Java Blue

Just got back from Semarang, attending my cousin’s wedding. We had all been thrown into turmoil weeks before the wedding, preparing every little detail. I’d been sent on endless errands to the dressmaker, as Mom wanted her Kebaya to be perfect. I made two, she made three. There were the sarungs. The shoes. The hairpieces. The accessories to think of.
When we gathered in Semarang the ladies would then compare the results of their toil, complimenting each other’s choice of colour and fabric, and bragging about their dressmakers. In the hotel room, Mom would meticulously fit, plait, and fold the sarung in a very expertly javanese way, while complaining on how impractical the whole tradition was. Dad would pester Mom on how to wear his sarung, finally proclaiming that the gold belt he was supposed to wear on top of his red belt, was absolutely useless.
“The Dutch must have invented this so that the Javanese would have difficulty walking!”, he finally said, which was the silliest thing I’ve heard from him for a long time.
I was forced to squeeze myself into a corsette, which caused me agony of pain for two days. Men must have invented the corsette so that women would look slim, won’t eat much, and won’t breathe much. See, now I’m a narrow-minded feminist, that’s what corsettes do to you.
My hair was tossed and turned, the hairpiece fastened with a multitude of what felt like pins and needles, tons of hairspray went on. Tons of makeup went on, scary looking pieces of fake eyelashes, eyelash glue, eyebrow shavers, and lurid lipstick were forced upon me. The makeup artist would hear none of my pleas, allowing only for me to choose my own lipstick, thank god, in which I chose a pinkish-nude colour. The end result was surprisingly rather elegant, I’ve heard my uncle say that makeup artists usually put in a little bit of black magic in their work to bring out the beauty in people.
Anyway.
I began to wonder what my job was for the siraman, as that was my main purpose of going through all the fuss. My aunt at this point bustled in, apparently in panic because the claypot they had for the bride’s-parents-break-claypot ritual was not the right javanese-wedding kind of claypot. She then handed me a 13-page booklet of the ceremony, bidding me memorize all my parts and what I was to do. So, amidst a vapour of hairspray, I squinted at the book, eagerly trying to locate my name. I found it on one page, it said:
Pemasangan bleketepe dan tuwuhan dengan urutan:
Pemangku gati sekalian membawa bleketepe ke bukit candra dekat pohon cemara. Pemasangan bleketepe dan cengkir gading oleh ayah pengantin (cengkir dibawa dalam nampan oleh Sdri. Tiza)
There was nothing else. And I didn’t even know what the Javanese words meant.
Looking at my elegant, suffocating, hungry self in the mirror, I began to think about what my Dad had said about the Dutch.