A legend was doing the rounds at the weddings of some of my friends who got married recently. It is in the form of a song that the grandmother of one of the grooms used to sing. From what I made of the hushed voices that spoke about it, it was a very lewd song. No one seemed to recall the exact lyrics — except that it was a song about the penis of a very “lusty” guy. And certainly, nobody seemed keen to repeat what they had heard, even if there was something they remembered. This is perhaps typical of marriages that take place in cities — they tend to be a little too prudish and sophisticated for those used to having mindless and somewhat bawdy fun at weddings.

When a close friend got married in a small town in Gujarat, the atmosphere was abuzz with sexually explicit jokes. The aunts’ and the greataunts’ references to foreplay and sex in normal conversation seemed a bit crude for the sensibility of some of us who had accompanied the bride to Gujarat from Calcutta, where the environment is much more subdued and mild flirtation between the groom’s friends and those of the bride is perhaps the only liberty they allow themselves.

A window is what people are always on the lookout for — a gap that will enable them to relax all those strictly observed norms imposed by habit or tradition. Sex education may not be permitted in our schools for the fear that children may get to know more than they should. Neither are people encouraged to talk of sex openly, although that does not stop the proliferation of pornography. But at weddings and in the related rituals, an erotic body of songs, jokes and games emerge from the mainstream of culture itself, for it is tradition itself that produces these texts, giving people a chance to drop their guard, even if for a short while.

Much of society’s anxieties stem from its belief that certain kinds of knowledge are harmful if unleashed upon people prematurely or indiscriminately. Innocence, embodied in the virgin bride, must make a smooth transition into Experience, which a wife is expected to have, founded on sexual, more specifically reproductive, knowledge.

In some communities, an older married woman, usually a sister or an aunt, is allotted to the bride to answer her queries and soothe her anxieties, if any, regarding the sexual act that she would soon have to perform. The role of this companion, as it was traditionally conceptualized, is hardly ever played any more since the bride obviously does not wait until the marriage ceremonies to learn about sex. The bride pretending to be sexually ignorant during the wedding rituals is important to sustain the complicated drama that reaches, to use an unfortunate metaphor, its climax in the consummation of the marriage without any glitches.