A Malay wedding

Shareena’s wed­ding din­ner took a lit­tle longer than what Boo Seng pre­dicted. He and I had arrived unfash­ion­ably early. The ear­li­est among all the guests by the looks of it. So early we had to excuse our­selves to go to the car park to pre­tend to get something.

It was an expe­ri­ence, as I have never attended a Malay wed­ding in Malaysia. Sin­ga­pore Malay wed­dings are usu­ally like what you have in the vil­lages here. Long after­noon lunches that stretch into the night. No set tim­ing for the arrival or depar­ture of guests. A bit like a wake. Shareena’s wed­ding, in con­trast, was a mix­ture of pomp and homeliness.

The cer­e­mony was solemn and reli­gious, with long prayers that reminded me of charis­matic Chris­t­ian preach­ers who liked the sound of their own voices. We were starv­ing by the time the Mus­lim ver­sion of Amen was said, with guests in the know mak­ing a face washing-like ges­ture sig­ni­fy­ing the close of com­mu­ni­ca­tion lines with Allah.

We had fin­ished two bowls of tapi­oca chips before prayers even started, mar­veling at the dec­o­ra­tions, which were actu­ally more taste­ful than I had expected. The tables, around fifty or so, had gold bows on linen lined chairs, and a huge sil­ver dome smack in the mid­dle. When the bride and groom finally fin­ished the cer­e­monies on two thrones up stage, and glided over a sea of songkoks and tudungs to the back of the hall to pre­side over the guests, the lights went out, and the very capa­ble wait­ing staff assem­bled around the tables in the dark with basins of rice to serve the hun­gry guests. We need more wait­ers who can see in the dark with­out stum­bling and spilling rice all over cus­tomers. I was impressed. Malaysia boleh.

The lights came back on, and whoa, another waiter who had crept up next to me in the dark first star­tled the shit out of me, then lifted the big sil­ver dome off the cen­tre of the table, reveal­ing beef ren­dang, sam­bal prawns, curry chicken, dhal and achar. At this point, hunger hav­ing got the bet­ter of me, I exclaimed a lit­tle too loudly, “You mean the food was here all along??!” I was told off by Boo, who said I shouldn’t embar­rass my Malaysian friends.

Our table was labeled “UNSW”, next to the one which read “Shareena’s Friends”. It is obvi­ous we are not in her inner sanc­tum. Accord­ing to Boo and Penny, there were sev­eral judges among the guests, as well as sev­eral impor­tant peo­ple, Tan Sris and what­not. Rank and sta­tus could not have been demon­strated more clearly, as the tan sris, datuks, raisins and sul­tanas were seated near the stage, while the UNSW table was in Siberia, next to the door where wait­ing staff stood at the ready to com­mence their night-vision rice assault.

Food was con­sumed at a fran­tic pace, and used crock­ery was cleared with equal haste. Jen scooped and scooped cubes of sinewy ren­dang, one chicken drum­stick, four pineap­ple cubes, one sudu or two of dhal and a par­tridge in a pear tree, while Allen made very small talk with the four strangers at our table and Boo and myself mused about what type of wed­ding we would have were we to be so for­tu­nate as to have some­one to marry.

We then took our place in the queue to leave the hall and spent all of three min­utes offer­ing our con­grat­u­la­tions to Sha­reena and Affendy, took the oblig­a­tory group photo, then took our leave.

We adjourned to Changkat Bukit Bin­tang and had a beer (no alco­hol at Malay wed­ding) at Deutsches Haus, mak­ing it the third visit in three nights for Boo and myself. Being a Sun­day night, we called it pretty early after that.

Ear­lier, Karen, Boo and myself went shop­ping for the wed­ding gift. As we expected, half the after­noon was spent nego­ti­at­ing traf­fic, first to Mid Val­ley, where we gave up try­ing to get into the car park, and then to some­where near Bangsar, to a mall whose name I can’t remem­ber for the life of me.

We found a shop sell­ing Chi­nese antiques, called ‘Madam But­ter­fly’, and bought a porce­lain urn with dou­ble hap­pi­ness painted on it, and a wine saucer set. The staff then took a back seat as they watched me rum­mage through their shop look­ing for wrap­ping mate­r­ial. Actu­ally, one of them got a lit­tle pissed off because I asked for a box, and they had to go to the garbage area in the mall to get one. We then made them put the gifts into the Kodomo children’s tooth­brush box (4 doz.), and made them use their coarse pack­ing tis­sue to make wrap­ping paper while we shopped for rib­bons and a card.

We came back to the shop and saw that they had wrapped the box in the most hor­ri­ble way imag­in­able – like a giant candy wrap­per, with scotch tape vis­i­ble all over the place. Too late to unwrap now, and I asked them for their pink coarse pack­ing tis­sue and tried to mask the scotch tape by mak­ing a sash over the wrap­ping paper, while tying our gold and sil­ver rib­bons over the scrunched up ends of the candy wrap­per. Cre­ative inten­tions, ugly outcome.

If noth­ing else, one look and Sha­reena would be immensely curi­ous as to what the pack­age con­tained. The way our present sat on the gifts table just screamed out “Open Me Please. Like Now!” I hope they like it.