Yesterday was our ninth Wedding Anniversary. Amazing to think of it, but the last nine years have rushed by like a blissful, sometimes hectic roller coaster.
We celebrated our "ninth birthday" with a visit to the Kuching Hilton, to sample their excellent buffet. I haven’t been in the place for at least three years, and was shocked to see how crowded with newness the hotel is now. A lot of the old lobby is gone, especially the water feature in the middle where I once took pictures of my Mum and Dad. Also, the coffee bar on the lobby level has now been completely transformed and the piano player removed. Another innovation was that half of the lobby has become a brightly lit jewellery shop, complete shining diamonds and a security guard armed with the regulation pump action shotgun which probably isn’t loaded.
But that’s not what we went there for, and we glided downstairs to the Riverfront Cafe past bright Christmas decor and a giant gingerbread Santa’s Grotto where the sushi bar used to be.
The interesting thing about our anniversary is that in fact, we have two wedding anniversaries. This is because we had two wedding ceremonies. This is quite a story, which I don’t mind sharing with you, seeing as it’s Christmas.
We met each other in the UK at Lancaster University, when I was finishing off my Doctoral studies and Annie was doing her Bachelors in TESL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language). To cut a long story short, we got married twice, once in a Muslim ceremony and once in a Civil service as British law required. Because I married a Muslim, especially one from Malaysia, I had to become a Muslim myself. I might write about this in a future post. But suffice it to say that I had to get married in the local mosque in Lancaster, which was a pretty mind-blowing experience.
The particular mosque where my married life began was the same place where I was officially welcomed into Islam a couple of months previously. And this mosque was predominantly Pakistani, and they do things differently compared to the Malays, even though they follow the same religion.
It went like this. On the appointed day, 11th December 1998, I made my way to the Masjid An Nur (Mosque of Light) in Lancaster, and performed the evening prayer with a large group of bearded, be-robed Pakistanis and a few Englishmen who had converted like me. I felt extremely awkward and alone and unsure if I was doing the right thing, or if I was doing something wrong.
I never forget one particular mosque member who helped me to learn some of the basics of Islam – we will call him Kassim. He was a tall, turbaned and bearded man who owned the best curry house in Lancaster. I don’t want to sound politically incorrect, but he was the spitting image of Osama bin Laden, although of course I wouldn’t have known who he was then. He was a peaceful, smiling and knowledgeable man who spoke excellent English and was an expert in mobile phones.
Anyway, after the prayers, all the men in the mosque sat in a circle and I didn’t know what to say. I was dressed rather incongruously in a white baju Melayu (long Malay shirt worn outside the trousers, and a songok (Malay pillbox hat) decorated with a little jewel. I probably felt that looked very Islamic at the time!
The Pakistani way of performing a marriage ceremony as I have said is very different from the Malay way of doing it. In a Malay ceremony, the bride and groom are together while the rites are pronounced by the cleric. Usually, all the close relatives, men and women, are seated nearby. However, the Pakistanis in Lancaster separated the bride from the groom, which made me feel somewhat nervous and apprehensive. My wife was waiting in a friend’s house a few blocks away from the mosque, with my mum, my Malay friend (representing Annie’s family) and my old landlady Josie in attendance. A pair of Muslim clerics went to the house and asked the bride-to-be three times whether she wanted to accept the groom as her future husband. When she agreed, the clerics went back to the mosque to present the answer to the Imam, the leader of the prayers.
So after a considerable time waiting in the mosque, chatting to Kassim and generally looking at the pattern on the carpet and counting the number of tiles on the ceiling, I was relieved to see the two clerics enter, and pass a piece of paper to the Imam. Then the real ceremony began. The Imam took my hand firmly in his, and asked me to repeat after him everything that he said.
Only it was all in Arabic!
Never mind, I tried my best to repeat his excellent Arabic words, all verses from the Holy Qur’an, making only a couple of mistakes along the way. Then, after a few verses uttered by the Imam (which I didn’t have to repeat thankfully!), he told me that I was now married. Just like that!
Something of an anticlimax, especially as there was no bride to kiss, but there you are!
After giving a gift of sweets to all the men in the mosque and shaking everyone’s hands and receiving plenty of blessings, I then went to claim my new wife. I remember one of the older men, a very dark and salubrious old gentleman, saying to me before I left: “congratulations. Now you can go to a hotel!”.
After a short walk up the road with my Sudanese friend Salah, I was reunited with my new bride, resplendent in a magnificent blue baju kebaya, looking as if she had been crying, and very nervous because she missed me. I performed the ceremony of placing the wedding ring on her finger and we all made our way to dinner at the restaurant owned by Kassim, which was a converted Church and made the best curries and Indian food that side of Bombay! Later on, I went back to the mosque to collect my Islamic wedding certificate, which was elaborately printed in English and Arabic. The evening ended with a family gathering at another hotel, then home to bed. The next day, we were to drive back down to my home town for the second wedding ceremony, which I will talk about in the next post....
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