Her parents had seen me on television and were quite fond of me. But they thought my name was Abhimanyu and then they got to know that I am Shah Rukh Khan. Then her brother would keep on threatening me in his best Amrish Puri voice, “Keep away from my sister or else...” Finally when I saw him I was in for a shock. He was this fair kid with blue eyes and not even remotely intimidating. In fact, when my friend Ashok saw him he said, “There must be more to him yaar, he sounds real deadly on the phone.”
We never wanted to go against the wishes of our parents. The thought of eloping never crossed our minds. But we knew that we'd get married for sure. When I met Gauri's parents I just couldn't get myself to say that I loved their daughter. That I thought was a stupid thing to say because I could never love their daughter as much as they loved her. They had given birth to her and brought her up... my love could never be a substitute for their love.
We had a Hindu style wedding as well as a court marriage. A court marriage is a must if it's an inter-religion wedding. You are supposed to do it on the sly and then wait for a month or so but it was out within three days that I was getting married to a girl called Gauri. There was a problem because some Muslim organizations thought that I shouldn't get married to a Hindu so there were morchas outside my house. This was very ironic because my mom was a social worker and special executive magistrate and she had organised about 25 inter-caste marriages at our house.
We wanted it to be a short and sweet wedding but Gauri's parents wanted a typical Hindu ceremony. I relented because I thought, what the hell you get married only once in a lifetime.
Normally the dulha comes on the ghodi and he isn't supposed to see his bride till the pheras are over. But the car that was supposed to pick her up after her make-up, conked out. Then panic struck because the mahurat was at a fixed time so I picked her up, dropped her, went back and returned on a horse. And then halfway through, I changed over from the horse to an elephant. Climbing the elephant was a major problem, my friends had to push me up.
When my mother was alive, she used to call me anti-social, I used to never attend any functions or weddings. My mother used to always warn me that nobody would come for my wedding. I decided to have all the fun I could at my own wedding so I danced for one kilometre to the venue. At the wedding I stood on my toes and wouldn't let Gauri put the haar round my neck. All my friends knew I have a sense of humour so they kept warning me repeatedly, “Shah Rukh, don't poke any fun there because you won't mean anything but people will misunderstand.”
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