The bride wore bulbs

Tulsi got married the other night and the whole village celebrated the wedding. I was invited and went out of curiosity to see this marriage of a sacred plant to a god.

There is something so simple and serene about a Tulsi plant lit by the quiet flame of a diya in the evening. But for the wedding, my neighbour Nirmala had decorated her Tulsi with strings of tiny lights and the bride looked quite garish. On the ground beside her a little fire was burning and there were coconuts and flowers. Men and women went round the Tulsi crying: 'Govinda! Govinda!' Afterwards crackers were burst and everyone was given pedas and a handful of puffed rice and jaggery.

But who did Tulsi get married to? – I asked. Amazingly, no one knew. In fact, they were quite thrown by the question. 'See those sticks tied to the Tulsi?' a young man finally told me. 'She got married to those sticks. They are her husband.'

Nobody knew the story of Tulsi or understood the significance of the ceremony. Nobody had thought about it and nobody cared. I always thought traditions in villages remained deep and pure, that villagers themselves were rooted in these traditions, that the old myths were central to their lives. But it's not so. The whole thing is just a farce, an empty ritual. Time-pass.

People will embrace anything and everything if it's sanctioned by religious tradition, and they won't find it absurd at all. It's all right for a god to marry a plant. Or for a man to marry the sun or a tree or a fish. The wedding of a (rather ugly) plant with sticks is celebrated. But the prosaic reality of a man loving and wanting to marry another man, or a woman wanting another woman, is regarded as strange and weird and sick, even criminal. What a strange world it is.