Mumbles from Mumbai

Fauxhawk and I are in Mumbai, but more on that later.

Christmas is a huge, elaborate affair in my family. We are an unwieldy, chaotic mob -impossible to wrangle, difficult to contain. Fauxhawk has had to take aerial shots of our family gatherings to capture the madness. Add a church pageant, several babies, family friends, relatives, Fauxhawk's lovely father, a gargantuan mountain of presents, a huge Douglas fir, a groaning board of delicacies (my mother's baklava is a highlight), countless showbiz types belting carols by the piano, and you've got Christmas Eve at our house.

Our parents met for the first time amid the chaos. Fauxhawk and I spent a lot of time wringing our hands over the logistics and details, the shuttling of presents and parents back and forth, but everything went well, all in all. Despite the usual histrionics that go on in my family, everyone was on good form and behaved according to rank. Good Child was mostly good, Bad Child was mostly bad, and Medium Child burst into tears in the car shouting, "I FUCKING HATE CHRISTMAS!" at least once (maybe twice).

Late on Christmas night, Fauxhawk and I regrouped after separate family celebrations that day, and collapsed into the couch in a state of exhaustion. Christmas was over, thank God Almighty.

We left the next day for Delhi, where we slept in the airport overnight due to a hotel mix-up, and then arrived in Mumbai the following morning, 28 hours after we left New York. We spent the evening at Chowpatty Beach with the crowd of families and couples camped out on the sand, tempting gastrointestinal distress by eating everything in sight. Stumbling along Marine Drive with full bellies and cottony heads, we hailed a taxi back to the hotel, slumping over in sleep as the car weaved precariously through a siege of honking cars.

We are preparing for my friend's wedding - an elaborate four-day celebration in Mumbai and Pune, which involves buying a kurta for Fauxhawk, a sari for me, and procuring a mountain of gold jewelry (on loan). Apparently, the wedding also involves a make-up artist, so I look foward (with some trepidation) to being transformed into a Bollywood babe. Needless to say, we are beyond excited to be involved in such a glorious affair.

More details later, I hope.