Express Dating Services- Day 1

The Taaruf or ‘introduction’ is a socio-religious dating program instated by my community for all its marriage-able aged members. The idea is to introduce boys and girls in a relaxed atmosphere so they can talk and interact with each other freely to figure out whether they are interested in someone or not. Since this happens with a religious background and with chaperones, also known as counselors, ‘decency’ is the keyword!!

This happened at my cfommunity's local Mosque and was an overnight program spanning the entire weekend.

The first round was the Intruduction Round. All the girls were seated on a table and chair and every three minutes a guy would come over and introduce himself. No, you’re not supposed to judge anyone for life in these three minutes but the main idea was to get girls and boys comfortable with each other more so since this happened in a religious background.

Anyways, it was soon time for evening prayers following which we were taken to the bowling centre. We were divided in teams, each containing five members. In my group, there was this girl who was pretty good at it and the rest of us excluding me were average, coz I never took bowling up seriously and I am not really interested in it. So you can imagine my score!! Beat this, all the girls were dressed in ‘the rida’, the Bohra traditional dress for women consisting of a coloured set of burka and skirt with embroidery. The guys of course were wearing casuals.

We then headed off to a rented villa where we played charades and hogged on kebabs with hommos and pita bread, washed down with a soda. We were up till about 3:30 am in the morning just eyeing everybody around and playing truth or dare. Boring zzzzzz...