Assalamu alaikum and hello, I am Hamza Qureshi and this is Rice, Rings and Relatives, the show about weddings and the people who make them happen. I have photographed over four hundred of them, and in all that time the person I most wanted to interview was never the bride or the groom. It was the man with the drum. Ustad Bashir has played dhol at Lahore baraats since 1988, through monsoons, power cuts and one very memorable fight over a parking space. I went to his workshop in the old city while he was fitting a new skin and asked him everything: the three rhythms every wedding needs, how the money actually works, the long cold war with the DJ, and his theory, which he will defend to the death, about telling within ten minutes whether a marriage will last. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.