Musing On Weddings

Musing On Weddings

How luxurious the invitation card which could cost as much as a novelette. It’s not mere entertaining a friend or someone in a food stall in Pecenongan, but invite, and entertain hundreds of guests in a grand five star hotel of the city. Dishes of crab, prawn, shrimps, fish, chicken, pork, beef, lamb, turkey(!), many kinds of cakes, pudding, fanta, coca cola, beer, wine, grapes, orange, banana,  ice cream, and a special wedding cake-ice cream as wide as a table and as high as the plafond(!). Too much even to taste all of them and one could eat as heartily as one likes and think of it, it’s free. It’s no wonder that what’s left over as waste on the plates of the guests, possibly could nourish and make happy more than a hundred hungry, poor people.

How sad the fate of tens of flower arrangements as billboards, paraded in the halls instead of  seeing their beauty. Then it’s left behind as it could take some trucks to carry them away and a big hall or garden to store. Only the cards are collected for the purpose to say “thank you”. Not to say about the presents  if one receives four wash machines,  ten clocks, dozens of plates, spoons, forks, while just one or a dozen is sufficient. (Remember, this is Indonesia 1994) 

“Hurrah”, said the flower shop owners and farmers, beauty salons, catering businesses and all those who are involved from hotel managers to car parking service personnel for the guests. “It’s trendy and prestigious” said the young successful executives. “We hope that wedding celebrations on a grand scale will be the norm and observed, our economy will prosper.”

A huge sum for the wedding and all the fuss, the headaches about the event .is waylaying the couple Then it slowly dawned on me the words of a song   "Love, ... the golden crown, that makes a man  a  king", not the glitter of the wedding.

 

"Si Bhuta is ‘giring’”, (passionate in love running after its mate). So said my boy to me, though she’s crippled and can’t fly. Si Bhuta who was bathing happily together in a wash tub (without being ashamed), when freed from a far away distance could fly so high that it seemed something tiny flickering in the sun and suddenly dived down home steeply, was shot dead by someone. The whole family silently sorrowed, wept.

Suppose man could love as a pigeon pair, they would be king and queen for life. Those, who, that love, would never grow old, would stay young forever. “Never Too Old To Be Young” so says the song. How sad is the story of  Princess Diana that started with a wedding as grand as only could happen, imagined in a fairy tale.

I then remembered the venerable sage as told in the Mahabharata  who changed himself and his “fairy” into a deer to celebrate their wedding, free from ceremony, guests and far from the bustle of the world; or as Sam Pek and Eng Tay  who happily were flying as butterflies together. And as souvenir,- I might add - which would be remembered, cherished as long as life, not a golden ring, but a child, the most precious jewel of lovers, the gift of the Gods. How beautiful that would be. 

From Jayakarta, January 27, 1994

April 2011