The
hot afternoon cooled into evening. The Captain skilfully moored our Nile cruiser
at the small town of Dendera.
Alongside
us was a sort of open-air enclosure in which some 200 white cotton- covered
seats were placed facing a stage. There
was to be a wedding and I would have a grandstand view from the deck. The happy couple, I learned, would have been
formally married in the mosque the day before but the bride had stayed with her
family that night.
About
a year earlier, the prospective groom will have endured a fierce interview with
the father of his intended. He would
have had to establish that he had a job and that he had somewhere to set up
home. Then he would have to propose the
sum of money that he had available. The
bride's father would then have to put up twice that amount as a dowry. The bride then used the combined fund to set
up their future home. The groom’s role was to take just the right amount of
interest, while deferring, naturally, to his future wife on every important
decision. He would have been wise to
assume that every decision was important.
Imagine,
for a moment, working out how to pitch just the right figure. Too low and the bride’s father thinks you
unworthy and the bride will feel short-changed.
Pitch too high and you embarrass the man whose permission you need to
marry.
Tonight’s
ceremony would unite the two extended families. Only after that would the honeymoon
start.
Excited
children ran about. The front ten rows
of seats on the right hand side filled early with the senior women, soberly
dressed, but with bright headscarves.
They were engaged in the serious business finding the seat that properly
reflected their status. The men were
nowhere to be seen.
A
raucous band rattled tambours and blew coarse trumpets. The bride and groom were on their way. Even the men started to take their seats on
the left hand side of the congregation and a curtain was drawn to separate the
sexes.
The
fanfare reaching a crescendo and the bride and groom arrived. To the noise of the band, there were now
added clapping, whistling and ululation.
The groom was a serious looking young man in a western-style white
tuxedo. The bride wore white, mostly
traditional, but with something of the western style of wedding dress. I had noticed two shops selling white
meringues of wedding dresses on our progress through Egyptian towns.
It
was a hot evening and under the relentless flashing neon and camera lights, the
bride fought with a fan to keep cool under her tight white hijab. She looked happy and confident as she sat on
a throne, where she was subjected to a great deal of sisterly and motherly
fussing. The groom looked less at ease,
possibly impatient.
The
band continued louder than before. Lights
rotated and flashed, gas flares roared and a camera on a moviemaker’s boom
swooped over the audience and the couple.
The bride stood up and danced amongst the women while the groom danced
among the men. Men in traditional desert
dress danced in a fog of dry ice, whirling dangerously heavy, wooden staves.
Just 20 or 30 people were dancing and filming as the bride and groom eventually
danced together; perhaps for the first time in their lives. Nearly all the other guests, there must have
been 150 of them, remained still in their seats like a cinema audience, the
curtain remained between the sexes. If
the audience were sharing in the exuberant joy at the front of the arena, they
did not show it.
The
stamina of the wedding party was greater than mine and, after a couple of
hours, I left them to it.
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