The background; Kahlia and Sarah work with an Indian doctor whose brother got married in Chandigarh last week. Before our departure they were invited to come to the wedding. A long story short we were in Chandigarh without having any details on how to contact the friend. Worse still the friends last name was Kaur… the generic last name for all Sikh women… the wedding was in a Sikh city of 1 million. In retrospect the odds of finding the wedding were slim.

Unperturbed I spent the first night intruding into wedding processions asking if anyone was from Australia. Lots of no’s and a few strange looks later we still hadn’t found our wedding. So after 2 nights in India’s version of Canberra we set off to the hill station of Shimla.

An uneventful day in Chandigarh, but in the evening as Sarah and Adam ate their 30Rs Vegetarian Thalis (I already ate, and Reagan was snuggled up in bed by 7pm), 2 Punjabi girls made it increasingly obvious that they were enamoured with Adam.  They mustered the nerve to approach our table after numerous smiles were exchanged.  Let me introduce our new friends, Sachleen, Raman & Vicki.  Vicki was their male cousin.  Despite their English being fantastic, they made many apologies for it as apparently we were the first tourists they had ever met and spoken with.  They laughed at the futility of our wedding search, and explained that the myriad of fireworks exploding that night were not for weddings after all, but the birthday of their first Guru. When the girls realised the extent of Adam’s infatuation with fireworks and crackers, they took us to vendors selling a varied display of large and small wears and insisted on buying 100Rs worth for us to set off together.  I was quite concerned that Adam was going to blow himself up (as Sarah almost did) but he seemed to possess a degree of luck.  Luck is apparently required not to blow yourself up when lighting Indian made crackers.  They are as likely as not to explode in the air as on the ground…