When friends ask who I have as my make-up artist, videographer, caterer and cake-maker when my fiance and I exchange marriage vows today, my answers have been met with a polite silence.

You see, Indra and I want to do for our solemnisation tea here as we did for our engagement luncheon in Cardiff - prepare everything ourselves as far as possible.

Yes, a D-I-Y do is not for the faint-hearted, especially not when we had under two hours in Cardiff to cook a three-course meal for 15 people. This time round, we had a week to work things through, although as these things go, it is still looking to be a dash to the altar.

That said, fun has been our watchword throughout.

There is the simple joy of picking out the cupcake recipe that best describes us (chocolate fudge with white icing in silver cases, with blue and purple sugar flowers crowning them).

There is the rare luxury of having my mother's signature dishes for tea, including the spicy Penang vegetable salad we call pasembur and her gingery chicken goujons.

There is no make-up that can erase the memory of what each of us looked like after a 13-hour bus ride to Edinburgh in Scotland where, amid its ornate spires and lush-green crags, we decided to get engaged.

And however vivid wedding videos are, they will not capture the many moments of grace on the afternoon proper that will be forever etched in our hearts.

This may all sound rosy-naive and, sure, it is our way of making do as we will be a single-income couple for a while in a waning economy.

But then, as Indra points out, we came together under the dark clouds of crises.

From the moment he plonked himself down in the seat opposite me at the welcome dinner during our course in Cardiff - five months ago to the day - the world around us was teetering towards collapse.

At our mock news conferences in class every morning, it seemed that every British newspaper headline we scanned was a variation on the theme of cash-strapped calamity, from well-heeled folk eschewing organic produce for the cheapest cuts of meat to first-person accounts of how they could not report for work because they could not afford the petrol that made their cars run and there was no bus or train service where they lived.

And Wales is the poorest part of Britain, with destitution driving an alarming number of youths to suicide in Bridgend, a southern former mining town there.

Still, when news broke in mid-October that Singapore was now in a recession, I SMSed Indra, who was then in Nepal, to say that it would not change anything between us or the financial commitments we had made to our families.

Our solemniser, Mr S. Puhaindran, said as much when he shared some wise words with Indra and me last Wednesday on how best to get along as husband and wife. Mr Puhaindran, who is a father of four, said the secret lay in always thinking of, and helping, others and being flexible whenever each other's family members were in need. We could not agree more.

Indra called me later from his family farm in Sindhuli, where his folk were getting ready to celebrate Dashain, the autumn festival which is Nepal's biggest yearly bash.

'Yeah, stock markets are falling everywhere,' he said, 'but here life goes on as always. We are harvesting the padi, cutting grass for the buffaloes to eat, nothing has changed.

'So we will be fine, yeah?'

And then I remembered the time we got back to our hostel in Cardiff after a 13-hour flight from Singapore, when I griped and fussed that the in-flight sandwiches we had saved for a late lunch had gone bad.

'Don't worry, don't worry. You just go and take a good shower,' said Indra. Which I did, and when I went back up to his flat again half an hour later, he handed me a hot boiled potato sprinkled with Sichuan peppercorn. Yum!

There will be pepper-and-potato meals in the months ahead, as going ga-ga over greens will help trim the grocery bill, to say nothing of our waistlines.

We will learn to wait for the books we want to read to be on library shelves and, in the meantime, rediscover tomes which have become old friends.

We will fill the few hours after work with ways to stay fighting fit. Morning and evening walks can be addictive when you are with someone who wants to be with you. And Singapore has parks and beaches enough to renew our sense of wonder of all that the universe holds.

And, well, we may not have a flat, car or membership of any club to call our own, but what shame is there, really, in renting, going that extra mile on foot or inviting friends over for good meals and long chats?

With so little for us to take from each other now, the fun and meaning will be in learning how to give of ourselves to each other, and to others, so that our new life is free of any debt of regret.

Indra's take on it is simply this: 'Life is meant to be happy. So if you remain happy, you can face any difficulties or problems happily.'

Words I find a joy to live by.

This article was first published in The Sunday Times on Nov 23, 2008.