The Accidental Bridesmaid
A Western backpacker gets an island makeover to attend an Indonesian wedding

By Kari J. Bodnarchuk

was sitting on a bed in an Indonesian guest house in the city of Solo, with long fake lashes fluttering on my eyelids and my lips glowing as red as poinsettias. Surrounding me were ten women who were attempting to transform me from a casually clad Western traveler into an elegantly dressed Eastern celebrant. No easy task.

At a local museum the day before, my friend Erik and I had met a cellist named Widodo. His band was to perform at a wedding ceremony the next day, and he insisted that it would be a "great honor" if we would attend. (It's common for anyone associated with an Indonesian wedding to invite guests to the ceremony, and it is considered a particular privilege to share the culture with foreign guests.) I was delighted with the invitation, but after ten months of backpacking across Asia and the South Pacific, I had one small concern.

"I have nothing to wear," I told Endang, a woman who helped run the guesthouse where I was staying.

Erik was going Western-style, in khakis and a button-down shirt, but all I had with me was a tattered skirt. Not wanting to offend anyone by dressing inappropriately, I spent several hours hunting for an outfit at batik markets around town but arrived back at the guesthouse empty-handed.

"What should I do?" I asked Endang, and within minutes I found myself standing naked in the middle of a room while she and her friends set to work dressing me up, from my heels to my hairdo, in traditional Javanese fashion.

After apply- ing makeup and fake eyelashes, Endang begins teasing the author's hair into a nest of knots.

Armloads of batik cloth appeared—earth-colored materials called kain, or "long cloths," that were decorated with Solo's traditional pattern. After I’d chosen one, Endang’s mother-in-law spent an hour folding it accordion-style so that the front would fan out gracefully when I walked.

Word of my transformation spread through the guest house, and soon we were joined by Geri from Ireland, Sheleen from South Africa, and Lisa from Arizona, who brought her camera to document the event.

Meanwhile, Endang hauled out a red makeup kit the size of a household toolbox and began working on my face. After months in the tropics, my skin had tanned to a lovely shade that I thought gave me a healthy, outdoorsy appearance. But in class-conscious Indonesia, where darker skin is associated with farmers and a hard life of labor in the fields, a tan has no value. The people there prefer kuning langsat—the light, yellowish complexion that symbolizes higher status and a prosperous life spent out of the sun. Not surprisingly, brides and the women attending their ceremonies attempt to look as fair-skinned as possible.

To achieve that look, Endang first scrubbed my face with lulur, a yellow exfoliating powder. Then she dipped four fingers into a pot of pale yellow face cream, and with gentle sweeping strokes, covered my face. My "healthy" suntan disappeared, first under the bright paste and then under two coats of powder. Next, Endang trimmed the false eyelashes, making them shorter and shorter until they fit what she described as my "small" eyes. After gluing the lashes to my eyelids, Endang added dramatic eyeliner, thick mascara, and dark blush. With every new dash of color, Lisa snapped a photo.

At a certain point I began hoping that "fashionably late" was a concept that translated across cultures, because the wedding was about to start and I was only half ready. Endang continued to work, slowly and meticulously. A few kids sat on the floor, looking up at me as if trying to make sense of this strange transformation, while Endang’s friend Kini stood behind me, running her fingers through my stick-straight brown hair, intrigued by how different it was from her long, silky black strands.

Javanese women traditionally clip a black bun onto the back of their hair on dress-up occasions; instead, Endang teased my hair into a wild, twisted knot and then molded it into a big, smooth wave that swept out over my left ear. She inserted golden hairpins adorned with diamondlike studs (symbols of prosperity), and then applied industrial-strength hairspray to shellac my hair in place.

It took two women to wrap the seven-foot-long kain around my waist, and as they pulled tighter and tighter, I regretted having sucked in my stomach for the camera; it would remain cinched like that all night. As if to emphasize that fact, an even longer cummerbund was wrapped around my hips and stomach to hold the kain in place. Finally, I slipped into a lacy pink blouse called a kebaya and a pair of small black shoes on loan from one of Endang’s neighbors.

I felt at once pretty and silly—and very stiff. The kain was so tight that I could only shuffle my feet.

"Should it be slightly looser?" I asked one of the women.

"No, this is right," she said helping me down a three-inch step to the entryway of the guesthouse, where I met up with Erik. He and I had spent the past week traveling together—climbing a volcano on eastern Java, enduring long rides in steamy buses, and exploring temples and villages on foot in the 100-degree heat. So he was accustomed to seeing me as a sweaty, dust-covered backpacker, not the elegant Javanese princess I now resembled.

When he saw me, his eyebrows shot up in surprise, and a single word came out of his mouth: "Amazing."

Erik looked wrinkled after the long wait. He smoothed himself out while the women adorned me with gold clip-on earrings and a medallion necklace and then escorted us to the door.

Following tradition, the ceremony took place at the bride's home, under a pavilion decorated with symbolic flowers, batiks, and towers of fruit.

There was a buzz of excitement in the air when we arrived, or perhaps I was sensing my own nervousness. Either way, as we stepped into the pavilion, at least 40 sets of eyes turned our way. I suddenly felt more vulnerable, more on display than I had when I’d been standing naked in a roomful of women. I tried to read the looks on the guests’ faces, wondering whether they were horrified or pleased by my appearance.

The author slips into a lacy pink blouse and apair of small black shoes on loan from a neighbor.

Everyone smiled or nodded in approval, which put me a little more at ease.

The bride was stunning in her kuning langsat, her green silk blouse, her golden sarong, and her elaborate jasmine headpiece that symbolized her status as queen for the day. Yet the guests seemed to be focusing their gazes and cameras on me. Feeling self-conscious and hoping to deflect the attention back to the bride, I kept my eyes on her. But it didn't work; throughout the ceremony and afterward, I was photographed eating, talking, sitting, standing, and fiddling with my eyelashes, which kept sticking together. Not only did they hinder my vision, but they also became a distraction, adding to my sense of awkwardness. Finally convincing myself that they were falling off, I ripped them from my eyelids.

As the event drew to a close, the bride and groom stood on their platform, and official family portraits were taken. Widodo approached Erik and me and said: "The bride and groom wish to have a photo with you. Would you kindly come inside?"

Erik helped me up the steps, and when the bride saw us approaching she smiled for the first time all night, a young, girlish smile that reflected my own jittery excitement. "Terima kasih" ("thank you"), I said to the couple after posing for the photograph, and then I shuffled away.

It was long after midnight by the time we reached the guesthouse, and Endang and her friends were fast asleep. I crept up to my room, where I spent an hour washing off the makeup, combing out my hair, and trying to transform myself back into someone more familiar. Then I slipped off my gold medallion, folded the pink blouse, and, finally, wriggled out of the kain. But just before crawling into bed, I pulled out those long lashes and pasted them onto a page in my journal.

Kari J. Bodnarchuk is a freelance travel writer and photographer. She is the author of Rwanda: Country Torn Apart and Kurdistan: Region Under Siege. She lives in Boston, Massachusetts.