The best man

It’s apt that me and the best man at my wedding are on opposite pages in today’s paper. ‘It’s weird seeing that’, said my fiancée while she was flipping through the National Day Special. We called the best man, and the best man said, ‘eh, I really look like chow reservist right?’, and I said ‘yah, and you’re one year older than me, according to the story’.

Hossan and I didn’t serve NS together. He was a chow storeman at Gombak Base, while I was the long-suffering combat trooper who at some points in his national service stint, really believed he was a soldier.

I was the rugby guy and he was the drama club member who was forced to also join the Gardening Society because he didn’t have enough ECA currency (points, they called it – you needed ECA points to get to university or something). I was the grunt and he was the sensitive new age dude who was sensitive and new age in an age when it wasn’t quite fashionable to be, but still ahead by miles when it came to getting along with the girls in junior college.

We were dorks together at our first ‘tea dance’, where we jived to the background elevator music thinking it was the discotheque’s (yes, that was the word for club then) music, until the discotheque’s DJ started putting on the real music. Then we jived some more, pretending we were intending to do that all along.

We made our own mixed tapes for our own combined birthday parties, which we started at the age of 18 all the way to 36, though we keep referring to them as our 24th birthday parties. My mixed tapes were mostly Depeche Mode, his mostly Bananarama, and he could dance to them to boot, while I merely pouted and mimed Dave Gahan’s monotone.

Next week, Hossan helps me tie everything together, and will announce my fiancée and I as husband and wife.

Thanks for being best man by default, dude. As with everything else.

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