A few more days of wedding preparation, Dec 17-20

After a hectic first few days in Jodhpur, we then had a few very relaxing days. We only had to do a few family/friend visits, so we could spend most of our time doing errands, sight seeing, or relaxing. His parents were mostly involved in last minute wedding preparations. One of our favorite wedding preparation stories involves the invitations. When we arrived, we noted the hundreds of invitations that were all around the house. Within a short time, it soon came out, that Abhijeet's parents planned to hand deliver all of the invitations. Remember that at this point the wedding reception is only 2 weeks away. The two sons somehow managed to convince their father that he should only deliver the invitations in Jodhpur and just mail the invitations to other places around the state of Rajasthan. Even with that change, they still have been running around every day delivering invitations and making personal visits. We thought that they were being unreasonable, but soon realized that everyone does in fact expect them to do this. One family member came to visit the house and his parents tried to give them the invitation. They refused to take it and insisted that the invitation was hand delivered to their house. In another case, a staff member at the school where Abhijeet's mom teaches wanted to meet me with delivery of the invitation. She was so upset that she did not meet me that she was crying profusely. She will of course meet me at the reception on December 24th, but she wanted to meet me then.
The other wedding preparations involve dresses and jewelry. Abhijeet's mom makes sure that I have enough bangles to go with every outfit so that I never need to go without them. Yesterday she bought me some with pearl design because she noticed that I was wearing pearl earrings. She has been spoiling me incredibly with an array of saris, lehenga suits, and jewelry.
The evening then came when it was time for Abhijeet to pick out his wedding reception outfit. He would be wearing a sherwani (long tunic type jacket with embroidered decoration) for the occasion. It was supposed to be something of a male outing when he went to pick it out but since they did not want to leave me home alone, I got to join in the shopping experience. We went to the city center to a tailor shop that sold several varieties of sherwanis. I thoroughly enjoyed watching him try on sherwani after sherwani as we watched and gave our input. Unfortunately it was at the time of day when jet lag kicked in the worst, but he was a trooper and kept trying on each shewani that the shopkeeper handed him. You can see the final choice in pictures from the reception.