Let me tell you about Eponine, the Grey

You never told me you had a little girl, so, when I heard about it, I was happy and surprised, even as I castigated myself for missing that particular part of your life, which must have been such a landmark. This was before I saw the picture of you and your little girl in my inbox. I used to have three very big girls, too; and I knew how big they have become when last Saturday, faced by a big Cat that suddenly appeared at our doorway, two of my girls expanded to twice their size, eager to prove themselves they were ready to defend their homeland.  I still remember how Eponine, the Grey, stood there, making herself as big as she can get; although the biggest that she can get at that moment was only up to the shoulder of the Cat. But Eponine was the most intelligent and the most brilliant of them all; the type who gets what she wants without even trying. I saw her last Saturday trying to scare the Cat; and I called my boy Sean inside the bathroom to come out fast because he will miss the action.  It was Eponine, the Grey and Oreo, the Black, who stood their ground against the Cat; while Henri Matisse, the Yellow One, shielded herself in the corner ready to duck and dart, if worse came to worst. But after a while of sabre-rattling without any actual action, I finally decided to call Oreo to my lap, leaving Eponine at the door alone to confront the intruder. Although she was able to maintain her size, I can faintly see her legs shaking at the effort. This makes me very sad every time I remember it now, the image of her standing bravely at the door. This was Saturday. The following day, a windy Sunday, Eponine got hit by a slamming door when I was coming out to get something.  What followed must have been 48 hours of terrible pain and suffering that only Eponine knew and I can only imagine with remorse.  In the morning of Tuesday, Eponine still attempted to join the boodle fight that characterized our feeding time with her two sisters but she could no longer make herself stand up.  I went to her to comfort her, telling her she did not have to move about because she was a very Special One, I prepared a special food for her.  Her mouth would no longer open when I tried.  Between 8 to 9 am on Tuesday, February 24, 2005, on the eve of the 29th year of the Edsa people power, I lost an intelligent, brave and loving girl of a cat. Her leaving fills us with sorrow so deep, it will take a very long time to heal.  

Dear Prateehba

Once you told me you’ve been reading Toni Morrison’s Love but can’t get to what she was saying, you decided to discard it, tucked it away somewhere out of sight.  Did I get you right about this, or is my memory messing up again, mixing up a bit of something with other snippets of past conversations?  I bring this up because I wanted to tell you about that particular man in Toni Morrison’s fiction; how he reminded me of a real person, someone I interview every day, sometimes at the dead of night, when everyone else—except for power-starved reporters—is already sound asleep. I think about this man, this Toni Morrison man, whose magic has caught everyone in his spell, so that, just like any other writer who came close to him, I, too, was overwhelmed by the desire to write his memoir; until it struck me one day that he was a Toni Morrison man, whose memoir I wouldn’t dream of writing, if I’d continue to love and honor Toni Morrison, unless I’d do it from the point of view of those who loved and suffered under his spell; the women.  Dear Prateeh, is there a way for writers to unravel the spell of an exemplary magician able to enthral his audience with the strength of his personality and magic?  Is there a way for us to span the growing distance between Davao and Kathmandu before it grows even bigger than the nautical miles in which it is usually being measured? Is there a way to reduce time and space and matter into pulp so that we can finally travel beyond walls, our minds soaring free of our bodies? It’s a Sunday morning here at my desk, where I face the growing clutter of wires, cables, chargers, keys, which I never had the luxury to set in order, as I was in a constant rush, just like the way we were in that dorm at Esteban Abada.  From my desk, I keep hearing the soothing sound of running water in the kitchen, where Sean is washing the dishes I abandoned, and somewhere in another corner of the house, Ja deep into his writing, quiet as a mouse. Outside my window, the three cats bask in the sunlight. Both soles of my feet keep brushing the top of the magazine pile growing fast under my table. We always dream of writing memoirs, though, we know no one else can write a memoir but the owner of the life we want to write. Unlike a biography, a memoir dwells only at a particular moment of a life, projecting it to eternity so as to render that particular life some meaning. 

The Magick "R"

[written when Sean was six, and never finished!]

After Ja first made me see what light does to the shape of an object, I began to be an avid student of light.  I fell in love with lights and shadows, closely studying them every time I get the chance.  Then, I introduced Sean to the “magic hour,” as the hour when unbelievable things happen.  Like most other six-year-olds, he mistook my “magic hour” for the “magic R,” perhaps, because of the way I pronounced it, pointing to the marks the sunlight makes on the wall when the sun starts to slant in the horizon. 

Then, I made him pose, midway between the rays of the four o’clock sun slowly sinking in the west and the white wall of the house directly facing the glass window.  The photo showed the soft face of Sean, half illuminated and suffused with the sun’s orange glow, occupying the first third of the frame.  On the frame’s remaining two thirds was the shadow that Sean’s face cast on the wall. 

It could probably be one of the most striking pictures I’ve taken of him, so full of irony and rich in metaphors; a photograph of life, itself; a revealing moment captured by a click of the shutter, etched on the mind for eternity. But remembering the power of metaphors; and the cruelty that ironies can assume at the most unexpected moments, I took one look at it and decided to erase the photo.

I finally realized that that love you have as a mother could only be measured by how much you could sacrifice your love and lust as a photographer.

For photography demands on its altar the same sacrifice that God once demanded of Abraham, who made an offering out of his son Isaac, a sacrifice that I, a mother, could never probably make of my boy.  This reminded me of what my mother told me one day when I happened to ask her why she remained a public school teacher handling Grade Six all her life.  “Didn’t it ever occur to you that you can be something else?” I asked.  “How come you never chose to defy Fate?”

I asked her this question at the most crucial point of my life; when we were packing my things because I was moving out again from a failed relationship.  For I was the kind of person who has always been defying fate and as a result, ending up in all sorts of trouble. There and then, it suddenly crossed my mind that my mother had never moved and never packed her belongings the way that I usually did in every five years.  She never ended her relationship and never made any life-threatening decisions. She had married and never left my father, never questioned the conventions and simply took, unquestioningly, what life has laid down for her.  It dawned upon me that, perhaps, she never really followed where her heart wanted her to go.   My mother’s answer almost made me choke.  “You were still very young when beautiful things began to happen to me,” she said.  “I was terrified of having to set you aside if I accepted new responsibilities.” 

From what my mother said, I had a sudden illumination about the nature of women’s lives.  Every woman is condemned by the choice she makes of that magic hour, that crucial moment when she can either choose to reveal herself before the light; or stay in mediocrity forever, lurking in the shadows, unnoticed for life.

Thank you, 2014; Welcome 2015!

Welcome and help me make sense of my room happily cluttered with books, photographs, cables, wires, chargers, dirty shoes, slippers, old magazines mixing with the new, soiled clothes piling up to high heavens; old newspapers gathering dust in every corner, discarded schoolbooks that I failed to throw away, more piles of discarded tickets, useless receipts of past travel. Welcome to the life heavily cluttered with people, dreams, meetings and some affairs of the heart.

Love and Spices

There's a story going round and round my mind. It started with that pair of old trousers you were wearing, and traveled downward to your muddy feet. Actually, I could no longer see the feet as we turned to see the scraggly leaves of turmeric, remnants of the recent drought. When you said only a few of them survived, I looked up at the sky and up ahead to the footpath down the river where we were supposed to go.

Elizabeth, the Beloved Monarch

She was the monarch who understood the woman question during her time and in understanding it, kept her power hold. http://europeanhistory.about.com/od/elizabethiofengland/p/prelizabethieng.htm

Cryptic message to the Beloved

The year is speeding away and I have a hard time coping.  You asked me why eating beef and red meat is dangerous but instead of explaining, I told you it’s not your problem, you’re young; it’s  for the old people to worry.  We were climbing down the ravine when I inadvertently grabbed your arm because I was about to slip. What will happen if I quit? I no longer care about things as much as I used to. All I care about now is the image that I take but it's usually an image nobody else would understand. Whatever happened to Sheilfa? Is she happy in Jolo? I told her once I would bring her here. I can imagine ourselves talking, two witches in the holy land. She had a talent for images, whether they be images of the past or images of the future. I don’t know what’s happening to me now that the year is about to end, I could not get anything done. I have lost all love for life until I saw Matisse and then I saw you. 

Beyond Sudimara

Shortly after Indonesia's national elections in April, and the day before our trip back to our home country, Indonesian political activist Tedjabayu Sudjojono treated us for lunch in his home at the outlying district of Jakarta. We--included Tatikarn Dechapong, our journalist fellow from Thailand we called by her nickname, "Boom," and Ryan, another journalist fellow from the Philippines, who is also my fellow corres at the Inquirer. It was one of the rare moments I treasured most, because we did not only spend the hours partaking of the delicious Javanese food that the family prepared, but we also spent the rest of the afternoon talking about books and art in Indonesia.

Pak Tedja, as Boom insisted in calling him out of respect, is the son of the great Indonesian painter Sudjojono, whose works are on display at the Indonesian museum that she saw the previous day. Pak Tedja described his late father as the painter who refused to paint the beautiful scenes of Indonesia but insisted on painting the real condition of his people under the Dutch's colonial rule.
But there was something else that surprised me more about Pak Tedja.

Unlike most people I’ve encountered in neighboring Southeast Asia, he was not a stranger to Philippine history and culture. He learned about Jose Rizal at a very early age. His mother, a political activist fluent in Dutch and many languages, translated it into Bahasa and introduced it to him. Was it at 15, when Pak Tedja said he was already reading the Noli Me Tangere in English?   “She used to speak Dutch like a native,” Tedjabayu recalls his mother, who wrote the book, “From Camp to Camp,” about her experiences as a political detainee in a series of detention cells under Soeharto's Indonesia.

Letter from Kathmandu

I told her years ago, towards the end of our summer together, that I was very lucky to have a poet for a roommate, because I could not imagine rooming with another person who only read politics and current events and neglect all about poetry. I told her I would feel very oppressed. Though, I have disappointed her for refusing to take snapshots of her against the backdrop of that tropical downpour raging outside our window, she said she couldn't imagine rooming with  one of the rest of the fellows, either. I remember  going over the list of the women journalist fellows rooming in for the on campus session of our MA Journalism course at the Ateneo that summer, and indeed, I realized I had been very lucky to have this sweet girl from Kathmandu for a roommate.  I simply loved it. I remember waking up one morning, with her agitated in front of her laptop, mumbling about this guy named Prachanda, as her country teetered yet again on the brink of another political turmoil. Back in Davao, I met a man from Nepal in one of those international conventions on bird migration occasionally held in the city. It took a while for him to remember that anchorwoman of Kantipur TV. Ah! he said, at last, in the midst of my descriptions. She's the one on the English news!
His sudden recognition somehow exhilarated me, as if Prateehba, a continent away and living in another time zone, suddenly appeared in front of me, smiling. 

Understanding the Lumads

I heard from Tebtebba that the book I edited in 2010 is coming out with a new edition this year and is being distributed by the Department Education in their indigenous people's curriculum. I still have something to say about this book, though; which I will set aside for another time, another place.

Remembering Ampatuan

A week before the infamous date, we followed the road from Marbel, South Cotabato to do a story of the backhoe (actually, excavator) used to bury the dead--and the story of the Ampatuan massacre, where 58 people, 32 of them media workers were killed in Ampatuan, Maguindanao.  The road eventually brought us to the town of Tacurong, where the group of media workers slept their last in a hotel five years ago, before proceeding early morning the following day on the road to Shariff Aguak, Maguindanao, to cover the filing of candidacy of the former Buluan mayor, running for governor in Maguindanao against the ruling Ampatuan clan.  The media workers, together with the politician's relatives and supporters, did not reach Shariff Aguak.  They were waylaid to their death in an isolated hillside in sitio Masalay, barangay Salman in Ampatuan town.  They were all buried here.  This was the last of their journey, the beginning of our own, as we continue the search for justice for hundreds of journalists killed in the Philippines since the so-called democracy was restored in 1986.

Still in Search of My Mother's Garden

As soon as I get home, I will retrieve Alice Walker's book, "In Search of Our Mother's Garden," to read the essays again to find out if they still sound and feel the same as the first time that I read them years ago.
 I first read her essay under the dim light of a running jeepney, after opening a discarded Ms magazine discovered in a bargain bookshop. I realized my mother also has such a garden and it is through the colors of her garden that I've come to view even the most difficult part of our lives.