From India with love

Imran and Rummana Master were born and bred in Lancashire, the couple decided to leave the damp and miserable weather behind them and get married in Baruch, Gujarat, India.

It wasn't a life long dream to get married there. My dad always wanted to see me on a white horse with the barat in tow and when we announced it to everyone we got a few sarcastic jokes but everyone was really excited about the idea' said Imran.

The last time I was in India I was three years old, so I really didn't know what to expect. But I liked the idea of the adventure and it was something different to the weddings here which all have the same routine".

Rummana , on the other hand, travelled to India every two years for a shopping trip and to see the relatives. All our relatives in England loved the idea of us getting married in India and were more than enthusiastic to come.

Though the initial problem was finding a suitable date for everyone but we eventually decided on January 16th.' Imran said, "I understood the reputation of India, with the dirt that's around and the manners of people there are different.

"You have to go with an open mind there. When you see elephants on the motorway, the traffic in the wrong lane and the drivers hooting for everything which only the native can ever understand, then you have to just think that this is India, so just get ready for it".

The preparations began quite early on, with the parents of both the bride and groom leaving for India in early December and the one hundred guests from the UK arriving early January.

They took the necessities from the UK though - the table and cake decorations and the wedding dress.

Everything that I would have done in England I did in India.' Said Rummana , I wore a traditional English wedding dress on the day and Imran wore a five piece suit. I'm very close to my mother and she understands me more than anyone so I left most of the preparations to her.

"She booked the hotel and arranged for a huge marquee to be erected in the hotels private grounds. She also brought my outfits for the Pithi and the Mehndi.' The groom's father had a collection of pictures and photographs supplied by Imran to help him with his preparations.

"We couldn't be as hands on as we would have liked because of work commitments. I left for India on the 1 January so I could have as many days there as possible and Imran left on the 5th.' Imran was actually going to turn up 5 days before the wedding but changed his mind at the last minute and booked an earlier ticket to have an extra 5 days there. Upon arriving in India, Imran fell ill and was bed ridden for 3 days.

Imran said: "Even though I was ill I knew I had to get things going. The honeymoon was in Goa and I wanted it to be perfect so I spent a lot of time trying to find the best hotel and eventually I booked one of the Taj hotels.

"I had my wedding day outfit sorted but I had to organise the Walima day outfit and in the end I just borrowed Rummana's outfit and took it to the tailors who made me a Sherwani to match. It wasn't delivered until the day of the Walima but it fit perfectly, so no complaints there."

The most important days for the bride include the Pithi and the Mehndi and for this they took advantage of their location.

Rummana said, "My mum wanted to do something different so on the Pithi I wore a yellow sari, we had a colour party, like the colours used for Holi in the Hindu festival and it was such great fun.

"My sister decided on the sly to go and fill a bottle with this colour just as the Pithi was finishing and came out and started squirting everyone. Most of the guest just ran like flies like there was a bomb scare and then everyone joined in including the elders.

"At the end of it nobody would let us into their house because we were covered in colour so we had to wash the colour off us in the middle of the night with a hose pipe!' The Mehndi itself took on more of a grandeur atmosphere. A marquee was erected again for 500 guests, and a stage was decorated with flowers and many cushions. "The Mehndi felt very official, because I was sitting on this stage with lots of pillows and it all felt very grand and elegant. At this point I did miss not having all of my friends with me as only one of my friends could manage to take the time off from work to come but what with all the excitement of the day I hardly noticed in the end."

Rummana took out a couple of more photographs from a different album. "I had a fantastic hen night which also made up for my friends not being there. We hired a hall out in Accrington and we all dress up as fairies and princesses and everybody wore pink!' The venue for the wedding was exactly as the couple had dreamed. Based in the grounds of a hotel, the marquee could hold around 1000 people.

A marquee of that size set the couple back around £100 when it would have cost them over £2000 here in the UK. With the red carpet and decorated, although wobbly stage, all that was needed was the bride.

I couldn't believe the bouquet was so awful and that was why we arrived later than the groom to the venue.' Said Rummana . We did show the florist pictures of how I wanted the bouquet to look, with the foliage a certain way and the beige ribbon and beads to decorate it with but when the bouquet arrived I was nearly in tears. It just seemed like lots of wild roses dumped around some green stuff with an elastic band tied around the bottom of it.

"However, my cousin took the situation in hand and got all the flowers for the men's jackets and bunched them togther, tied some ribbon around it and it looked quite brilliant.' "I was also a little disappointed with the cake. We took our own cake stand that we had used at my sisters wedding because we loved it so much but the cake arrived that day with an extra silver block at the bottom so it looked like a cake stand within a cake stand.

"Apart form these little glitches everything else was brilliant."

Imran said, "I had about 6 large bouquets of flowers in my room on the Walima day and the pillars of the stage and the tables were just completely decorated with flowers and to my surprise it only cost me around £180."

"We also had this fantastic large cake for the Walima which tasted gorgeous and it only cost me £10. The day itself was such a relaxed affair. We had the marquee and the tables set out and the main table looked wonderful too. I just look back and think what a fantastic time we had.

"The day before the wedding we just had a spontaneous poetry night in my village, Bambusar for 1500 people, and Baber Master who runs the Asian Poetry Society in Blackburn recited a poem for an hour. Everyone joined in also, and with the cool breeze of an Indian night it was just perfect".

Money would be the first benefit of getting married in India.

"The overall cost of the wedding was around £2000 and if the couple had the lavish wedding in the UK then it would have set the back at least £15000.

Imran said, My ticket to India alone cost me around £500 which gave 4 weeks in a beautiful country, a chance to see and experience my roots and that £500 here would have only partly paid for the car hire.

"Also, the photographer and cameraman for both sides cost us around £650, which included 2 wedding books with about 200 pages. Here we would have had to pay around £2500".

"The people were also helpful there. Everybody joined in with the preparations, even though only one of my friends managed to come to the wedding, my relatives and I went out every night to enjoy ourselves and I got a personal driver there to take me everywhere".

For all the complaints and the memories they have shared, both Imran and Rummana are smiling away, living the memories again of the wedding week.

Imran said, People are still talking about the wedding which amazes me. It wasn't my intention to have the best wedding; I just wanted something different to experience. And I've got work colleagues who are going to do the same now. One of them is going to have his Hindu wedding at the Marriott in Mumbai which is going to be something else.'