A Day Bride

A day bride

Once our father narrated an incident which he himself witnessed. Long ago, in his teenage years, when he himself was not married, he went to a nearby city with a procession on camels and bullock carts for the wedding of a Punjabi friend. On the return, the bride and groom were seated in the same bullock cart. The bride was wrapped in a large cloak with loose and fringed clothes. She seemed very restless and anxious and kept changing sides. On being asked, he said that he felt something moving on his back. The groom said there will be an animal, let's see and took it and got down from the bullock cart. When he removed his cloak, a snake was entangled in the heavy decorative trappings of the traditional Punjabi wedding bird.

He grabbed the bird and started shaking it, then the snake suddenly jumped and bit him on the neck below the ear. The bridegroom fell down on the ground and started panting and died on the spot. Meanwhile, the rest of the people had also gathered, they caught the snake and killed it and sent the bride back to her home from there. And all these people, who had gone all the way laughing and singing, came back with the dead body of the bridegroom crying. There was chaos in the whole village and every eye was in tears. For a long time, the effects of this tragedy remained on the hearts and minds of all.

Then, after a long time, a strange heartbreaking incident happened again in a nearby village in the same area. On the next morning of the wedding, when the bride and groom did not wake up for a long time and there was no response even after making noises, the door of the room was broken and both were found dead. The cause of death could not be known, but it was a matter of those times when the holiday was on Friday and all the work and business were closed, the burial goods shops were also closed. The relatives of the deceased came to the shopkeeper's house and opened the shop and bought equipment and burial materials. And on the day of Walima, the funeral of a newly married couple was carried out under the tent of Walima, instead of beds and chairs, windows were laid. The pots were also brought down, but the gathering of the deceased's food and feast turned into mourning. This was also a very painful and unbelievable incident which reverberated for a long time.