Something salaah somewhere.

I went to the private home of a pastor recently, to witness the baptism of a friend.

It was an earnest, cosy affair in that middle class way, a gathering of singalongs, serene faces and tearful testimonials. There was an amp in the corner for the microphones and acoustic guitar, a costly little buffet on the dining.

I was only uncomfortable enough to make very few, very private infidel jokes to ease the outsider's itch for my fellow non-christian buddy and I. Sure, being surrounded by religion was not the favourite way we sorry free-thinkers would choose to spend a Sunday afternoon. But we are good friends, and Singaporean enough to have thick skins about trespassing religious ceremonies when invited to. What raised our eyebrows was the luxurious, large home of a man whose vocation demands modesty and sets examples.

See, the guests belonged to a small church without the facilities for the baptism, so the pastor hosted them in his home.

It begun to drizzle as we arrived, hurrying over a wide water feature to enter the bungalow. The living room had sliding glass doors for walls. They displayed the backyard, and the water feature that had followed us from the front door. Its passage surrounds much of the building; it was a modern-day, partial moot.

We teased that the water feature was where the baptisms will happen, since, aside from the largeness of the feature, the witnesses could be seated comfortably while the girls were dipped for the ceremony right on the edge of the marbled living room floor.

At one point during the preliminary prayers, the guests, following some unseen cue, closed their eyes and tilted their faces to the ceiling. Some raised their arms, as if to embrace it. I watched as an elderly lady with a shock of bone-white hair and a surprisingly crease-less face swayed lovingly, no worrylines on her brow and slack-jawed. A pair of little ones next to her stared in their solemn child's way at the pastor's hand resting on my friend's lowered head.

A lady standing next to me turned to my curious gaze, and her mismatched eyes twinkled engagingly at mine. She didn't smile, but turned back to the ceremony and raised her arm, palm outwards to face my friend. She looked just like Yoko Ono. The rain clouds got serious about their work. The pastor used the symbolism offered so freely.

The baptism itself was uneventful. They stood chest-deep in the pastor's swimming pool, he asks my friend one last question, has her hold her nose in one hand and fold the other across her chest, and dips her backwards quickly. She emerged, with a smile and splutter for the cameras and applauding crowd.

Leaving, we found that our little remark before had been unoriginal, repeated by many other guests upon entering that vast space. The pastor himself laughed off these needling comments graciously.

"He used to be a stockbroker before finding his place with the Lord," someone said.

He stood waving us off in his foyer, dressed in shorts and a Giordano T-shirt, both in the muted, dark serviceable colours of a working class man. Only the ironed crease down the front of his shorts did not contradict his home.