Do you take this stranger?

It was near midnight at the Railway Club, a posh spot at the train station in Gorakhpur, close to the Nepal border. Hundreds of guests had gathered four hours earlier to eat made-to-order dosas and Indian-Chinese fusion finger-foods, to watch green, red and gold fireworks explode over palm trees and to dance to bass-heavy Bollywood tracks.

My cousin’s wedding would soon begin.

A family astrologer had recommended the date and advised that the wedding start after 10 p.m. and conclude before 4 a.m. Those last hours would end six days of ceremonies, the first reunion of my maternal family in two decades and my first full Hindu wedding. They would also end my uncle’s efforts to arrange a marriage, and a future, for my cousin.

All of it -- the years spent selecting a suitor, the final minutes of anticipation, the newness of the couple, a man and woman not shaped by former loves and heartbreaks -- was romantic in a way I hadn’t expected. Growing up in America for all my 25 years, I’d long ago given up on the tradition, but by midnight, I had started to wonder.

What I never realized, as a googly-eyed adolescent who had imagined eloping with a George Clooney type, was that “love marriage,” as many Indians call it, is the aberration.

Arranged marriages are common in countries and cultures that came belatedly to Romanticism and rock ‘n’ roll and whatever else gave rise to what we call youth. It’s difficult to quantify them because the term is such a broad one -- encompassing a childhood betrothal and a parent’s mere suggestion of a vetted match.

My cousin’s arrangement was closer to the latter. Her father found Vishal through one of my paternal cousins. Shockingly for this conservative swath of north India, sometimes called the “cow belt,” he set a date for them to meet without a chaperon.

“He looked better in person than in photographs,” Garima Upadhya, 26, said, recalling their first meeting. “He was always laughing and joking.”

They next met at their engagement party in Gonda, Garima’s hometown. Two months after that they would be married; the all-nighter wedding would be the most time they’d spent together.

That’s still more time than my mother had with my father before marrying him in 1969, in the same house where Garima was raised.

They met face to face when my father looped a garland around my mother’s neck at their wedding. They moved to the U.S. within months.

My father attended school while my mom improved her spoken English by watching daytime television, the teacher to so many immigrant women. Whereas Garima called her sister’s cellphone only hours after driving off with her husband, my mother had to save up for a short, staticky call home.

She tried to hold on to her old life and customs, but when she patted the part of her hair with sindoor, a red powder many Indian women wear to denote their marital status, Americans worried that she was bleeding.

She wears it only for special occasions now, and so, for Garima’s wedding, she applied sindoor and piled on the other many accessories of married Indian women: thick gold bangles, anklets, toe rings, a wedding ring and a mangal sutra -- a gold-and-black beaded necklace.

Beside her, I felt nakedly unmarried and young.

For five nights, the guests arrived at dusk at the house in Gonda.

The first ceremony was the sangeet, a sort of bachelorette party. A crowd of 200 women drummed tablas, danced and sang funny ad-libbed songs about the groom.

I had seen one sangeet in the U.S., performed on a stage by a handful of women. It was more a folk art display than a boisterous, inclusive party. Still, it was something.

The next day brought a ceremony that’s rare in India because it requires a body of water within walking distance. A nain -- a jack-of-all-female-trades hired to preside -- began the ceremony by painting in red ink a thick line around each woman’s feet, in the manner of Hindu goddesses and old-time Bollywood actresses. The ink would last longer than the days of celebration. She made sure to break mine at the heel, signifying that I was unmarried.

Then the nain led us, a line of singing, sari-clad women darting between motorcycles and rickshaws, to the nearest pond.

There, my mother dug a mound of dirt that we would take back to Garima. In an earlier time, Garima would have sculpted it into a hearth for her new home.

My grandfather explained the ritual. “The bride is being uprooted from her family,” he said in his nimble English. “And so the women uproot the soil.”

While we sang and prayed, Garima packed and gabbed constantly with her future husband on her cellphone.

Despite her unabashedly joyful voice, I still found myself wondering why she decided to have an arranged marriage. All our cousins had had “love marriages” and had still won parental approval, however reluctant. My parents have never expected me to have an arranged marriage, even if they praise the practice and occasionally name-drop eligible bachelors.

Garima was never the shrinking Indian ideal of a girl. She was brash and essentially American like me, and always had been. When I visited India every two or three summers, we were inseparable.

At about age 5, in matching miniature bridal saris, we vied to see who would receive more compliments. A few years later, we were disrespectful to our elders; we talked back and threw tantrums.

As teens, we bragged about boys, despite our meager experience with them. She was mostly obedient to her father, who forbade her from talking to boys out of earshot. I was shy, studious and either was ignored or mocked by boys.

Now, Garima was lecturing me on love.

“Swati,” she explained to me in her slightly patronizing English, “love grows with time. You don’t just fall into it.”

It didn’t matter that I had been in love before -- the kind you fall into, the kind that does grow with time, but breaks, perhaps because no arrangement, no contract, no children held it together. It didn’t count because it was unsanctioned by marriage.

My grandfather made this clear when he sat idly reading my palm one afternoon, a small-time hobby for him, an 84-year-old criminal defense attorney. He observed the two creases between my pinky and heart line.

“And you will have one great love,” he said.

“But there are two lines,” I said.

He paused, raising my hand to his glassy brown eyes, and stared hard at the unmistakable pair of lines.

“I see only one,” he said. “And it is yet to come.”

By my family’s standards, my spinsterhood is imminent. An arranged marriage had always been an appealing Plan B -- if I failed at romance or a career, if I got tired of being alone and wanted a family, my parents could simply find me a gainfully employed man, as long as I was still fairly young and decent-looking and virginal, not too tan or too irreligious, not a smoker or a drinker. (I have trouble with some of those; I won’t say which.)

Garima explained why she opted for an arranged marriage one afternoon, after we had spent some time recalling the boys she had crushes on in high school.

“I know Papa would never choose anyone but the best husband for me,” she said.

I had heard the reasoning before -- from my parents, mostly. It assumes that one’s parents know one best. That might have been true for Garima, who had never lived apart from family, who had never had an actual boyfriend and had few secrets to keep.

But by accident of birth, I had been an American child and dorm-dwelling student, a great keeper of hidden diaries, a believer in privacy. Since I was 18, I had scrupulously hidden parts of my life from my family, collecting and losing loves, as it seems women must to grow up. But why should I believe that the secrets I keep are what make me most me? When I’m in India, surrounded by the comfort and community of my big family, by Garima’s glowing youth and uncanny wisdom, that seems too American a notion.

For two hours before her wedding, Garima waited for her groom.

She wore her wedding lehnga, a deep-magenta full skirt and fitted blouse, all embroidered with silver and gold thread and blue, pink and silver beads. She sat still so as not to upset her veil, or her heavy gold-and-ruby nose ring, a hoop the size of a silver dollar connected to matching earrings with a chain across her cheek. A necklace dripped from her collarbone to her waist, and a dozen bangles were stacked on each arm.

She was overwhelmingly beautiful, and seeing her made me indulge in a girlish daydream of my future wedding, which as a child I envisioned as white, but which I had years ago started to see in pink and red and gold.

Garima, her sister and her female cousins were hiding, waiting for the baraat -- the groom’s party -- to arrive. We peeked through curtained windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the men dancing down the red carpet, and the groom emerging from his horse-drawn carriage.

When the baraat finally arrived, as fireworks erupted and spelled, in English, “Garima Weds Vishal,” my family greeted them, offering the groom sweets and a quick prayer. We women stayed hidden, holding Garima’s train above the dusty floor as she extended a solitary arm out a tinted glass door to toss rice toward the groom.

Finally, when she appeared, she looked dutifully melancholy. As the couple stood onstage before the crowd and exchanged flower garlands -- like exchanging wedding rings -- she had only the faintest flicker of a smile. Vishal’s grin was broad, but mostly, Garima’s lips were pouted, her head bowed.

That expression held as the bride and groom walked seven times around the fire, as the groom’s sister tied a knot with their two scarves, as their parents washed the couple’s feet. I was sure it was exhaustion, the oppressive weight of her clothes, nerves, an act -- as the good, sad daughter. It couldn’t be what my mother had felt at her wedding. I wondered as a child, seeing my mom’s expression in photographs, if she had been forced into marriage, if she loved my dad, if they should divorce.

But by the time the wedding ended at 4 a.m., it became clear to me how sincere Garima’s sadness was. She had one journey to make alone, while her husband waited in his car. It was the bidai -- the parting.

The family lined up to say goodbye. Garima’s tears, initially just shining around her eyes, began to fall thickly. Her shoulders heaved, and soon she was wailing, a long, loud, high wail, bursting forth from a sadness I couldn’t understand. It scared the emotion out of me; I felt like an alien American, who would never know this strange mix of pain and exhilaration that all the women in my family had known.

Just before Garima reached me, just as I had finished rehearsing what I would say to her in the most profound Hindi I could muster, she cried for her sister, who rushed to her. She sobbed for her father to take her home, but instead, they walked her to the car. Outside, the sun was rising.

Usually, I am the one embracing a line of tearful relatives to say goodbye. This is what I did the day after the wedding, except Garima wasn’t there. There was little crying -- the wedding had exhausted us.

I thanked my grandfather for teaching me about some ceremonies. He replied in short, sharp English: “Don’t write about it. Do it.”

It might have been a simple nudge toward marriage, but I couldn’t help but hear the same infuriating drop-your-job, find-a-man advice of too many bestselling American books.

My grandfather, with his broad shoulders and bullhorn voice, just needed fewer words. And they cut more deeply, because I knew that I couldn’t just “do it.” It’s too late for me to have a rite of passage that combines a wedding, prom and first date and moving out of your parents’ house and in with a man.

I moved down the rest of the line thinking deeply on the tradition I was rejecting by living the way I do. Seeing that tradition as a boisterous, living spectacle had made it harder to dismiss, and harder to see my choices as inevitable or obvious or easy.

Garima’s younger sister was last in line. We were now the only unmarried ones in the family. Though that status signified so much for me -- ambition and freedom, failure and loneliness -- for her it was an unremarkable fact. At 23, she could switch it off like a light by asking her father to find someone.

She gave me a long hug, and I asked jokingly when I should book my next ticket, for her wedding. She smiled and uttered the most reassuring words I’d heard in a while:

“Don’t wait for a wedding.”

Epilogue: After a honeymoon in Goa and a month getting to know the in-laws in Gorakhpur, Garima moved to Vishal’s apartment in Gurgaon, a rich, sprawling New Delhi suburb. He works as a computer engineer while she gets to know her new city and circle of friends. She seems happy.

For me, returning to the United States always requires forgetting the realities of my Gonda days -- that pink can be worn with orange; that hot showers are a luxury; that marriages can be made by people other than those doing the marrying. It took a few weeks to readjust to my life here, but now that I have, only with deliberate effort can I recall what appealed to me about my cousin’s way of marriage. But then I imagine myself in her place, and it is not unappealing.

--

swati.pandey@latimes.com