The music played, drinks were served and the priest prepared for the wedding, as 2,000 guests waited on the sprawling lawn for the beautiful young bride to walk in for the ceremony.
That was when Nisha Sharma, dressed in the shimmering red dress of a Hindu bride, was calling the police, demanding they arrest her husband-to-be.
At the same time, last Sunday night, a baby girl lay sleeping in a hospital's intensive care unit some 1,500km to the south, with the nation's eyes on her as word spread that her mother had allegedly abandoned her to take home another woman's baby boy.
On the same day in two cities across this sprawling nation, the bride and the baby were tied together by a bitter social truth -- for most Indian women, life is one long curse, starting at birth.
In the northern city of Noida, just outside the Indian capital of New Delhi, 21-year-old Sharma refused to marry after the groom's family allegedly demanded a huge dowry and humiliated her father.
On Monday, police arrested the bridegroom, Munish Dalal, 25, and charged him under India's dowry prohibition law, which has been amended several times to make it tougher but is still little enforced.
In calling off her marriage, Sharma defied a centuries-old tradition in a nation of more than 1 billion people, where many parents prefer sons and rarely give their daughters equal treatment.
"With my voice, I hope many girls will stand with me," Sharma said in an interview Wednesday, still wearing intricate henna designs on her hands and feet, the mark of a Hindu bride. "I am proud of myself because I have done something really great for others."
And something so rare that the 21-year-old software engineering student has become an overnight celebrity, made more so by her classic beauty and self-confidence.
"This young girl has brought about a revolution. She is a heroine," said Vandana Sharma of the Women's Empowerment Committee, a volunteer group.
"She really is a kind of role model for a lot of young women today," said Dr. Ranjana Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research in New Delhi. "She has shown her rejection of a custom that would chain her for all her life."
But in the southern metropolis of Hyderabad, the baby girl was paying for the same ancient customs.
When she was 4 days old, nurses took her to Latha Reddy and said she was the 19-year-old woman's daughter. Reddy knew she wasn't; she had already seen her own child, a son, moments after birth.
Reddy refused to accept the baby girl and began a sit-in protest. The baby girl's real mother did not come forward and "Baby India" -- as some media christened her -- remained unclaimed.
DNA tests proved Reddy right. A three-week hunt for the baby's parents ended Tuesday when police arrested three hospital workers and the girl's father, accused of swapping his daughter for Reddy's son.
Police allege that Nazeer Ahmed and his wife Mehmooda Begum conspired with nurses at Nayapul Government Maternity Hospital to swap their daughter for a boy. Begum's arrest was delayed as she must nurse her baby girl; she says she is innocent.
"I do not know why we are being harassed like this," she said on Tuesday, calling the swap a tragic trick of fate.
"I fed that baby [boy] for three weeks. I am happy that I have got back my daughter, but I will miss the boy for a long time," she said.
The law will decide if Ahmed and Begum were acting out of Indians' general preference for boys. Theirs is one of the few nations where a woman's life expectancy is lower than a man's, and the abortion of female fetuses is so common that the law bans doctors from revealing the gender of unborn babies.
Parents favor sons as they will ensure getting -- and not giving -- dowries, and because boys are seen as more useful and productive.
Indian women have made great achievements in recent years, ending the male monopoly in politics, running leading corporations and gaining top ranks in the military.
But in many Indian homes, girls are asked to eat after the family's men and encouraged to learn to cook instead of studying -- especially for a higher degree since that might mean paying a greater dowry for an equally educated groom.
As for Nisha Sharma, all she regrets from her unhappy wedding experience is the humiliation suffered by her father. An amateur video taken by one guest shows the groom's family and friends pushing businessman Dev Dutt Sharma and calling him names.
"My father was pushed and slapped and they spit in his face," Sharma said. She only knew Dalal, a computer teacher, for two months. His widowed mother had responded to a matrimonial ad placed by Sharma's parents, a modern means of finding a spouse for the age-old tradition of arranged marriage.
Minutes before the ceremony was to begin, the family of the groom reportedly asked her father for 1.2 million rupees (US$25,000) in cash, apart from the many expensive gifts offered to the groom's family under the marriage arrangement -- including a new car, two refrigerators, two television sets and two cooking ranges.
"They had asked for everything in two sets. One for the groom. One for the brother. My father somehow did it. But when he said he could not give cash, they started humiliating him," said Sharma, in her modest, middle-class home, where boxes of appliances and hundreds of uneaten boxes of wedding sweets were stacked up high.
"My experience should be a lesson for all women. It should also be a lesson for all men," said Sharma, who has made headlines throughout India, while several political parties try to woo her into their ranks.
If Sharma had not had her fiance arrested, she may have met a different fate. In India, thousands of brides are killed each year -- most often burned alive in supposedly accidental kitchen fires -- when their families refuse or are late on dowry payments.
There were nearly 7,000 dowry deaths nationwide in 2001, the most recent statistics, according to Kumari. Many more dowry murders are believed to go unreported, and police in New Delhi say deaths and violence over dowry demands have risen dramatically in the past year.
Kumari of New Delhi's Center for Social Research blames it on a growing culture of greed as India's markets offer more foreign goods that the younger generation wants but cannot afford.
"These boys are grabbing everything they can get," she said. "Greed is the culture and more girls are becoming the victims."
Even after his heartbreak, the bride's father is experiencing a somewhat happy ending -- many offers for his daughter's hand. "I am trying to choose from among them," he said.
And what does the outspoken Nisha Sharma want?
"Whatever my father and uncles choose for me."
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