An Anglo-Indian family kicks off wedding season with a massive celebration that honours their forefathers' roots in the city
100 guests descend on the city from Britain, 40 rooms booked in a south Mumbai hotel, as Daniel Tyler and Kirsty McTighe prepare to tie the knot.
Big, fat Indian weddings are a common occurrence in Mumbai, but the city would rarely have played host to anything like the big, fat British wedding taking place this week. The couple and 100 of their guests have descended on the West End hotel, in Marine Lines, for a celebration that has been over a year in the planning. As if a dream wedding wasn't enough of a reason to get the details exactly right, it is also a tribute to the groom's grandfather and grand aunt, Anglo-Indians who had left Mumbai for England in 1951.
That's why Daniel Tyler, the 36-year-old groom, insisted on booking 40 rooms at the hotel, despite being told by Arjun Ramani, the general manager, that the exterior of the building was being renovated. Tyler, a theatre director from Birmingham, wasn't going to let a little heat and dust get in his way. He had stayed at the West End in 2015 on his first visit to Mumbai, and he thought the interior of the hotel still looked like something out of the 1940s, and he could imagine his Indian family popping round for tea.
Tyler first thought of getting married in Mumbai after the death of his grandfather Ronald Freemantle and his great aunt Fay in 2014. Fay had practically raised Tyler's mother Lynette, so he considered Fay to be his grandmother and called her "Nan". After they died, Tyler realised he didn't want to have a wedding in England without them. It was only after they died that Tyler learned more fully about his family's previous life in Mumbai because he inherited a vast trove of documents, notebooks and photographs that he had not known existed. Armed with this history, Tyler visited to India two years ago and was able to find his great-grandmother Dorinda Freemantle's grave at the Sewri cemetery because Percy had preserved the receipt for the plot (which had cost five shillings). "The gravestone no longer exists but the grave is there," said Tyler.
At that point, Tyler and his fiance, Kirsty McTighe, who is 26, had been together for five years. When he brought up the idea of having a wedding in Mumbai as a way of honouring his "grandparents", she did not hesitate. "It was an easy conversation," she said when Mirror met the couple at the West End hotel on Tuesday afternoon.
McTighe also works in theatre, and the pair met eight years ago on the sets of one of Tyler's productions. It was McTighe who asked Tyler out, after she had got her mother's permission to do so. Today, Tyler is a director at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre, while McTighe works in the box-office at the Hippodrome in Birmingham and as a stage manager.
Tyler officially proposed on 27 October, 2016. By then, he had already been planning the wedding for four months. "After Kirsty said yes, I handed her a Save-The-Date card," he says with a chuckle. He had decided he wanted to have the wedding exactly a year later.
The pair said their families were surprised when Mumbai was announced as the venue but the reaction was mostly positive. "All the family wanted to come to India. This was the perfect reason," Kristy said. Lynette had never been to India before and burst into tears on finding out what the couple had planned.
Tyler says Fay and Ronald didn't talk about India much, except for the food. "British families had roast Sunday lunches and we had Indian feasts," he says. Food is, therefore, a big part of the couple's celebrations in the city, which have been spread over a week. Gulab jamuns and paneer tikka achari, mutton curry and caramel custard, the classic Anglo-Indian dessert, are all on the menu, plus lots of samosas. "Grandad always loved anything with lamb or mutton. He said a curry has to be like that," Tyler says. And Fay would make caramel custard "in a rabbit shaped" mound for dessert at their family lunches.
Over the course of the week, with help of The Wedding Company, a wedding planner, which has taken care of a lot of the paperwork, the pair has planned a series of functions, with a mix of Eastern and Western traditions. They are having a haldi ceremony, a mehendi ceremony and will perform the Saptapadi, albeit without the fire. There will also be a blessing at the Church of the Holy Name, on Wodehouse Road, on Saturday.
Following the blessing, there will be a high tea at the Taj because Tyler's great grandfather Percy would take his family there "whenever they had the money".
They have so much going on that they have a board set up in the lobby of the West End that lists the itinerary for the week and has sign-up sheets for sari draping and henna. Tyler and McTighe have also come up with "The Freemantle Family's Bombay", a tour, complete with a programme, of all the places that made up the family's life in the city. Roughly forty family members will take in the Cathedral School (which Ronald and Ralph attended), Abu Bakar Mansion (which houses Cafe Mondegar and caught fire last year), the Convent of Jesus and Mary School, which Fay attended, St. Thomas's Cathedral and the Sewri cemetery, plus other tourist staples such as Leopold's Cafe and Colaba Causeway.
Percy Freemantle had lived in Mumbai for twenty years starting in 1931. He lived at Abu Bakar Mansion and worked at the Central Telegraph Office, then located at Flora Fountain. Sadly, in 1949, his wife, Dorinda died and two years later Percy and his four children left for the United Kingdom. The family would settle in Kidderminster, once a thriving carpet manufacturing center but now described by Daniel as a "post-industrial town, a depressing place." Ronald, born in 1933, would go on to work in the steel forges while Fay, who was born in 1929, and had worked at Caltex and the Swedish Consulate in Mumbai as a secretary/personal assistant, would wind up in the offices of Kidderminster's carpet factories.
According to Tyler, Ronald and his friends used to spend a lot of time of time at the promenade outside the Taj Hotel, sometimes even selling postcards to tourists. Recently, Tyler learned that Ronald and his friends had been known as the Bunder Boys because of how much time they spent there. One of family stories that has been passed down is how Fay and her friends, who were three years older, would teach Ronald and his friends how to dance "so they could impress other girls". Occasionally, Ronald, Fay and their group would dance the Cha-Cha or the Waltz down the promenade near the Gateway of India. "We are going to keep that tradition alive," McTighe says.
And, among the photographs the pair brought to India is one of a cleancut Ronald, dressed in a short-sleeved shirt and pants, almost reclining on a bollard, with part of the Gateway creeping in on the left. Tyler plans to have his nephew, Ronnie, who is named after Ronald, recreate this photo, thereby linking four generations of the family to Mumbai.
A few weeks ago, Tyler started posting on Facebook about the wedding and long-lost Indian cousins got in touch and will be attending the festivities. More improbably, in of Percy's notebooks, Tyler found a list of tasks that his great-grand father had to carry out the day before they were leaving, including an outstanding payment to Eugene Biggle. This, too, found its way to Facebook, and Tyler was contacted by a man who said his mother used to be a Biggle and used to live in Abu Bakar Mansion. The woman, it turned out, was Eugene's daughter Pansy, who will be attending the festivities on Saturday.
The wedding is actually the second tribute to Ronald and Fay. Overwhelmed by his discovery of his grandparent's hitherto unknown lives, Tyler wrote and directed a play called "Between The Two", which was set on a ship sailing from Mumbai to England that was based on the letters and diaries passed down to him and deals with the challenges of moving from one culture and country to another. Tyler took the play on a national tour earlier in 2017 to mark the UK-India Year of Culture. "Theatre people tend to channel their emotions into art," he says. Now that they are actually here and surrounded by friends and family, both McTighe and Tyler said they are trying to soak it all in and just enjoy it. "It feels like a dream," McTighe says.
