My sister and I slept in quite a bit on Wednesday but we did have to get up eventually and get ready for the day. There is a daily power cut here in Sulur from 9am-12pm and then again at some point in the afternoon/evening. It's really quite annoying but there is nothing that can be done especially since this time around we have a generator that lets us use the lights and fans during the power cuts. I made a round of calls to various family members to let them know that we had arrived. Since we are only here for a week we weren't really planning on going anywhere but to see my grandfather (dad's dad) who lives about 3 hours away.
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| With Rithika (neighbor) and Ashvatha |
First up visitors-wise: My cousin Bhavani, her husband (my uncle) Rangaraj Mama, their kids Rithani and Kavin, Bhavani akka's older brother Bala Anna, his wife Selvi, their daughter Asvatha and Bhavani Akka and Bala Anna's mother, my aunt. Bala Anna and his wife are building a new house/apartment building and were having the puja (blessing) for the new house the next morning and had come to invite us to the ceremony. Their new house was literally about 50 yards diagonally across from our house so we all we had to do was walk across the grass. There was a dinner tonight, the puja was supposed to start at 3:30am (we are all about auspicious times here in India) and there would be breakfast around 7-8am and then lunch at 12am.
The kids stayed back at our house while everyone else left to go prepare everything for the ceremony and the onslaught of guests. There were probably going to be around 300 people that were coming and going throughout the night and the next day. We headed out to the new house around 7pm which started the barrage of relatives coming up to us to ask us when we had arrived, how we were doing, how our parents were doing, if we remembered them, how old we were, what we were doing, how long we were in India for, what we were doing in India and on and on and on..... We have a huge family and here in India you keep in touch with pretty much everyone even if they are your fifth, sixth or even tenth cousins. So basically about 50-60% of the people at the puja were related to us and another 20% knew my grandparents and mother and therefore "knew us."
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| Ashvatha and Rithani |
My sister and I? We knew about 0.1% of the people there. We spent a lot of time playing the do you remember me? Well take a guess game with everyone there. And let me tell you this was a lose-lose situation. I literally knew 10 people that were at the ceremony however pretty much everyone else knew us, knew of us, or hadn't seen us since my first visit when I was 4 but still expected me to remember who they were. Regardless we had a fun time, the house was all decked out in lights and there were a ton of people milling around everywhere. A tent was set up as a place for people to eat and there was a smaller canopy set up for people to sit under. People were arriving left and right and pretty much everyone that had come from out of town was going to be spending the night in the new building. There are three floors and six apartment units in the building and everything is empty so everyone was just claiming their spots and sleeping for a few hours before they needed to get ready for the puja at 3:30am. Thank goodness that we lived close enough to go home and sleep in our own beds (which aren't really that comfortable) but at least we were sleeping on beds and not on the floor. Rangaraj Mama came back with us because he didn't want to sleep on the floor either and none of us were planning on being at the puja at 3:30am. My grandmother decided she was only going to come to the puja in the morning because she didn't want to tire herself out being at the house the entire time. We decided that we would get up around 4am (yipee, such a better time) and then wander over once we got ready to see everyone and the puja.
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| My grandma with Rangaraj Mama (Uncle) |
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