Tradition lets women go home again

The tradition is old and has changed some now that women have more independence in India. But for centuries, when a woman married, she lived with her husband’s family. A newly married woman could not easily communicate with her parents if she lived far away, not in the time before telephones and e-mails. So the first summer after marriage, the woman’s brothers traveled to collect her and bring her home.

There the newlywed gathered with family and friends to dance, sing, tell jokes and gossip about the peculiarities of her husband’s family. At her mother’s home, the young woman was served all her favorite foods, allowed to sleep late and babied once again. She nourished her roots, and after a few weeks, she was collected by her husband to go back to his home, where her mother-in-law ruled.

This tradition evolved into a summer women’s festival known as “Tian.” Saturday in a Spokane Valley home, about 100 women from India gathered to celebrate Spokane’s first Tian. I was honored to receive an invitation from Sital Kaur Gill, a Sikh woman I wrote about in January who runs the Driscoll One Stop in north Spokane. She’s been homesick for India lately. She and her friend Kalwant Floura planned Tian to ease their homesickness. They told me the rules: Wear your finest dress. Wear your heaviest gold jewelry. Prepare to party.

VJ Pavani, a column regular, is Hindu, not Sikh. But she knows many of the Sikh women here. She was invited, too. As we drove through Spokane Valley streets, we noted men and women mowing lawns and packing cars for the lake. A typical Saturday in suburbia. We parked in front of a home in a rural setting near 32nd Avenue and Adams Road. We then walked into an alternative suburbia – Sikh women dancing, singing, laughing and wearing traditional dress. I wonder what the neighbors thought.

Some of the women had traveled to the festival from Pullman, Colfax, the Tri-Cities and Cheney. The only true newlywed in the group, Subarna Nagra, symbolized all the newlyweds throughout the centuries feted during Tian. The women placed her on a backyard swing and sang to her. Subarna dwells in two cultures and likes it. The college student graduated from Gonzaga Prep in 2002. She told me that every morning of high school she walked out of her family’s door a Sikh girl and transformed into a U.S. girl once at school. She married a Sikh man last July and now lives with his family in Spokane Valley.

We all celebrated between two cultures. We ate Indian food washed down with Diet Pepsi. Cell phones rang as the older women taught the younger women the ancient Tian dances. The mothers there bragged to me about their daughters’ good grades and career ambitions, as well as their beauty and marriage prospects.

I do not understand a word of Punjabi, the language spoken in Punjab, where many of the Sikh women are from. Yet as I watched the Sikh women tell jokes in their own language, I understood exactly what they were celebrating.

When you return to the place where you grew up, the weariness of adult responsibilities can slip away, especially if you are lucky enough to sleep in your childhood bedroom and smell familiar summer breezes through the window. Older parents say that when their grown children fall asleep under their roof once more, everyone rests easier. It is good to venture home alone sometimes, sans spouse, the marriage books will tell you. The women from India don’t need the marriage experts to tell them why.

The temperature outside Saturday flirted with 100 degrees. But the beautiful Sikh women of all ages, dressed in their finest clothes and gold jewelry, simply wiped off the perspiration with brightly colored scarves and kept on dancing. VJ and I drove home, happy to have experienced Tian, a festival that united all women who have moved from that place where they were young so long ago.