Three lads sent by their mothers to market for the floral corsages for the wedding guests. (No doubt bride and groom had been separately provisioned earlier.)
Two flower sellers sat in adjacent stalls in one of the middle rows, the second, older woman in her head-wrap had been specified.
Three or four betel leaves were overlapped and shaped into a small vase, almost water-tight when stapled together. The woman had fetched a stapler from a drawer.
Beside the lady her assistant had been dicing leaves all morning: it was shredded pandan forming the base of the bouquet. Two or three heads of white jasmine, petals broken from stems, for the first topping, followed by small, strongly scented crimson roses.
Each step was carefully shown the lads. Back at the reception the task would fall to them.
The finely shredded pandan goes into plastic sachets of the sort with the string-tie they do take-away teh here. A squirt of some kind of rosewater perhaps produced a saccharine cloud. (The following Sunday when the woman was asked she denied anything so commonplace: perfumed waters from Arabia rather.)
The reception might take place at the base of one of the HDB towers, like the one investigated last year at the Haig Road blocks, where the young bride and groom were found seated on ornate thrones on a raised platform, plush red carpet over the concrete before them strewn with paper money. Kings and queens for a day, the Malays said.
Geylang Serai, Singapore
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