Bertunang dan adat Melayu

A friend of mine is getting engaged in the near future. He asked me a few things about 'bertunang' that I asked back, "tak pernah tengok orang bertunang ka?"
His answer was no.
'Biaq betoi,' I thought.
But then again, I haven't seen one too until I was 23 years old, so it's understandable. I then proceed to tell him what I know and observed about 'bertunang'. Keep in mind that this are my views and if you find that the 'adat' that you knew is different or I get it wrong somewhere, feel free to comment. Because honestly, going to one 'bertunang' event doesn't make me a pro.

A few years ago.

One day my cousin came to me and he said, "Faris, nanti tolong jadi kameraman abg mat bertunang boleh dak?"
My cousin is an avid photographer and take better photos so I asked, "Awat abang mat tak tangkap sendiri ja?"
Of course I knew he can't be the photographer for his own event! Was just kidding him. But then he replied, "mana boleh, laki mana bleh pi bertunang sendiri."
"Eh, yakaa??"
Didn't know that before.

Rupanya lepas tu baru aku tau secara adatnya, orang lelaki tak pi majlis bertunang sendiri. Tapi kan, bukankah tak logik orang yang nak kahwin tu, tak tengok bakal isteri dia. Kan Islam suruh tengok dulu bakal  pasangan tu?
Haa, di sini lah adat melayu ada proses merisik. Merisik tu lah untuk pergi tengok muka orang tu, ada hidung ka takdak. atau dengan kata lainnya, waktu merisik tu lah waktu 'menengok'. Waktu bertunang ni, nak selesaikan benda-benda lain, macam mas kahwin, hantaran dan sebagainya. Kalau waktu merisik/menengok tu dah bincang benda-benda tu, susah la nak jalan. Kena bagi yang nak kawin ni tengok sama sendiri dulu, pastu balik rumah, bagi angau sat. Pastu baru pi balik, bincang-bincang hal seterusnya. baru lah semua lancar.

But that was in the old days. sekarang, tak merisik pon dah angau. whatsapp, facebook, twitter; pick your choice. Unlimited source to 'menengok'. Amikau, tengok la sampai puas.

Anyway back to my cousin's engagement.
So on that day, the family and relatives gather up and convoyed to the girl's house.
Kami sedara mara pon bergeraklah 4 biji kereta. Yang muda-muda, setiap sorang tolong pegang la dulang hantaran bertunang. Bila sampai kat rumah perempuan, dulang-dulang ni diletak kat ruang yang sesuai (meja, ruang tamu, bilik perempuan; ikut tuan rumah la kot). Kebanyakan benda yang dalam tu, seingat aku adalah makanan. Tips: letak 'double-sided tape' antara bekas makanan dan dulang. Kalau dak, dok angkat pi mai pi mai, nanti jatuh. Paling koman, kek kemek. lulz

Lepas tu mula la upacara sembang-sembang. Wakil dari pihak masing-masing pon mula bercakap. Normally the representatives is the relatives eldest uncle.
"Kami datang ni dengan hajat..." bla bla bla and all those stuff.  Kalau lagi 'challenging', wakil tu buka bicara dengan pantun. Dem, susah kot nak pantun 'on the spot'.
Maka selepas cakap sikit-sikit, persetujuan pon dicapai. Serius, aku tak paham sangat macam mana boleh selesai cepat gila. Rupa-rupanya dah 'kawtim' sebelum tu. Logik la kan, mesti bincang dulu. Bertunang is to finalize the on-going discussion.
Oh satu lagi, kawan aku cakap zaman dulu orang bawak tepak sirih, dengan bilangan daun sirih tertentu. Tepak sirih ni bagi la kat pihak sana, untuk makan-makan sambil bincang/bersembang. Tapi bilangan daun sirih tu, ada fungsi lain kononnya. Bila pihak sana setuju, wakil makan lah sirih. So in the end, when the guys back at home received the 'tepak sirih' back, they can count the number of sirih and discover how many of the request were agreed upon. Halus kan adat dulu-dulu?
Cuma satu ja la masalah. Kalau lepas habis makan, pihak perempuan pi top-up daun sirih tu, tak ka naya(masalah besar). Lelaki tu ingat dia kena reject lak. terpodol.

Masa sekarang ni, mana ada orang makan sirih dah. Daun sirih pon tak kenai, sesetengah tu.( I was 10)

Berbalik kepada bertunang sepupu aku, lepas semua pihak setuju dan perbincangan selesai, wakil pon baca doa sikit-sikit. Pastu mula sesi tangkap gambar.
"Ni kameraman, mai sini tangkap gambar."
Aku pon tangkap la gambar tunang, gambar kek, gambar tunang lagi, gambar bakal mak mentua, gambar sarung cincin  dan sebagainya. You get the point.
Waktu ni jugak la, bakal mak mentua kena cakap, "Cantiknya bakal menantu saya," bla bla bla sambil cium pipi kanan kiri. CLICK! CLICK! Tu gambar mahai, kalau boleh tangkap waktu tu.

Setelah habis semua, selalunya ada jamuan sikit. Lepas makan, rombongan pon balik. "Ni jangan lupa hantaran ni haih!" tuan rumah cakap. Hantaran yang dibawa tadi, tinggal, hantaran yang perempuan bagi, dibawa pulang. Exchange. Apabila sampai rumah, hantaran tu diselongkar dan apa yang boleh dimakan, akan dimakan. Meanwhile the relatives would congratulate the fiancee, "Tudia mat, pandai hang pilih calon. Lawa aihhhh." In which the guy would smile widely. Untuk pengetahuan anda, dari sini lah asal perumpamaan seperti kerang busuk.

As you notice, the guy didn't go to his own engagement. He just sat at home like a boss and waits for the pictures. Seems more befitting, I think.
But each is to his/her own, I guess. If you want to go to your engagement, there's nothing wrong in it.
Just don't do a wedding photoshoot. You know, hug and stuff.
"Ni kawin ka bertunang ni?"

Anyways, I wish my friend all the best in his engagement, and afterwards, wedding
And as put by a blogger crudely, "sekarang ni musim mengawan", I would also like to wish all those that are going to get married, to have a barakah marriage.
May Allah bless us all.

Thank you for reading.
Here's a song about a man who should get a job.


*dialog adalah rekaan semata-mata
**for the record, I'm a bad cameraman. sarung cincin tu kena ulang dua kali, pause, untuk aku tangkap gambar.

How I Met

I've been watching the series HIMYM recently, which I would not explained what the acronyms are since if you know what they mean already, it doesn't matter. And if you don't know what they mean, you won't prolly relate with this post. And if you won't bother googling the acronyms, I'd bet you'd prolly won't read this post to the end.

Anywaaaayyyss... I know I'm a bit slow, because I am not a 'following' type. Following is when you like some series/comics/something-to-those-extent, and you wait them to be released every week. I hate the waiting.
My friend argued that, 'following' is fun as it gives a sense to fill the activity through the days, where he proceed to explain that at mondays, he can wait for Manga A, on tuesdays for YoutubeChannel B, on Thursday for One Piece and etcetera.
As for me, I'll usually take anything that I like in one gulp. Not exactly a marathon, but kinda mania. That's why I don't watch/read series that haven't ended, usually. So about HIMYM, I've watched one of its episode, while on a bus with mawas, and felt it was okay. But since it's a series and it doesn't have a foreseen ending("takkan bersiri-siri pon dia tak habis cerita bini dia sapa? mohong gila!") and the fan are strong, which always turn non-fan off("hang kata best gila. lame ja barney ni"), I haven't taken the interest. Recently I read somewhere the MOTHER is made known to the audience so since I was searching some movies to watch while I eat, so I think why not.
So I began to watch.

HIMYM is most ways, I agree with another friend, not as funny as Big Bang's theory(I'm not following this one too, I only watch occasionally when people watch it). However HIMYM does have, loosely, a plot. Although their jokes seems tame and the hillarious ones seem scripted, I like the dialogues more. They feel more real(except Barney's lines) because when you're with friends the normal thing to happen is you make small snides and snigger, not make clever remarks/comebacks and walks off nonchalantly(like in most comedies). HIMYM fall to this too, because they have too, but most of the times the scripts are palatable(<---I thought I just made this word up, but turns out I didn't.)

Writing script is hard.
Why did I say that? Because believe it or not, I tried once. Kids, when I was in high school...

*****

...my school had a new foreign English teacher. He was from England, I think. Or Australian. Whatever. You see, normal English teacher won't normally have time for conducting theater for student to perform in. By normal, I mean the Malaysian teacher who are pressured to tell the student that The Pearl by John Steinbeck actually have morals in it, and to be able to regurgitate them back on exam papers. So this new foreign teacher doesn't have those so he did a theater, and began auditioning. I went to it.
Not many went, so I wasn't surprised I got a part. Plus there are those that went and got the part but 'tarik diri'. They said they were just trying their luck. One of them was a girl named Blabla.
The audition needed us to walk by twos, from the back of the hall to the front where the teacher sat. During the catwalk, we had to act an emotion/characteristics that the teacher thought up on the spot. It turn out I was paired to this girl named Blabla. Blabla was in a different class from me and although I seldom talked to her, I knew her. As I was wondering what the emotions I had to do, the teacher said the word, "Talkative!" or something like that.
You see, Blabla was among the most talkative and noisy person that I ever knew and I knew a lot of talkative person(anyone who talks more than me, is talkative). I was thinking, "What? This girl IS the epitome of talkative! Of course she's going to do it better than me. Of course I'm not going to get any part and me being called pansy was for nothing. Of course... hey she's walking first!"
Blabla was already walking so I quickly followed suit (up!) and walked besides her. Plus I tried being the character that was given, talkative. If you know me, I was everything but that. However I really wasn't going to 'lose' to Blabla so I talked myself out. Mostly nonsense but those words are the few occasion in my life that I 'talked' a lot in front of strangers/not-friends. And the first time I talked a lot to Blabla. The first of many? Maybe.

No, Blabla isn't your mother.

Anyway the audition ended and initially the teacher gave the participants the chance to pick their own scripts so we decided to wrote one. The idea of the script was someone else's but I gave my agreement so it was much my fault too. I was tasked to write the dialogues, so the words, in English, were mine.
It was about some girl/boy who got ditched and died. And became a ghost.
Yes, it was that bad.

Fortunately the teacher scrapped the script and plucked out some funny, albeit meaningless, script which consisted mostly of puns and misheards. Prolly he got it from Little Britain.
I remember one of the scenes were about a policeman catching a thief who got bad luck due to his mispronunciation and puns. I got to play the police officer. Yeah, me.

okay, stop laughing.
So that wraps the story about how I wrote a story.

Oh your mom? You guys were adopted.

*ends with theme song*





Thanks for reading.

Teh tawar: the analogy/theory

Here's a theory I pulled while in a car, one night.

The analogy.
A man eats his dinner quietly, even smiling between the bites and after he wipes his mouth, he's served desserts. He eats them happily. As he wishes to wash down his throat, he sips on the tea and that moment his face suddenly changed. Eyebrows knit in a fury, he says, "This taste like mud!"

A friend who's dining with him contradicts him, saying it is perfectly sweet albeit the dinner was a bit salty. The friend added however he didn't mind.
On the contrary, the man minds. The man jumps up in anger, shouts about, kicked the stool away and storms out off the room. Thus the evening is ruined.


I have come to terms with myself that most times in life, humans can have very different wants and needs from one another. The man for example cannot stand a bitter/'unsweet' tea, which his friends perfectly accepts. The friend however thought the dinner was salty but was able to tolerate it.

As in life, sometimes we meet a person with all the great characteristics and virtues that begged us to do nothing but admire him/her, yet for one infallible trait of him/hers (which is normal for a human), the admiration and feelings are polluted. We no longer feel the same.
The friend instead felt the dinner was a bit salty but tolerable. Likewise in life, someone else might find the trait that appeared to us unfavourable, acceptable. He will still find faults with the person but in the end he either considers them tolerable or willing to accept it.

There are occasions where we, ourselves, can change and be that friend; in the sense tolerating other people's unfavourable trait. However until I am sure he can, my suggestion to the man is to completely avoid the same dining, or at least leave before the tea is served.



p.s. I drink iced tea, mostly.