YOU may consider them a chore that must be performed at the behest of the boss's daughter, the neighbour's son or the third cousin. Or you may look forward to them as welcome breaks from life's humdrum drudgery.

Whether borne of obligation or curiosity, boredom or bachelordom, your presence at a wedding in the parade of matrimonial celebrations in the weeks before Ramazan is a certainty. biryani

Depending on your own distance from weddings, your desired frequency of attendance or your distaste for the acrobatic feat of balancing mass-produced and lukewarm Pepsi, you can dismiss these events as escapism, their glee incongruous with conditions in a bleeding city.

There is truth to these laments, and to those of previously peaceful years that denounced them as ugly acts of consumption, the food-laden tables and gold-laden women mocking poverty. There have been laws and prohibitions, prescriptions for serving only soup and soda and curfews to curb revelry — these have failed to rein in the hedonism of celebratory spending.

Wartime weddings are all of the above, amalgams of old hang-ups and some new ones. Yet they are more than that. When wedding guests brave a petrol strike and bomb threats delay the groom, the event becomes an exercise in resilience.

It is perhaps no surprise, then, that urban Pakistanis have begun to evaluate the depravity of current circumstances — whether or not the prevailing circumstances can thwart a carefully planned wedding, hold back committed guests and mess up the delivery of rose garlands. Where others talk of the weather, spiffed-up guests exchanging niceties at a Pakistani wedding reiterate, almost proudly, how disaster and death do not necessitate a cessation of celebrations.

Such banter would suggest that weddings take place war, registering as acts of brave normalcy and disguising the desperation lurking between the lines. All the degradations of conflict and its exacting impact on family relationships, are glibly and surreptitiously contained in the details of these weddings.

A closer look at the inner circle of relatives huddled on the stage at any or reveals just this fatigue of the maintenance of the myth. The clans of yore which stuck together and divided up the work of grand celebrations are no more, as urbanisation and the scattering of families preserve few connections while varying fortunes and limited opportunities try others.

But where relationships have perished, expectations remain, requiring the opportunistic coddling of relations weeks and months earlier so that an adequate number of women can perform traditional wedding rituals and a sufficient number of men can man the reception line. No dissection of wartime weddings would be complete without a mention of the issue of exit. As was the case in Nazi Germany and other conflict-ridden populations teetering on precipitous moments that augured further destruction, the desire to flee and the ability to do so is the mainstay of every relationship formed under its shadow. The situation is no different in Karachi or Lahore, where love and marital bliss bloom faster and fuller when fuelled by the promise of a life elsewhere. Such pragmatic considerations can, like true love, produce some unusual configurations: the slightly older bride, the groom who needs a translator — war casualties of a new sort.

Strewn about them are living versions of their marital future, plumper from the fast food of other shores and toting foreign-born babies, harried by the heat, the memory of which the centrally air-conditioned environs of new homelands has erased. Life just goes on, these groups reminisce in conversations with other exiles on lonely, faraway Eids where the details of Pakistani summers must customarily be resurrected.

There is no data on the number of weddings in Pakistan and so no way to tell whether or not conflict has pushed for an increase in the desire to wed. War by definition extinguishes hope, and the yearning for human contact is an effort to evade its eviscerating effects.

It is tempting to lend such significance to the goings-on at the neon-lit Mughal-i-Azam and Jade Gardens, imagine brides and grooms as warriors against war, their guests as instruments of resistance.

While such analogies may be overdrawn, the altered anatomies of weddings in wartime do point to the failure of family ties in the face of changed realities. The daily uncertainty, the lack of direction for the future, all point to a crucial need for deeper connections, an urgent desire to reach out for hope and happiness, to convince oneself that everything will be okay.

Weddings that take place during war, like the war itself, reflect questions that a society doesn't know how to answer or whose reality it is unwilling to accept. Pakistanis, particularly urban Pakistanis, live in a world where family connections are tenuous and opportunities limited, where a wife's salary is needed just as much as the husband's and foreign passports can trump fair complexions.

Like the terrorist, whose presence continues to be debated, the changed world where the nuclear family is replacing the extended one, where the unnecessary size of acceptable weddings means crowds lured by free meals rather than filial love, remains an unacknowledged reality.

While wedding venues may aid and entertain the delusions of peace, shutting out both the heat and gunshots in chandelier-lit cocoons of fantasy, the realities of war — wily and persistent — have managed to gatecrash the party.

The writer is an attorney teaching political philosophy and constitutional law.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com