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, 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. 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)
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.
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.
Translated from Jayakarta, January 27, 1994
This is my book. You can read it.
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