“Biscuits, slabs of white cheese and boiled sweets had been arrayed on every surface”……. “Plate of sheep’s parts, cut with the favoured cut, the great fatty tail, like a grey glacier on a summit”
In a Mongolian wedding they pick up their bride from a Ger their equivalent to a house and drive then in a hired Russian truck for the occasion. A Russian truck is the equivalent of the wedding Rolls. In the wedding Steward meets two families numbering 50 or 60 people, they traditionally each guest had to drink three bowls of airag and three of arkhi, both are alcoholic drinks. They younger sisters were refilling the glasses going back and forth. After three glasses or airag every had to sing a song even Stanley but no one knew his song ‘she moves through the fair’ so he had so sing all four verses, unaccompanied, with a bemused audience. Half way through only realising that’s its about a failed wedding, when they asked what the song was about his interpreter make up a story about a horse and his owner. That adds to the humour of the story. Every one has their own special something about them and Stewart brings that out in them and describes them in a way that people in the west understand,
“The groom’s brother, in his role as best man, was trying to bring some order to the proceedings”….. ”He wore the kind of peaked leather cap favoured by Lenin”
The brother was exactly like Lenin in the revolution days; he had the goatee and had a tendency to stand wave his arms in a declamatory fashion. He commanded people like Lenin did. This is a good way to compare the family. Also there were two brothers one of them who look like Wyatt Earp the legendary sheriff from the American Wild West era.
Large numbers of peoples left together will lead to trouble with the help of airag, and that’s what exactly happened. In Ln 92- is the fight began with the elder sister of the bride rose to leave but was stop during the stop of the sister someone pulled her too hard to return her back to her set and toppled forward, flattening a granny, maybe some of the humour was exaggerate to make it funny. Someone else was throwing a bowl of airag. Suddenly blows were exchanged. In the end the grooms side won for keeping the brides family their, they all settled back down and had another round of drinking and songs. Even the lama was caught drinking airag while the fiasco was proceeding. Stanley in Ln 126 said
“A wedding reception where you got to give your new in- laws a good thumping was the kind of thing the people in the west could only dream about”
Thumping you in-laws is a married couples dream, this too adds to the humour. Stanley uses Mongolian nouns to add realism, colour, humour and authenticity to the piece. The use of nouns makes humour like “flatting” “chopped”. It’s affective by the simple nouns. Stewart’s language is live, energetic without using too many metaphors and similes or other figurative expressions. He is sparing the adjectives but the ones that are used are very effective. The sentence structure is varied thought the piece ‘It cleared the air nicely’. The story has great bits of humour,
“One of the grooms brother had taken proprietorial interest in me”….”When I emerged that I was travelling by horse, he offered me his own horse, a priceless beast according to his own calculations. I demurred but he insisted. “I’ll kill a sheep tomorrow, you can take it with you,’ He held up his fingers quizzically, ‘Have you a wife’ he asked. ‘ Don’t worry. We’ll sort something out in the morning.’
This shows that he is welcomed as one of them and that the man has so much
wealth that he wants everyone to know about it. By the end of the story he is accepted as one of them and he respects them for their traditions and gets along with them and they accept him for who he is and they like that. It is said to be lucky for a visitor to come to the wedding and I think that it was lucky that he was there if he was not we would not have known about the Mongolian wedding.
By Eloise Griffith
March 2003
