The Great Indian Wedding: An Invitation

To Jaipur, where your wedding wardrobe takes shape: sherwanis and lehengas fitted at the family's own tailor, safaSafaThe Rajasthani turban — a single long length of cloth wound around the head, its colour and style signalling region, community and occasion.Read in the glossary (turban) tying practised until it stays up, jewellery — real or rented, both honourable — matched at the family jeweller. Evening dance rehearsal: the sangeetSangeetThe music-and-dance evening held before an Indian wedding, at which both families perform for one another.Read in the glossary has a group number, and you are in it.

The celebrations open: mehndi in the haveliHaveliA traditional townhouse or mansion built around one or more internal courtyards.Read in the glossary garden, your hands hennaed among the aunts as the singing starts; then the sangeet — a palace lawn, a stage, three generations performing rehearsed numbers with unrehearsed joy, your group number surviving contact with the audience. You came as guests; by midnight you are cousins.

The day itself. You ride in the baraatBaraatThe groom's wedding procession, in which he travels to the venue accompanied by dancing family and friends, often on horseback.Read in the glossary — the groom's procession of brass band, drummers and a white mare — dancing the kilometre to the venue because walking it is not permitted. Then the pherasPherasThe circuits of a sacred fire taken by the couple, which constitute the binding moment of a Hindu wedding.Read in the glossary: fire, Sanskrit, seven circuits, the couple bound scarf-to-scarf, and a thousand-person dinner where you now know forty people by name.

Farewells to the family — emotional, with breakfast — then the drive south through the Aravallis to Udaipur and the Lake Palace, the traditional address of the newly celebrated. An afternoon of nothing: the lake, the spa, the slow replay of three days that already feel legendary.

A gentle day among the sights the wedding eclipsed: the City Palace's mirrored chambers, the old city's silver lanes where wedding jewellery is born, a private cooking session recreating three dishes from the feast — recipes transcribed for home — and a farewell dinner afloat as the palaces light up.

Departure day — vidaai, the send-off, which Indian tradition insists be tender. The album arrives before you board: the family's photographers included you throughout, and the frames prove what the week already established — you didn't watch an Indian wedding; you were in one.