Sayfurrahman

I am a sucker for stories about family.

For instance:

Ahahaha! I just listened to that song. I got interested. Then I went looking for the summary of the story.

I got hooked.

I dunno. A friend once told me that first-borns usually place a lot more emphasis on family. He was commenting on his eldest brother; he was third. I guess this statement rings true in a way to me.

Amongst the Malay novels that I have read, the ones that give me the most impact are the ones that place great emphasis on marriage and family. For example, Ayat-Ayat Cinta and Ombak Rindu.

It also saddens me that people of my age and below nowadays get blocked from starting a family early in their lives. I guess this is mostly due to the cultural upbringing here in modern Malaysia.

The examples are widespread. You can this everywhere. Youth wanting to get married will have to face high “hantaran” costs, high wedding ceremony costs, relatives that demand this and that, the cultural norm of delaying marriage until after studies and all sorts of friction between the first intent of marriage and the actual nikah.

I have seen this in my friends. Some of them very close to me. Some tells of what they face when they bring up the subject of marriage to the girl’s parents, whereupon the response would be, “RM10,000!” Others have opined their reluctance to marry early, putting it off due to not having amassed enough to propose to the girl.

Once an uncle told me what he said to the girl’s parents when he went to “merisik” at the girls house for his son, “If you want, we can do this (nikah) next week, I’ll support the walimah, and they do it simple (i.e. do only the obligatory stuff). But if [my son] wants to give special presents to his wife (i.e. ‘hantaran’), then he has to collect the money himself.”

At this, the other family declined to hasten the nikah, opting instead to go through with tradition.

Not all my friends get this much friction though. Quite a few of my friends have it the opposite, with the girls parents suggesting hastening the nikah instead and helping out with a whole bunch of stuff.

One friend of mine had his wife’s hand in marriage offered to him by his wife-to-be’s (at the time) sister. Then the process after went very smoothly. They managed everything from start to finish in about three months, doing everything minimally but effectively. This would count as very fast in terms of Malaysian wedding preparations!

Another friend went to “merisik” thinking that he probably had another year or more before he was allowed marriage, but the father of the girl said to him, “How about later this year?”

I think he went somewhere in the middle of the year. Calculate how fast that went.

My parents also had their wedding simply. Theirs were so simple that some people enquired to my grandfather, “Why didn’t you put a higher price (for  ’hantaran’)?”

To which he replied, “I am marrying off my daughter; I am not selling her.”

Cool. I’d love to say that in the face of today’s pro-high-class-wedding parents.