It was supposed be a traditional Pakistani wedding reception, starting with ongoing festivities a week in advance.
Some 350 relatives and friends from around the world would be there, dancing and kissing and laughing and hugging – lots of hugging.
“We Pakistanis are really affectionate,” said the bride, Aamna Abbasi. “That definitely was not going to work with the pandemic.”
She and her husband Muzamil Samimi worried that even if they attempted a scaled-back and socially distanced party, exuberant family members would not be able to resist warm embraces.
So instead, they settled on drive-by greetings at Abbasi’s childhood home in Tustin. The reception took place on the initially scheduled date – Saturday, Aug. 15.
“It was a coronavirus compromise,” said Abbasi, who graduated from Beckman High five years ago.
There was no turning back after saying “yes to the dress” – already ordered from Mumbai. Friends urged her parents, Rafat and Maryam Abbasi, not to let the ornate fuchsia gown go to waste.
“We had to work it through in our heads,” Maryam Abbasi said. “Then we realized it would be an opportunity for the bride and groom to dress up, take photos for their wedding album and celebrate.”
About 25 carloads of guests rolled by, waving at the splendidly attired couple perched beneath a gauzy white canopy. Hundreds of roses decorated the backdrop.
Traditional South Asian cuisine – featuring beef, eggplant, spinach, cheese, rice and garbanzo beans – would make messy “to go” dishes.
So guests went home with pizza from the Bosnian restaurant Sofra Urbana in Fountain Valley.
“It was the biggest order they’d gotten in months,” Maryam Abbasi said. “We wanted to help a struggling small business.”
Samimi’s Afghanistan-born mom, Marzia Samimi, baked an array of elaborate cookies and pastries.
The newlyweds, both 23, bonded over calculus while attending UC Berkeley. Aamna Abbasi jokes that she tutored him only to end up the one with the lower grade.
“I got a B-plus and he made an A-minus!” she said with mock indignity.
They married last summer before moving across country for jobs in Maryland – she as a biologist for the National Institutes of Health, he as a consultant with Ernst & Young.
Only California family members attended the private Muslim wedding, but Maryam Abbasi promised aunts, uncles and cousins elsewhere a huge reception to make up for it.
“It is a sore spot in my heart that my siblings couldn’t be there,” she said. “We could not justify people coming from out of town for a drive-by reception, with sleeping arrangements difficult.”
Might the couple consider resurrecting the magnificent, week-long, multinational reception when coronavirus is no longer a concern?
“I think we’re good,” Aaman Abbasi briskly answered, as though to beat her doting parents to the punchline. “We got what we needed,”
Admitting that she and her husband shared a secret groan at the very thought of a repeat, Abbasi added with a laugh, “We’re so tired of talking about receptions.”
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August 19, 2020 at 01:42AM
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Traditional, yet not, Pakistani reception in Tustin honors newlyweds in ‘coronavirus compromise’ - OCRegister
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