhythm where being 10 minutes late was close enough to being on time. For Lim Vohra, who is Korean American and was raised to arrive 10 minutes early, it was close to unbearable. She was already on the verge of tears when Vohra tried to reassure her that nobody expected an Indian wedding to run on time anyway.
A year and a half later, they can laugh about it. Mostly. On their first date, Vohra arrived 26 minutes late to find Lim Vohra already eating dessert with a glass of wine. During their first year of marriage, they kept finding themselves back in the same argument about time while rushing across San Francisco for dinner reservations. At one restaurant, they arrived just past the grace period and lost their table. Lim Vohra still brings it up. She’d considered telling him that their bookings were 20 minutes earlier than they actually were, before deciding that beginning married life with time-related fraud was perhaps not the most auspicious start.
What had first seemed like a personality clash began to look like something inherited from their unique cultures. His lateness wasn’t indifference and her punctuality was not simply anxiety. They had brought different clocks into the same marriage.
During the wedding, of course, this melange looked far more graceful. For the pyebaek, Vohra’s family wore hanboks while chestnuts and red dates were tossed towards the couple, who held out a cloth to catch them, with dates symbolising sons and chestnuts daughters. “Meaning somewhere an aunty was counting future children with terrifying seriousness while everyone else nervously laughed.”
Over the past three months, 17 of the 32 weddings featured on the Vogue India website have involved interfaith, inter-regional multicultural weddings. We have seen Hindu and Jewish ceremonies sharing a Mumbai itinerary, Gujarati rituals travelling to the Sussex countryside and Swahili customs entering an Indian wedding in Kenya. The wedding can usually contain it all because someone has already assigned them a place in the day. Marriage, as Priyanka Ahluwalia, a New Delhi-based sex therapist and relationship counsellor, sees it, is where the same questions lose their borders.
“Couples often assume the big cultural decisions have been made during the wedding,” says Ahluwalia. “But after marriage, culture shows up in small, repetitive ways. It comes through who is expected to travel for a festival, what language fills the living room and which food becomes everyday cuisine.”
Back in San Francisco, Lim Vohra burns sandalwood incense in the mornings and plays mantras around the apartment. Vohra, a start-up founder, sometimes appears with an air quality monitor and asks her to slow down on the smoke. The aromas in their home, depending on the hour, shift between sandalwood, kimchi fried rice and masala chai. Vohra puts gochujang on almost everything, and Lim Vohra hands him Tums for the heartburn that follows. When she speaks to their dog Cotillion, Korean comes out first. “Kaja,” she says, meaning ‘let’s go’. Vohra, whose Korean is perhaps more limited than Cotillion’s, now says “kaja” to Lim Vohra when they leave for dinner.
Kunaal Gosrani Photography
