My First Wedding

Malaysia, Land of A Thousand Holidays. We are now celebrating our second and third new years of the year. It does sound a bit weird but that is Malaysia for you. I wonder if there is an Indian, Iban, or Kadazan New Year, but we already have so many holidays that we don’t know what to do with them. I’m not complaining, as long as the paycheck clears, and I always welcome the chance to sleep and rise late. I wonder though, if it would preferable if we could accumulate all those one-day and two-day holidays throughout the year into one long year-end holiday. Barulah berbaloi to go Cuti-Cuti Malaysia and beyond.

Holidays and school breaks also mean one thing – weddings. I went to a wedding myself on Sunday. It was my first wedding, the first wedding to which I was invited personally instead of as a member of the family. The image couldn’t be more perfect: an out-of-state traditional Malay kampung wedding reception with a traditional tangga batu stilt house, kompang and silat performances, and Melayu Asli songs in the air.

I used to hate weddings. In fact I am still not all that excited with the idea of attending a wedding. There is the big crowd with strange people and children running around, and the terrible noise that is the not-so-subtle entertainment. In the past we used to have live music from the local kugiran, which has a certain charm in itself, but as the society turns more ‘Islamic’ the kugiran has mostly given way to disc jockeys playing boring nasyid songs. But the most annoying part of going to weddings is having to wait in all that heat and humidity, finding shelter under a tent or a tree, while the women-folk would go inside the house ‘for a minute’ to ‘see the bride’.

Since I just do not seem to stop going to school away from the family, I have been missing out on, or perhaps spared from, the weddings in recent years. Three of my closest cousins got married when I was in Boston. It is quite awkward to be introduced later as the just-returned-cousin-I-told-you-about. So I now have a more positive view on weddings, as an avenue for meeting and catching up with relatives and friends. It is really regrettable that while the whole family is based in the Kuala Lumpur and Selangor area, we don’t get too see each other very often.