Technicolor Winged Horse

Once I had asked my grandfather about my grandmother's weakness and general immobility. He told me that it was indeed because of a disease that afflicted her and that she would not be able to speak so well anymore. What I really wanted to asked him was why she would scream at times into the midnight that everyone in the house would be awaken. What kind of disease would let one scream into the night was the thing I wanted to inquire upon. But as a toddler, I bet there are things that we do not even know how to ask, when vocabulary would not be enough to elucidate our inquiry. Everytime she was attacked by such "disease", Uncle Mameng and the servants would come and help my grandfather calmed her down, to reassure her that everything was all right. She was always murmuring about some person she was afraid of; a one she calls "the jinn".

"There are no jinns. You are just imagining" my grandpa always assured her while she would lay there wide-eyed and trembling. From the looked on her eyes, pity was the natural thing I could feel for her. She was like a child afraid of something.

"I have checked the whole house and there was no Jinn around" my uncle would add to further reassure her.

At times the attacked on her nocturnal sleep would be so serious enough that in the stillness of the dawn, we would packed the necessities and head for the hospital, staying there for nearly a week every time.

At such a young age, my grandmother's predicament affected me so much that I had always hoped then that I was already grown up and be able to help her, wishing earnestly to appease her. Those dreams of flying had made me somehow distant from her, a little bit wary of her and somewhat disturbed that the winged old woman in my dreams somehow looked like her. And yet, I felt so much for her. Besides those were merely dreams.

Once I decided to investigate the cause or causes of the "weakness" of my grandmother. I was relatively confident that I would find some answers however tender my mind at that time. It was in the apartment's bathroom with its yellow darkened light and perpetual wet floor that she had pointed to be the place where she had seen the "jinn". The bathroom had malfunctioning equipment that always had that pungent smell typical of aging lavatories, full of slime and fungi stuck to walls and corners giving it a dark green shadow all over, from the floor to the ceiling. What augments the general dimness was the decision of the household to put a bulb of the weakest power that even at daytime, I would always feel like it was already midnight whenever I enter it. There was desperation written all over it that anyone who went into the toilet would realize immediately that it was a place where the smell would remain even if best efforts to clean it up would be undertaken.

As I relieved myself, I tried to stay longer when the apartment was quiet and everyone was either asleep in the afternoon or were out for work. I examined the ceilings for some clue and stared at the walls for holes and cavities to where the jinn might be hiding. When I convinced myself at that time that there would be no such signs of the unknown being, I stepped back and headed for the door. As I turned my head, suddenly I saw in the corner of my left eye a huge shadow of a man that goes from the floor towards the ceiling, the shape of its head folding into the surface of the ceiling. The hairs at the back of my head stood up and I felt my skin trembled. Despite such apparent terror however, I gathered all of my strength to focus my stare into the wall but the shadow was not there anymore. I went quickly outside and found the afternoon very still as usual.

I went to the garden in the front yard where I usually enjoyed my solitariness when the sun was readying to fall towards sunset and played in the gardens, picking some leaves and mangling some stems. My cousins would be asleep in that hour of the afternoon while I did not developed such habit, allowing me so much time alone to play with whatever my mind could think of. As I put some stones into holes that I have previously dug in the ground, I pondered upon the shadow in the toilet. Was it the shadow of the "jinn"? It was a huge being I thought and the image of the shadow was vivid enough that I was able to surmise that it wore a g-string garment on its body and had a strip of clothe wrapped around its head while its hair was shoulder length, like an ancient warrior. He must have held spears and knives but such things did not appear to me.

I kept on digging holes and putting stones and coins into them and then covering back the holes, ironing out the surface to look as if the soil were never disturbed. Such was the kind of solitary games I played. I have reckoned then so early in my life, when I dug up the stones and coins the day after, that plants and trees could grow from the ground and flowers multiply too; but stones and money would not.

I had perhaps had a very strong desire to tell my grandfather about the shadow but somehow I did not had enough inclination to put them into words while my grandmother kept wailing in the middle of the night every now and then. Then after a while, her predicament eased towards serenity that she just stared and sat in her rocking chair until she died in the hospital one day while I was looking after her. My Aunt Julpa cried first and asked me what have I done that she died. Of course, I did not know what to say but her asking was etched so much into my mind that every now and then I would ask myself if indeed I had done something to hasten her death. But as I child that I was then, the disturbance of Aunt Julpa's inquiry just faded into memory till now that I earnestly attempt to recollect those events so far into my childhood.

There were a lot of card games played while the family was mourning the death of Hadja Dayhana and the smell of brewed coffee permeated as the men would take turns in making the coffin. They were in jest as they kept on putting one up against each other about who is the better carpenter. My father attempted to drive a nail into its rightful place but the rest laughed that Salip Hussin could never become a sharp carpenter. This had somehow eased my apprehensions about Aunt Julpa the day before. Every one was in a light mood that everything must have been all right and done with. Dying in the latest of ages seemed to be most acceptable to all. But when my grandmother was finally rested to the ground, as the men held her body so gently and tucked her into the crevices of the ground, almost everyone was teary eyed and Aunt Julpa was even talking to my dead grandmother while we throw soil to cover the grave, about why she had to leave, about her being not able to come and visit her frequently. How could she talked to a dead person I thought? Would her cries and words be heard and not flow into the rural wind of Taluksangay? This had somehow recuperated the apprehensions I had about her.

There must something in my grandmother that gives spark and liveliness to the house that after she died, there was a gradual silencing of the household and everyone was more incline to frown, more inclined to be introspective that conversations became lesser and us children played lesser games, as if a great lonely shadow was cast over the household. If anybody missed her among the members of the house--including the servants--no one could tell, the least myself. It was the newfound serenity of the surroundings that everyday I had wished that all those who played card games in the mourning of my grandmother would come and played those card games again and again, to make the noise stifle the sadness of the gardens and of the front yards, to fill the air with coffee smell again and of rice cakes. But this was never so. And so in the afternoons, I kept playing in the garden, careful that the traces of stems mangled and flower picked would not be apparent enough less my Aunt Nene would call upon to inquire upon the suspects and then the guilty malefactor, which would be either one of my cousins or me. I went about to pretend that I was like the older men who did the coffin thinking that I might become a good carpenter, unlike my father. It was in sunny days that I loved to play alone in the yards when the air was a little yellowish and everything seemed to glow, like the image of those pictures not developed properly and everything in the picture would be bright yellow. I smelled the air and they were thick that almost I could see the wind swooping by, and caressing my hair so gently. I smelled such air so smoothly they seemed to be delicious, like chicken or chiffon cake thickly covered with butter. In one of those sunny afternoons, I had looked towards the sky and observed the sun. I tried to examine if the sun had come nearer towards the ground that everything looked brighter. And my mind got stoned when suddenly the clouds move so agile that a hole in the sky formed, like a gate opening. And then I saw a very colorful image coming into the center of the hole. What a beautiful kite it was I said that it had the bluest of blue and the greenest of all green. It was a horse with the head of a woman with its hand waving at me. A kite would not do such things I told myself. And the gate in the sky closed and the technicolor horse disappeared.

I wanted to ask my grandfather if kites could stare back and waved at us while in the sky but somehow, I did not ask anymore. It happened in those very early years where my vocabulary was not yet efficient to elucidate every thought I had then.

Dirty Sox

Not only in these moments that I have pondered the possibility of writing a long overdue requiem for an old friend that had already gone to the netherworld, but also in many other instances before.


Maybe I just hadn’t had the time before or maybe the time wasn’t just right. And so now I shall speak of him in the best of manners and as far as my remembrances of him could take.

Aziz Vernon Mustapha was closer to me as a brother than as a friend. I met him during our first years in Ateneo de Zamboanga, in a time and place that was etched in my mind like mildew on a rock. He was sweating so furiously one sunny afternoon when he appeared out of nowhere and suddenly sat beside me without any prelude in a Religion 101 class that we had both attended. He kept on scrubbing the area around the back of his neck with a handy towel and that made me a little uneasy. It was the first week of school that year and I panned around the entire length of the room for any familiar faces, as well as amiable countenances that I could be comfortable with, those that I could possibly associate with later on. I did not find one familiar soul and most of them looked grim and sordid. Anyone sitting for a Religion class in Adez has exactly nothing to be cheerful for and everything to grieve. The words coming out of the religion teacher’s mouth can border from the murderously boring towards the unforgivably commonplace. I am now a strong advocate of religion and I assure you that religion is not such a dreary subject to brood over. Do not get me wrong on this. It is just that when we were so young and adventurous then, the matters of faith took a major backseat from our thoughts and attention, and became farthest from the pyramid of our wants and desires.

I attempted at a conversation with Aziz by asking: “What’s that CD about?”

Aziz handed me the square object that he was holding tightly in his hands like a precious ancient artifact (he held it so tightly as I have observed then) and I found out for myself that it was a recording of live performances by the Filipino new wave band “The Dawn”.

I said: “I like their songs and Jett Pangan was sublime in ‘Enveloped Ideas’; or something to that effect.

Aziz nodded and never spoke a single word to me up to that moment. I had rescinded my forward engagements towards him because of his seeming nonchalance. Sheik Bagis, the religion teacher that was in front of us called my attention and told me to shut up and be attentive. I did not notice the classes were about to start that I felt a little sore from embarrassment for the first time ever. I am not kidding. I was such a diligent student for most of my high school years that until that moment, my attention inside a classroom had not been questioned and called for. I never minded this discomfort so much and began to keep quiet and pretended to listen to what the teacher was reading from a fading textbook. Sheik Bagis knew me fairly well since he had also been one of my teachers in high school. He proctored us in SRA. I am never sure now what the exact denotation of the acronym SRA but Standard Reading Activity seems to be the approximate term.

Later that week, I was sitting with my Tau Gamma fraternity brods in the bench near the Ateneo Chapel when John Suico, a classmate from high school walked towards my direction. I stood up to meet him and gave him a hug. He was with Aziz. It was so long ago that we have been together so I asked where he had been?

“I was in Davao” John said. “ Our family had some business there you know.” He continued.

“How about you? I heard you were in Silliman with Tony?” John asked me.

I narrated to him how I spent one whole year in Silliman but found some difficulties there that I had to come back again to Ateneo and take up accountancy. John explained to me that he had likewise met Aziz just recently. “Pics, this is Vernon”. Pics was my nickname while Vernon is the name John use to refer to Aziz. I said, “I know him. We’re in the same class in religion”.

John had apparently got to know about Aziz in the orientation seminar given that year for incoming freshmen and transferees. I forgot the orientation schedule that if I remember too well, I might have been flying kites that day somewhere in the vicinity of the rice field just adjacent to our neighborhood.

I had surmised then that Aziz was a man of few words when during our initial encounters, he seem to have not spoken to me even a single word. But later, as our friendship blossomed, he had become the most gregarious among the three of us.

One afternoon, on a break from that arduous Citizen Military Training we usually had in college, we were munching on fried bananas when John noticed something. “What’s that smell?” he asked and we all look around for the possible source of the unwelcome scent. “ I do not smell anything.” I answered back. “It’s your shoes Pics. Your socks are dirty”. I protested that observation from John and I said that it was only in his mind. But I must have been guilty that one afternoon for I remember not a few times did I resorted to wearing socks that wasn’t fully dried up. I was not a sock person back then when I was in college. Usually, whenever Sundays were near approaching, it was usually the night before that I usually remember that I had to wear socks for the CMT drills the following day. I had to scurry up and wash some socks that I almost always left dirty and unattended in some dark corner of our house. Bad habits that I had then you might say but in college, I never really wore those big and heavy shoes that called for the wearing of socks, like the way those humongous basketball rubber shoes many wore during those years when Michael Jordan was the god of many gangly youths. All my loafers then were topsiders and some look like kung-fu shoes. I like those kinds of shoes better since they were so windy and my feet felt breezy in them all the time and I never had to wear socks often. Besides, you won’t have to go through the usually lengthy ceremony of tying up laces that big shoes demand. You can just pick up those topsiders and slip them into your feet and up you go in a jiffy.

John and Aziz both laughed citing my smelly socks but I just disregarded them. As the three of us were heading downtown, after that afternoon’s CMT session, I uttered to them while my eyebrows were furrowed from deep thought, a suggestion that could make our associations more rewarding and productive. I said, “You know what, ‘Dirty Socks’ seems to be a good name for a band”. Right up to that moment, we were really dreaming of forming a rock band and we were so serious about it that we have made acquaintances with some Ateneans who were already playing in one. They both agreed to this band moniker but later on, we had to change it to “Dirty Sox” to make it sound spikier.

We had a friend named Stephen then and he was already in a band. In fact, he was the bandleader of a band that played heavy metal music by Metallica and Iron Maiden. That time, if a band could play “Enter Sandman” with silkiness and spontaneity, that band is popular as hell. Every time Stephen and his band mates were rehearsing in Stephen’s house, we would be present just watching them and learning the craft from a distance. We all knew how to play the guitar but we were not so refined in that field that we had to observe how others did it. I had to learn how to play drums myself because John had wanted so much to be the lead guitarist and Aziz coveted the role of the bass player like he was yearning for a woman. Being unassuming that I was then, I agreed to beat the drums for them even when I had no professional training whatsoever in that field. Aziz had good things to say about my voice though. According to him, my voice was both full and raspy and among the three of us, I had the finest voice. So I had asked both of them that perhaps I could be the lead singer. They both answered yes to this particular intimation. But I eventually asked them about how I could be the singer of the band when at the same time I had to be the drummer? John said almost in a whisper, “Pics, if Phil Collins could both play the drums and sing the lead vocals for Genesis, I can see no reason why you could not do it.” I did not know how to react at first to this particular opinion of John but to be sure I was elated with the comparison to Phil Collins so I agreed to be both the singer and the drummer. In my lone moments after that, I had felt so confused and challenged thinking what great trouble I had found myself agreeing to become both the drummer and the singer. I reckoned that it would demand from me too much exertion for having to do two tasks at the same time. Yet, I let pass those doubtfulness and decided for myself that from then on, I should face the challenge of becoming the Phil Collins of the Philippines.

When Stephen bandmates quitted on him one by one, we tried applying as his new band mates but he would not take any of us. He said our skill was still far from performance level. We said we could try harder in practice and play all the songs he want us to carry out but he would not let up. We were so disappointed with Stephen that we made jokes about him when he wasn’t around and laugh so hard on them. John said that at first Stephen had a complete band made of four individuals like U2. Then when a bandmate said quits, they became a trio like The Police. Then after another band mate left the band, they became a duo like Tears For Fears or Wham. Then Stephen became alone and became George Michael singing “Careless Whisper” like a cross-dresser in the middle of Plaza Pershing. We laughed so hard to this humorous crack at Stephen for being an inconsiderate fool, I mean friend. Even when all his band mates had quitted on him, he remains unwelcoming to our propositions of becoming his new bandmates.

I remember that I wasn’t only the singer and the drummer for “The Dirty Sox”, but I was also its main songwriter. Our first original composition was a song called “Sitting On My Backseat”. Part of the song’s lyrics goes this way on a D-G-C-G chord progression.

STANZA

D G C , G
Sitting on my back seat.

D G C, G
Playing with my yo-yo.

D G C, G
Waiting for the sundown.

D G C, G
Looking for a showdown.

CHORUS

F G C, G
Sitting on the back seat with the radio on.

F G C,G
Sitting on the back seat with the radio on.

F G C,G
Sitting on the back seat with the radio on.

F G D,G
And it feels like sunshine.

F G D,G
And it feels like moonshine.

Forgive the simplicity of the lyrics but that was how crude my writings back then, right about the time when I was still a college freshman. Aziz queried me about the meaning of the song’s lyrics and what the hell I was doing sitting on my backseat. He said that maybe I should change some wordings of the song to give it more sense. I refused to be edited and I said the person in the song is sitting in the backseat of a car listening to the radio and that he enjoyed that activity so much that it felt like a good sunshine on an ultra-cool afternoon for him—pure and simple. John on the other hand praised this eponymous composition of mine that he compared it to the Clash punk classic “Should I Stay or Should I Go”. It was so simple John added and the chord progression was so strong and very rock-oriented that according to him, the intro for the song “Sitting On My Backseat” reminded him of the fierce guitar in the intro part of Deep Purple’s “Smoke On The Water”.

John, Aziz and I were never really able to fully form our band called “The Dirty Sox”. We did not have the right amount of money to buy ourselves a complete set of instruments. With some savings, we were able to acquire a second hand bass guitar but that was all what we have gotten then. Usually, we just end up popping out in some other band’s practice sessions and when that band was resting for a while, we hopped in and play some number, hoping to hone our skills all the more. Most of those who were already in a regular band were mostly acquaintances from high school that they are just real kind to allow us to just appear in their rehearsals and made use of their instruments while they take some brief recesses. It was sort of a trade-off. I was already a writer then for the Beacon Newsmagazine, the official publication of the Ateneo de Zamboanga and I had featured those bands in some articles, or made some mentions about them. Perhaps, they decided that they could make use of some music journalist hanging around their necks.

John was already back in Davao when finally, me and Aziz were already able to form a band with a complete set of musical instruments. We were already working in the same government agency by then, earning quite contently and being able to buy those costly musical apparatus. Except for the drum set which would have cost us a fortune if we have gotten them. One of our officemate turned out to be a hobbyist of drums and he had a drum set he kept at home although he wasn’t in any band at all.

But without John, the camaraderie was never the same and the magic of three or four people longing for each other’s musical support, the kind that band mates usually have, was not present at all. And besides, we could not pour so much of our time into the band since both me and Aziz held crucial positions in our office—positions that demanded more attention than we were willing to give. I was the legal assistant reviewing piles and piles of project applications, examining each time if each folder was complete in its legal requirements while he was the procuring officer that took care of the adequacy of supplies and materials.

Farouq, the designated drummer, always had some excuse tacked under his belt. He had to bring his kids to the mall every time whenever weekend came and Schulk, our supposedly other member playing rhythm guitar was a computer programmer that always had some clients calling him on his ever-ringing bulky Motorola. After a while, we stopped pursuing the dream of forming a band as newer realities set in like being married and having children, being so busy taking care of them when the night came. Aside from that, work in the office had become so demanding that soon our rehearsals became so infrequent until there was none at all.

When our employment contracts were ended by the agency we were working for, I went into dried fish business with some capital from Aziz but the endeavor never really took off until I decided to take the bar examinations for the first time. While, we were still in the agency, a few months before our work ended there, Aziz was rushed to the hospital one morning as he suddenly lost consciousness while he was preparing to go to work, and needed blood transfusion so direly that I had to assist his brother in finding the proper blood source. I received the call while I was doing some task in the office and without asking permission from my boss, I headed for the door. While I was in the tricycle on my way to the hospital, my mind whirled like a train, asking what perhaps was Aziz’s malady that he needed to have blood transfusion.

I found out later, as I arrived at the hospital panting and perspiration was all over me, that he needed to be operated on in order to take away the kidneys that had failed him. I saw how his feet become so bloated as he lay there in bed. He was conscious and he told me, “Pics, why of all people this has to happen to me? My son is still young. Take care of my son if the worst comes.” I consoled him that everything will be all right and that he should not speak words like that. I wanted to cry thinking how in his most difficult times, Aziz thought of nothing except his son Jakob, my godson.

For two years, Aziz had to go through a laborious process called dialysis and his medicines was too costly that his parents struggled to maintain them and he needed them in such great volume that the boxes in the back of their house were stacked so high towards the ceiling.

While he struggled through nearly three years of painful medication, I could not remember him cry or looked so grim even once, the way sick people do. He was even extra cheerful in some moments like nothing was wrong at all. Perhaps, he was just hiding from me the many fears that he had to struggle against or maybe he was just all too positive that someday, his discomfort would someday vanish like a smoke in the wind. So every now and then, we still go about like nothing happened and I was relieved to see him up and about again. We played guitars while sipping some warm coffee while at times we go downtown and watch people pass by while inside the mall and talked on almost everything there is to talk about and also about the friends we had, some that were present still and those who aren’t anymore. Aziz had a way with conversation that when I was with him, there was no moment when we ran out of something to say or mean. I am naturally an introspective individual that I usually do not speak much but Aziz could always find something to say or utter.

Then came a time when his phone calls to me became infrequent, and since I was also struggling with some of my life’s own hurdles then, like failing the bar, an unstable business, joblessness, and other similar concerns, my visit to him also became infrequent that the distance between each visit to him could go for an extended period of a month or two. In the last six months of Aziz in this material world, I have observed quite well how his health deteriorated so quickly that the last time I saw him, he had became reed thin and he was struggling to carry himself—he had to walk with a cane in hand.

That fateful night when Aziz mom informed me by phone that finally Aziz had finally succumb to the illness that had longed bothered him, I sat by the stairway and tried to absorb the news with all my mind’s might and resolve. It was near midnight already and all I could hear was the songs of crickets in the shadowy bushes nearby. I kept telling myself that it was the moment that I had feared and yet at the same time it was also the moment that I saw coming. I convinced myself that Aziz should be better situated there in the afterlife, in the loving arms of the Lord, than be here and suffer that highly debilitating and often-cruel disease.

The following afternoon, we buried the remains of my friend in a seaside cemetery over a brimming sun that slowly descended on the horizon. The sky was clear and cloudless that day. I had seen the sky clearly that one fateful day and the sea was calm as a windless night. I had reckoned that it was a beautiful day for him to go away. I heard his father pronounced to the Lord his own pleadings as Aziz was gradually laid down to the ground. “That is my son, my Lord! That is my son that is being buried there!” Aziz’s father was saying those words as tears rolled down from his swollen eyes. I was not able to hold back some my own tears that I had to wipe them to look like I had not cried at all.

You could say that I had prepared myself for his passing that when his passing finally came, I had not been overtaken by so much grief and sorrow. But once, a few weeks after his death, while I was strumming a song titled “A Letter To Elise”, I wasn’t able to hold back tears that just flowed from my eyes automatically like a river that was dammed for too long and finally let gone by the opening of floodgates, as the song reminded me of him and I cried like a child and cried so hard that I wished he was still alive and walking like the man that I knew him to be and be there to receive my calls whenever I dial his numbers. But he wasn’t there already.

Aziz was more than a friend to me in more ways than one. When we were together, there was never a dull moment. We could just stroll along the side streets of downtown Zamboanga and sipped some cappuccino in a nearby donut store and our afternoon easily becomes delightful and full of joy. We usually talk about music and our favorite TV show “Friends” and we would laugh so hard recalling the many antics of Joey, Ross, Chandler, Monica, Peevee and Rachel. At other times, we just strum along an acoustic guitar and sang the song of our lives even in moments when the strings were not fine-tuned and our voices could not hit the nicer notes.

As I turn back time and reminisce the days that we both had, I am continually reminded of one of his favorite songs from his favorite band “The Cure” entitled “A Letter To Elise” and the song goes:

And every time I try I try to pick it up like falling sand.
As fast as I pick it up, it runs away through my clutching hands.
And there is nothing else I can really do.
There’s nothing else I can really do, at all….

It is not that there was nothing else I could do for him or could have done for him. It is only that I had to be brave for him in many times in the past so that he could be brave for his own self. I never really knew if he needed my urging for him to face courageously his own challenges while he suffered through that malady but in my mind, he had always appeared stronger than what could be expected from a person in his situation. I always thought that I should have visited him more during his last remaining days but I wasn’t there at his side as much as I would like to. And now I continually pray for him and plead to the Lord that his soul be taken into the great harbor of salvation. I believe that when the time comes, Aziz will be alive again in the company of angels and the Almighty who is in Heaven.

(A post from 2003)

When The Dead Came Marching In

There was one fish story that brought me to the very ends of the world it seems, so far away that running water does not exist and a paved road is an alien concept.

My cousin King came to me on a warm day, the kind of day that my head is loose and every idea could grow and expand into some humongous concept. The kind of weather that the breeze is almost thick you could see them pass by, making you light inside and cheery. It was this cheeriness perhaps that took a bite into salesmanship, an amateur one that I realized later.

"I am busy with some business prospect," I mentioned to grasp some talking points. King always seeks tutoring with his school assignments.

" That must be a good prospect," he condescended.

"What do you know about silk?" I asked. Perhaps he must have known some who could give me some idea.

" Not much" he said. He seemed to know nothing. Bet that's why I was always ghost writing his report.

"It's something we could grow from silkworms" I answered my own questions. "We have to nurture worms and the most part of the work is growing hectares and hectares of mulberry trees to feed these worms."

"Oh" he exclaimed and I felt hopeful." I know such worm. I saw some huge ones in the beaches of Tawi-Tawi. They sell well."

He was talking about some other specie of worm.

"Why don't you try dried fish?" King suggested later on.

"What about them?", I asked.

"They cost half as less back at home."

I went for the calculator and grinned at the prospect. A week after, we were heading for the islands, about two boat-rides away, three hundred miles downward, and near the Malaysian border.

Banaran Island is place rich in lore, the ones you hear from the elders whenever they visit us. I had been there once but that was way back in my childhood. There was one ghost story about the place that I could not forget. When we were kids, my two brothers and me and my sister would always seek some retelling after retelling about such particular incident from the visitors from down south. As children, we craved for fear and scurry for more mysteries. The scarier it gets, the more attentive we became. It was like eating pepper; it hurts to eat more and yet wanted to eat more and more. At night, after we took our meal, we washed our bodies from sweat and put on fresher clothes and then we troop into the living room where the available storyteller would be waiting for us.

One night, they always started the story, when ships and boats was not supposed to sail anymore, when the air is so fragile and the wind was harsh, a ferry sunk on the way to Banaran from the main island of Bongao. All those aboard did not survive the tragedy. This accident had happened about two decades ago and it had caused so much distressed to those whose relations were part of the doomed voyage and due to the large number of victims, the sinking of the ferry cast a huge shadow over the entire province of Tawi-Tawi and would be remembered as a sorrowful time for the area for years to come.

Island life then might have been darker without electricity, and lonelier without the touch of modernity that every death lays every possibility of otherworldly apparitions and the wanderings of ghosts.

Then came the night when the wind whistled and overhanging clouds made the night more sinister. When the dogs howl started to howl incessantly, the elders in the island would call for their children the doors and windows were so locked that even air could not come in.

The yards have become empty and even cats would scurry for safety. Not even crickets were brave enough to serenade the eerily hushed night. It was a night that humongous clouds would cover almost the entire sky. Everything you see would be cast in shadow and the stars were all absent. They said that it had become so dark that when they look towards the sea, they could see nothing but darkness. No glow of the sea would reflect and the waves did not made a sound the way they usually make.

The island folks first heard the sound of drumbeats reverberating through the cold and wet atmosphere. "Tom…tom…tom…tom…" The beat did go until it got faster and faster. They could feel the air get thicker they said and the smell of decay became so overpowering according to one account that their stomach would ache, urging to regurgitate.

Some peek into the darkness to investigate the source of the drumbeats and as if in a sudden, the yards became illuminated, as if the sky parted instantly and the moon belched out its head. The moonlight gave those few brave souls the undeniable sight of a parade of people going in circles in the middle of the community plaza, walking in a line. Most of them have limbs unattached and their faces were white as chalk. The leader of the parade was in fact a headless drumbeater carrying his own separated head. The children cried when they heard some of their fathers and mothers wailing and shouting. They scurried into corners as if it would be of much help to them. They hide in thick fabrics and sweated horrendously. The men were ready with their bolos anticipating any physical attack by the limbless walkers.

No such attacked occurred as they sighed every time they tell and retell the haunting. The drum beatings carried forth through the dawn and many were not able to sleep that night. They said the ghosts was somehow taunting them as the beatings would suddenly stop and then came back again gradually, slowly and then frantically. The sounds of the drums were suddenly loud and then suddenly calm.

When the morning came, the entire island populace was awestruck with fear that nobody spoke much. The children were kept inside their homes most of the time even when the sun is blazing in the sky. Many went to the nearby cemetery to make some offerings while the men embarked on a lengthy prayer session so arduous that it started just after sunrise and ended when midnight was already around the corner. The air was so full of the smell of burnt sulfur, as the prayers involved the burning of small yellowish stone-like bits of sulfur.

The shock in their faces was so apparent that in a matter of hours, most of their countenance shrunk and withered so gravely. They were bowed and their heads stooped all day long, a sign of surrender to the menace of the unknown. There was no knowing what was to come really. Most of them until that time had not really fully believed in ghost but since that night, their greatest fears came true.

At first, they said, the parade of dead people came every now and then, especially while the moon was full or at least fairly illuminating. Then they came less frequently, sometimes catching them by surprise. The parade would announce its haunting by the sound of drums, starting rhythmically slow until it gets faster and faster as children cried aloud and the dogs howled into the night wind. It was really very fortunate that the dead persons physically harmed nobody although the emotional injury was so palpable.

The parade of the dead, some told us had successfully lessen the island population by at least half. Many left their homes to seek some habitat in nearby islands and Banaran became the more silent. Many houses lay empty and were allowed to wither by themselves.

Most of my relatives, as we were told, decided to stay despite the haunting, for they said, they would never know another place aside from Banaran where our forefathers settled and died through the years.

From my autobiography "A Prophet's Life".

The Sea Is A Monster (Part I)

The sea is a monster, unbridgeable by midnight, mollusk skins and arms,
Strangled upon itself, heaving its own breath, fearful by its own breathe,
The day surpasses the dim-light, sharks and serpents alike,
Bestows the Caribbean myth, of longing by a son to father, slave to hero, martyr to saint and
Then thereafter.

There is a great apology, to nature, which is life-giving, but bestows death upon its own might.
The sea is a serpent, a vampire, a misunderstanding of nature.
The dead arises, when laughter becomes whimsical, a longing emotion cures the sickness of doubt.
The night arrives like a brisk man walking, headless with chains on his feet,
Unable to flee, the breathe of the sea.

It is a ploy! A warlock's gambit, or a man of science, that serenades through the dawn unperturbed by its own viscous flight,
Such as a stream of ravaging water, from cliff to sea, from break of dawn, towards twilight,
Like a lover’s cross, a woman’s tale and a war hero’s lament.
And then thereafter.

The Mystical Old Man

You could fall in love in such tender ages this I realized when I stepped into first grade. Those feelings might have been merely infatuations. I was not sure. Nothing is so certain with emotions especially that of a child.

I could always write "C-H-A-I-R" or "U-M-B-R-E-L-L-A" when our teacher instructed us to identify things on the board. That was how Julie chose a seat beside me. She was like a leech poring into all the answers I have got on my paper while I was always ever willing to share them. She was there with her angelic face looking perpetually it seemed at my paper. In such closeness, I could study the gentle features of her face, the wide-eyed girl who also happened to be a neighbor of ours although their house was far enough that she was not with the regular kids I play with every afternoon.

Julie had a face of dolls my cousins used to play and she wore dresses like those dolls wore. With flowers and sunbeams in them embroidered like badges. Her hair was always prim and her shoes shiny. When rainy seasons came, she was the only child who carried to school an umbrella made for kids while we carry the larger ones, whose length were nearly our heights, making us looked laughable and tragic it seems.

Even in the gardening activities, I would be the one toiling for her that it felt good to be so needed while she enjoyed being so dependent. At that age, the littlest of vocabulary in our minds never allowed us much conversation that what I did was merely stare at her face and wonder how it attracts my attention so much. In the afternoon, I would go home ahead so that I could again examine her face while she walked past Hadja Saniya's house.

One day she shook the entire class as she narrated to us, while we were playing in the fields, how she had a dwarf friend that she had put in the bottle. I inquired so earnestly if the dwarf was still there and said that in fact she had spoken to one of them that morning.

We all grouped around her for dwarf stories and she would tell them with so much energy that she sweated sometimes.

From then on, she was full of dwarf stories that my classmates proceeded to disregard her. Perhaps, bandwagons were a fact of life even in our tender ages that even I started to isolate her. She became bitter and always in argument when we chided her about the dwarfs. Until one day one of the dwarfs died and it seemed she never spoke again and became all the more introspective and isolated. In the second grade, she had changed classes but I continued to examine her face whenever she was around. As she grew older, the dresses she wore disappeared and started to wear jeans and t-shirts, and before we knew it, she had developed lesbian tendencies and became silent.

When I entered high school my grandfather took me back and paid for the expensive fees of my catholic schooling. He had become weaker and weaker that perhaps, he needed someone to tend over him when weakness consumed him altogether. He had bouts with asthma that often, we both slept in the hospital for days. The hospital became my second home during those years while I struggled with my studies.

In his healthier days, he would give me Arabic lessons and great myths of old. Being a Moslem preacher that he was, he was always writing some Arabic scribbles into his minute notebooks and I would ask about them.

"It is the mysteries of the world." He would always say. I wanted to ask if for who does he writes it for when almost nobody could understand Arabic but I did not.

I would observe him scribbling all afternoon like a well-versed scholar on composing his post-graduate opus. He had an apprentice whom he always consults every now and then, a young preacher named Abirin, who was also our relations. I would go along with him to these frequent visits and indeed they compared notes. I observed so keenly how they relate and strangely enough, they do not speak as much to each other but they would smile and grunt as if they understood each other. One time, they had this ritual where they lit up a candle and Abirin was holding the Tasbi, the Moslem prayer beads, and held it up that it lay there static in a hanging position. There was no one around except the three of us. Both of them continue to mumble Arabic verses that they both seemed to fall into a trance, including me that my sight got plastered into the hanging Tasbi. Then all of a sudden, the beads swayed back and forth, about forty-five degrees from left to right. Then it went forth in wild circular motion without the hands of Abirin moving. Then if stop so abruptly that even at that age, it must have been impossible. When after a while, the Tasbi stopped completely in a forty-five degrees position, for a bout sixty seconds and this had astounded me so much for I know this is not how gravity actually works. My hairs stood up and felt a sadness so deep that I wept there so hard, and tears flowed from my eyes like a river. Both of them pacified me telling me that "it's alright. It's all right. Stop your crying". And they were both smiling at each other without conversing in dialogues.

One of the manuscripts that Hadji Unih was writing one afternoon was a wide paper with shapes in them. It was so wide that he had to fold it before tucking it into his black leather case. In the middle of it all was a circle and at each side were three rectangular shapes. At each corner was a triangle and within the shapes were Arabic verses. I was particularly mystified by the work that I asked him its meaning and consequences. "It's the mystery of our existence," he would vaguely answer again. I imagined those writings to be charms that I had a keen eye on them, coveting them in my heart that I planned to tuck them away. I daydreamed that they would give me powers of the supernatural kind. One that could make me disappear perhaps and become invisible or one that would afford me extreme luck and plow in mountains and mountains of money and other riches. But it was only after he died that I have got hold of the paper that I wanted most. Not by stealing it away as I had planned but by just appearing in my sight several nights after he had died. All his garments and materials were distributed among the relations including all his writings and paraphernalia. It was only the one that I coveted much that I found in the empty closet that we both used to share. I was so consumed with sadness that after putting the paper in my bag I just forgot about it and did not mind it much until years later. His death meant that I had to go back to my mother and started the "silent years" of my life.

The death of Hadji Unih was like the world falling down on me. I awoke to a newer set of reality where the very person that almost became everything to me, to be the father and a mother, to provide every garment and every toy, suddenly disappeared. My body became literarily wobbly that uncertainties of future things cast a huge gloom into my mindset.

I became the more introspective and the change was so abrupt that my classmates once took notice of this change and ask if something wrong was happening to me. I said there was none.

As I visited his tomb every now and then, I would take a stone from the surface of the ground where he was buried thinking and hoping that his spirit would into the stone and guide me throughout my life. I would be like a man gone out of his head as I spoke to him while my words just flew into the wind. Extreme introspection was the consequence of his death to my person but sadness was not so. A week after he died, my mother and many others would still cry, especially my mother who even months and years after, she would wake up in the middle of the night to sit by the dimly lit kitchen of Hadja Saniya and cried. But I did not cry as much. Weeks after his death, I was playing basketball with so much fire that I excelled in it. I cried once and then never again. My body became lighter that despite the abrupt change in the things that I have, as compared to the things he had been affording me, I never cried so much over him. As if somebody was lifting me up and protected me from longing so much for him.

And yet, the lack of things was a something that I had to struggle with and took me a long time to adjust.

Years later, he would appear in my dreams. One of those dreams I quite remember so well. We were walking along the bridges and planks of a Moslem community by the sea, like typical communities of Samals. It was unlike any community that I see or that I have been. As we were walking, his footsteps became faster and faster, leaving me a little behind and struggling with my own footsteps. Then he walked faster that the distance between us became wider and wider until he ran suddenly forward. I was teary-eyed calling out for him, not to leave me behind. I could see him run and suddenly dived into the water below and swam towards the deeper sea. I was flooded with tears as I ran after him and I also jumped into the water. I struggled to swim as water poured in through my mouth and suddenly he appeared from under and carried me while he swam like a swooping tornado. When we were in the middle of the sea, he suddenly became a crocodile. I did not mind it so much as the ride gave me a serene exaltation, and a wide grin was on my face. The dream ended as we approached the beautiful orange sunset against the blue horizon

The Beast & Other Stories

In my senior years in law school, an old friend, Aziz Mustafa called me up and inquired if I needed a job. The offer was like that of Marlon Brando's, it was hard to refuse. Working for a foreign-funded institution is like a baptism of fire, threading another dimension of existence. My hands were so full I choke on paperwork virtually. There is this braggadocio in me that always get me into the prying pan. I never learned it seemed. Serving the second half of my presidency, tackling the end years of my law school, and eating up paper at work—all of them almost at the same time—stretched me up like a rubber band in order to clip bundles and bundles of papers. I was always up and about, always on the run it seemed. If I find myself sitting in a corner at that time, that would have been a minor miracle. Even at home, I would take work and finish it there because there was a time that regular office time could not accommodate them. There was madness in activity, so much activity it seemed that you could imagine me like a crazy wheel rolling and rolling until nothing is there to roll for. My nerves were full but it did not snapped because somehow, I felt at ease with furious activity that inactivity was then a hellish idea. I bet when the juices gets going, work becomes more and more palatable.


The money was so good that I stayed in my job even if I had consequently has to take the bar examinations to gain my lawyering license. And besides I was married already then.

I did not last in my work. There was a parting that was both hurtful but at the same time relieving. For almost two years, office work had gotten so flat that with more personnel coming, the load got lighter and lighter until there is nothing more to do except watch for the clock's small hand to approach five o' clock. And the days grew longer that we always joke around that somehow there must be some fantasy company we could work in that every day was salary day. At the beginning of the day, we wished it were already twilight. At the beginning of the month, we would wish it were nearly halfway through. At least not all of us felt that way. Or perhaps some were just not as honest about being disturbed of the almost fatal routinariness of day jobs, especially government jobs.

But work is work and a job is a job. Without it, there is no sense that you find yourself suddenly idle and not earning the usual things. Besides, who could go against that unwritten rule where it seems that humans were created merely for the purpose of growing up until you could work and then die? There were times when I was too uncomfortably busy that I used to daydream how my world could be so wonderful if I could spend every day of my life just sitting around in front of my computer and make that proverbial "great Filipino novel" and watch over my kids when I am not scribbling anything. Alas, writing a novel was so much easier to imagine than do. It was like putting up a rocket ship or assembling a nuclear bomb. I tried to make some upstarts but nothing came about not until years later.

Delusion I had hoped then could propel me towards success in literature. I had believed that my intellect was adequate to harbor such ambition, sadly, intellect and grammatical skills were not enough to get me going towards endless and lonely nights by myself, writing and imagining, the sort fiction demands. I had fully realized then that there is more to me that writing demands, something ethereal and incorporeal, one that could not be seen; some call it inspiration and it was inspiration that I lacked then.

I tried giving life to an otherworldly tale of two-lovers separated by time. I called it "Black Sea, Dark Night", the way old writers thought of fancy but concise titles like "My Brother, The Executioner" of F.Sionil Jose or "The Joy Luck Club" of Amy Tan. More of it, it was a title that came to my mind whenever I pondered upon the darkness of depression. I had learned so well that writing from the heart is the sole highway towards affective writing and I could not be genuine I would not find no parallel in my life to the things I write. It was about Peter, an adolescent struggling with the same depression problems I had who suddenly saw a creature of the night, a vision of an old man with a decrepit hat. The spirit would talk to him and proposed that he do some favor for a task only he could do. Peter would not know how to tackle this quandary at first for no one would believe his tales, when almost everyone he knows he had this mental or behavioral problems; until someone did and the story goes on and on until the final journey into the spirit world and back and the final task accomplished to appeased the spirit. What task was this did not materialized in the story, I could not even invent one until now that it is such of essence that a spirit would go to the extent of contacting a half-deranged boy. Although the tale would take me into the ancient warrior days of Zamboanga, towards the colonial days of Spanish Conquistadors, it stopped when the tribal chieftain was about to declare war upon the much stronger Spanish soldiers and I left it at that. Until now, Black Sea, dark Night is still yearning for its ending but you would learn later on why It remains eating dust somewhere in one of my attaché cases.

Stephen King might have invaded the crevices of my veins that I had this inclination to write about the things that feeds our fears. There is something delicious in testing the limits of our nerves. The more we fear the more we scurry for the mysterious. Like eating pepper; the more it stings the more we crave.

I remember that before there was "Black Sea, Dark Night", I had this short story, again with a fancy title. I called it "The Southbound City of Iceberg", a tale of an imaginary beast lounging beneath the city under ways, in sewages and giant canals, pulling down each victim one after another, one by one that as the disappearances became more frequent, the "beast" would go on a very lengthy guilt-trip. What if men finally knew about his existence? And although it was merely a beast it had the proper intelligence to regulate its mayhem. It ended just that way, although every possible circumstances was scrutinized by the "beast", to the worse where mankind would pour all its resources, the fighter planes of America, the satellites of China, the tanks of Great Britain—all at once coming to the city of Zamboanga hunting for its own mischief and blasting it towards perdition, turning into pulp or pulverized like crisp biscuits.

The "beast" would stare upward the sky and got disturbed by the moving starlights that it did not suspected at once to be man-made, until later on it surmised that men had invented eyes in the sky in order to hunt it. It had surmised that before, man had no such equipments to search for misfits of nature now it has meteor-like gadgets to roam the sky as searchlights. The "beast" was an ancient creature that slumbered for thousand of years, only to wake up to a cacophony of downtown lights, rock music, honking jitneys and television. The world was never the same it had determined. Even at night, the streets were brimming with clarity making its haunting all the more difficult.

And yet, despite this difficulty, the thirst for flesh and blood was overpowering that day in and day out, it would peer from the dark crevices of the street, in some isolated nook or corner of the city, finding out if it could be lucky at any time, that someone had drunken too much or got too much honked by drugs in the head, to walk alone by some abandoned alleyways, and then go for the kill. It could get luckier it thought, if some lovers who lacked patience would abuse the darkness of bushes and wayward trees, to do the unthinkable, where the beast could go for a double kill.

As days went by, newspapers started to report these mysterious disappearances and so the "beast" finally went into the guilt tripping I mentioned earlier. Men are now more sensitive to this untoward incidence, that every crime has its record and every sin has its public board. The "beast" hated the modern man all the more. It had delusions of murdering the city inhabitants all at once, wrecking havoc like a crazy evil god, flooding the ground with flood. Luckily for the city, it inhibited itself. Thanks to the things it sees on television. Those weapons of the modern man were so different than those it had seen before—those spears and daggers—even those catapults were no matches.

It ended when it decided not to devour as much in order that it would not be indicted by man that in my fantastic mind, the "beast" is still out there, pulling down its victim one by one.

The "beast" story was somewhat lyrical and honest. It was then the first and only tale that I had completed. It was flowing since it was all about my struggle against "Satan", that beast of a menace that keeps pulling down young men and women, leading them into some dirty and stinking abysses of life, and never to get out again.

I simply lost my manuscript that was why it did not go all the way to the papers.

But material things are not to be fret up, especially when these things could be created. If I lost it, I thought I would just make another one then. A better one, it must be.

This better one did not materialize and the tale of that doggone "beast" is like a lost child whom I wish to be reunited in the future.

Oh, I lied about completing just a single work. Remember the dream of the pond? The moment I woke up from that dream, I could not stop the itch to write and document it for I had no such other dream that could be so vivid at that. I remember so well the caking red clay to where the dancing old woman floated above. Even the color of the dewy water was stained like rust in my mind that every time I think about it, I could feel the sharp and crispy coolness it brought my skin. I documented every moment, every emotion and every color of the environment. The sky was red, bleeding towards horizon and the air was heavy and so still, and that my breathing was the only sound I heard most of the time. In fact there was that conversations with the other two men present that I forgot to mention. As I came out from the water, I remember being a little aghast at the interferences of the men who looked like me.

"Why don't you leave me alone", I almost shouted at their faces.

"You could not go deeper. You would not be able to come out", one of them said, with a worried look in his face that tells some grave worry or concern.

I looked at them and hissed and I almost sneered. What could have gotten in their heads that they burden themselves the issue of my well-being? These were very particular dialogues and emotions that I have captured in writing "The Pond" then. I remember how surreal was the world that I painted in that story, responsibly truthful to the happenstance in my dream of the pond.

Then perhaps by now we recognize that my dreams, my memories and my fiction had a heavy thread on them; all are surreal. Perhaps, we could add my life to that.

The Accidental Politician

Law school was both a destiny and a curse. The first appreciable words I heard from my father was "you would be a lawyer when you grow up" and stuck to my mind like mildew on wet rock. If he were a warlock, it would have been the curse from Gods. But since he was not, then it must have been destiny.

The minute I stepped into the halls of the University, there was a realization that every other hour I have spent in classrooms were for the sole purpose of this endeavor, to learn and argue for somebody else's tragedy. Sighing as if a great thorn in my heart had been plucked out and yet sighing, or rather yawning that the specter of boring classrooms would still be there to haunt me. It had become the wildest of my ambition to finally find myself free of blackboards and teachers mimicking textbooks. And in my first year of law school, my patience was gravely questioned; my discipline doubted thinking it would be another four years of classrooms.

To make matters worse, my law years overlapped with Satan's wrathful stranglehold on me, stifling my attention rules and procedures as the scourge of depression sent my emotions into ecstasy, and then sadness, then everything in between. Again, I merely traipse along periodic examinations and semestral breaks and along summers and make-up classes and completion tests. The years in the University would have been mostly plain and sordid, until I got myself entangled in student politics.

I was riding the seaside highway towards school while heavy in my mind was whether to skip the class or not. My decision to attendance led to a lengthy conversation with a classmate that was himself harboring a hard decision to make, that is, whether to run for another term as President or not.

"This is a good proposition," he said. Teng Catong is a miniature national politician who takes his politics so seriously that it pores out of his skin. Elections were his staple, the lifeblood that makes his spirit rise and gain him some shine in his face. If orations were an Olympic sport, he would have represented Philippines.

"Any good proposition is good to hear," I said, pinching in some bravado, upon speaking to one who is full of politics.

"I am sure you could do it," he sort of whispered to me and that was the time I realized that this may be something beyond jest. I felt some sinister.

" If I can do it, then I will do it," I answered with bated breath, somehow recognizing that the proposition would demand so much from me. I thought perhaps this was a business proposition and he needed some capital, which I do not have really.

" We need you run as President for our party" he muttered casually, psychologically assuring me that it would not be so much of a big deal.

I regretted my bravado soon after and smiled so hard I thought I would laugh. He must have been joking I reckoned then and my mind rushed for excuses.

"I do not have the resources"

"We have the resources"

"I won't win. I have no previous reputation."

"You will win."

The following day, I submitted my application with the dean of student Affairs and rode the campaign trail thinking I was merely in a movie and everything was merely an acting job. And most of it were actually acting job for someone who does not have much time in the past speaking in front of crowds. I would scurry to imagine Jose Rizal or Ninoy Aquino. If I had then the proper equipment, I would have studied their movements and actuations every time I prepare to speak, like basketball coaches do. In my mind was a playground, and I was the master of my speech, the director of that movie. I became Gandhi and then Marcos then Pilate, sometimes all of them at the same time. "Lend me your ears.." were words I learned in school; "bring me your votes" was the phrase I learned in the field of political battle.

When the counting came in, the lights went out and Teng was almost shouting at me to make the rounds and guard every vote. He was holding his personal tally sheet as sweat poured all over him. He shouted like he was my master and I was merely a confidant. I did not say anything although I wanted to appease him that losing would not be the end of the world for me. It was then I realized that my defeat would be the world falling down on him. It was much of his election as mine. When the smoke got cleared and every bullet was shot and every cannon fired, I got away with the most minimum of votes and worry overcame me rather than elation. But it was a show all along until the very end that I jumped as Teng and my other teammates hugged to the air. I smiled but did not laugh.

Running for the topmost student post was one thing and winning was another. It was purely bravado that got me embroiled in such very alien endeavor. I would not worry much anyway for winning is not one of my expectation. You see I was a complete nobody then. I had not anticipated governing that my losing would just be another day for me. But I won and worried so much about governing.

The summer after such election, I fell into an abyss and that made everything worse. I have to deal with a major depression while preparing for my reign as the University president.

Depression is like water. You could not get hold of it. You grasped it into your hands and they just melts away. It is also like upon a darkened room that the darkness would be so unkind that you would not know where the chairs and tables are, not even the way out. I bet our soul is like a ship and mine was the Titanic. I hit an iceberg and got sunk into the deepest of the icy Atlantic water. There, in the most desolated of the ocean's bed, nothing lives except some freak creature, staring at you every now and then. The coolness of the water would not support any moss, not even some anemones. I remember again that dream of mine where I repeatedly dived into a pond, where I dove deeper and deeper and had no such temerity to rise up again. My anxieties had gotten so worse that to compare me to a shipwreck was an understatement. Depression was like that, you have worries and could not point out to the source of these worries and you end up just letting go of any resistance and wallow in sadness and general bowing gait that paints the darkness of my life then.

I carried on with routines of governing when there is not much to govern except that you are being expected to make something move and live, like a magician. Student politics is not similar to the usual politics we have where everywhere and everything calls for action and work, work and more work. In that set-up, you have to create work it seems not so unlike of milking a male cow. So I had concerts and essay writing contests and everything in between. If history truly judges the rein of student presidents, then I must have not deserved a single jottings or a blot of ink in the history books.

(An excerpt from my autobiography "A Prophet's Life".)

The Accidental Tourist

            What do we mean by producing fruits from our repentance? To produce fruits from our repentance is the condition attached to the rewards of forgiveness that the angels have brought with them and this condition must be fulfilled.

            To produce fruits from our repentance is an edict of replacing what we had taken, of returning what we had borrowed, and putting back into the condition in the past of a thing or persons ruined and defiled by us to the extent of the condition taking place before our particular misdeeds had caused such ruin and injury. What is broken should be unbroken. A thief should give back the money he stole, and the fornicator should live a life of total devotion to the edicts of God, evading fully even the mere thought of lust and temptation. It is also to ensure our soul by giving back more than we had taken that for instance, if you stole a car, you must give back the amount of the car you stole and more in addition. That is to ensure the acceptance of your repentance.

            There is also another way of producing fruits from our repentance of countless sins throughout our lifetime, those that we could not trace anymore, for as we say to be human in a world despoiled of strong faith, is to have committed countless sins that are so countless that we lose count of them. This mode of repayment is the cultivation of your hearts by helping others to be uplifted from a life of hardship and misery. That is the power of the rewards of repentance. In the interest of everlasting peace and harmony among brethren, producing fruits from your repentance could be fitting in this manner. You shall be forgiven but only if you repent immediately and produce fruits from your repentance, in order to make a complete turnaround and turn away from a life of sin and falsity, to accept God fully and follow His edicts and judgments from then on.

            This convenient mode of producing fruits from our repentance however, should not in no way be abused for even a minute abuse of these would mean eternal damnation in hellfire so that it is still a primary edict that what you steal you must return, whom you abused must be disabused, whom you killed must be recompensed and what is broken must be unbroken.

            Indeed, even as we do not have to produce fruits from our repentance, the most beautiful manner of cultivating our hearts is by helping others get back on their feet, to uplift the condition of the poorest of the poor, those unfortunate brothers and sisters of ours who live in the slums and giant piles of garbage, living in ultimate squalor, endangering not only their lives but the lives of their children and their olds.

            One might argue that the idea of sharing that I am strongly professing would only promote and cradle a lazy society, establishing a welfare system for slothful and laggard people, a system where people depend on others instead of their own capability to survive and rise above poverty. There is nothing farther from the truth. Let us realize that the condition of poverty is never intentional anywhere in the world for no man chose to become miserable and it is not the desire of any man to suffer poverty.

            Even the richest nation in the world has a welfare system for the poor, in fact the wealthier the nations become, and the stronger their welfare systems are.

            Everybody wants to work and scurry for their own daily bread. Nobody desires to live the desperation of a beggar’s life. Man is by nature proud and dignified even from birth. If we think this way, it would be easier for us to accept the role of the brother’s keeper, to share whenever possible and whenever necessary.

            Poverty is an existence brought about by factors that are mostly beyond the control of any man like the lack of opportunity in a master-and-slave society, where the rich are getting richer while the poor are getting poorer. These factors are independent of the poor man’s will. A master-and-slave society would always put him down, like a drowning man caught in the middle of a storm that even as he is able to swim, the giant waves would be too much for him to handle.
            In a society where opportunities are limited to some sectors, where monopolies abound and cartels persist unhindered; both in business and labor, as well as in the possession of arable lands, the drowning man is an everyday reality.

            Most rich people gained wealth by simply having the right opportunities at the right time. There are gains in wealth achieved by men who simply had the knowledge or initiative to recognize the key to gaining wealth and affluence. But in many societies however, not everyone has the opportunities and initiative because man and society as a whole is not made of intelligent people all, there would always be the less capable so that in a society where the only strong survive, the drowning man is indeed a pitiful reality. Now we ask ourselves as we encounter the everyday drowning man, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”  “What good does it do a man to have faith and yet he has no works?” “Even so faith, if it has no works, is dead, being alone.” [6]

            Let me tell you a story from my childhood. When I was still a child, I was living with my grandfather instead of my parents, compelled by circumstances the moment my first brother was born. My father then was working as a postman whose compensation was perhaps insufficient to make ends meet so my mother needed the assistance of my grandparents. Or was it maybe perhaps my mother had difficulty looking up for two sons while my father was always away. I could not surmise enough upon these particular conditions that happened so long ago in the past, when I still had a juvenile consciousness.

            My grandfather then, Hadji Unih Bandaying, was a grower of coconut trees where through his labor and persistence, the land he tilled had carried two generations of our family. He had also been a Muslim preacher that we call as imam. The coconut plantation that he had tilled was not very substantial that he oversaw it all by himself in order to save on labor expenses. Every three months or so, he would go to the farm to make some work, mostly to clear unwanted bush growths and to repair some fences and then to oversee harvest time. The farm was located relatively far from the city that in fact he had to travel by sea to reach the place. I had grown so emotionally attached to my grandfather that I would insist on going with him whenever he leaves for the farm and he would take me despite his firm opposition to the idea. In one of those memorable travels---a journey where I could usually be closer to the natural grandeur of the rustic countryside, to smell the healthy soil and to witness radiant sunrises not easily found anywhere---I am particular to an incident that has been etched in my mind since it happened, an event that was not so commonplace that it somehow taught me my first lessons in the humanity of man and in the power of sharing.

             This particular childhood memory however, would not bring us to the seminal beauty of the farmlands. It all happened in the ship that my grandfather and I were to embark for our trip to the island of Suba-Nipa. As usual, we went early long before the scheduled departure and we spent hours waiting for the boat to depart from its docking.wards its point of destination, most of the passengers were already on board.  As it was usual, the passengers were busy arranging their baggage and some took their meals packed in plastic canisters and banana leaves.

            I could always feel a sort of exhilaration whenever we had the island travel. There is always that shared excitement of a group of people leaving for the same destination, crossing waters on a long trip and spending the night adrift the sea together, to be one in purpose and destiny, at least for that moment, with a certain rising in everyone’s spirit.

            I gazed towards the wooden plank where people traverses in order to reach the ship from the docking, silently observing the flow of people and the kind of camaraderie they had, when I noticed a fat man wearing unruly and discordant clothes. His shirt was dirty white and over-sized even for his wide body. It was not a dirty cloth but it was sort of disconcerting to the eye, declaring that the fat man had not much choice for wardrobe. He was carrying a fading small black bag and in his hands was a “Tasbi”, the Muslim version of the rosary beads, declaring to the passers-by that he was a Muslim. And as the man drew closer to us, I was a little bit taken aback by the fact that he was a foreigner with a middle-eastern look, wearing a lengthened beard on his face, and his skin was white as any white man’s skin. He was conversing to every man as he walks past the passageways, gradually towards the direction of where I was situated. He did go closer and closer to where I was seating, until I finally realized that he was begging for money. It was indeed a surprise that a foreigner was on the streets of our country begging for coins, speaking in straight English. What really takes me out of my wits is the fact that aside from his features, he seems to be so unlike other beggars. He spoke as if he was making a contract with each man he approaches, making a business engagement, with full dignity and pride, as if he just decided not to be ashamed altogether despite the desperation of beggary. I was drawn to this fact so keenly that I observed more closely his actions and words. As he approached each man he would greet “Assalamulaykum” and went on to state, “You know I am Amir, a Pakistani.  Do you have one peso? Just one Peso my brother.”   He kept on repeating and reasserting that he needs a peso from each man. He would continue saying “You see, if you give me just one peso, it would help me buy a plane ticket back to Pakistan where my family lives. If many brothers would give me one peso each, that would help me so much.”

            He was sort of making a contract to each and every one that he had approach, without any hint of shame in his face but pure humility, to declare to each and every one he met that the consideration for giving a peso for each and every one of us was the altruistic feeling of enlightenment that one feels after helping a less fortunate person while his cause and consideration is to enable him to escape that particular desperation---a contract indeed with minds meeting somewhere in the middle of understanding. And because of his foreign look and the way he talks, some of the passengers got so interested in him that they inquired into his person and his other conditions in life. One passenger, an acquaintance of my grandfather who I remember to be Hadji Ahmad, inquired so much about him and conversed to him as if the Pakistani was a long lost friend.  As the two men talked, many others circled around the Pakistani, curious still about the foreigner. The “accidental tourist” relayed rather deliberately (while I was listening nearby) that he was a tourist on a business trip and looking for opportunities in the selling of carpets and other goods from Pakistan. While he was billeted in one of the hotels in the city many months ago, he was robbed of almost all his belongings including his money. He was so careless he admitted to the crowd, but he did not expect so much to be put in such a quandary. Luckily he said, a friend he had known while staying here allowed him to live in their humble house in a nearby slum where poor Muslims lived, until the time that he could find a way to solve his problem of being stranded in a foreign land.  The friend of his was not affluent so he is not much of help in getting him back home to Pakistan. So he thought of a plan to help himself and this was by reaching out towards his brothers for assistance, to go to the streets to solicit for money. He said that if twenty thousand persons of Zamboanga City would give just one peso each, which is not, as he often declared, so much to ask for from each person, it would enable him to buy his plane tickets all the way to Pakistan. Many inquired upon him why he did not ask the help of the government or the rich Muslims, maybe they were willing to help. Or why did he not seek assistance from his consulate. He just stated that walking the streets was the only way he thought of since their consulate is in faraway Manila and there was no assurance that they would give such assistance.  He could have gone to Manila to pursue assistance from the Pakistani embassy but felt more secure here in Zamboanga City than in Manila because of a friend that could help him survive from day to day and survival was foremost among his concerns.

            The crowd felt so sympathetic to the Pakistani’s flight that everyone including my grandfather fished for more money to assist the hapless Pakistani. The man was misty eyed all along. The crowd became so involved with Amir’s flight that in fact the Pakistani went with our trip upon the invitation of Hadji Ahmad.

            What happened finally to the Pakistani is now beyond me, whether or not he was able to get that fare fee back to his homeland is not a memory to me anymore. But one thing I was sure of that day, that all of us in that particular trip felt enriched by an unusual event that had somehow opened us to a reality where men could be generous without limit, that all of us shared the experience of sharing and the enlightenment it brought forth. At the least of it all, it made me realize what a good feeling it is to share and help others to get back at their feet by the meager amount of a peso or two.

            The story of the “accidental tourist” made me realizes that a man might beg but at the same time retain a certain honor; an amount of dignity that could be had when one still has faith in the basic goodness of man. It was not easy for him to walk the street for money for you could see the Pakistani to be holding something heavy inside him, swallowing so much pride and dignity that he was misty eyed whenever he approached each man to solicit for a peso. A stain of embarrassment perhaps, for his helpless condition was somehow patent in how his voice would crack at times, as if losing composure and determination to go forward like a boxer about to raise his hands in surrender after a frenetic pounding of punches. Yet, he decided to roll with the punches and held in his heart the belief that men are still good and are still brothers’ keepers.

             The Pakistani was making a legitimate contract with each and every one of us and if we recognized this as legitimate, then he did not have to be teary eyed at all. For a meager some from each one of us, he could be back to his homeland and at the same time for a meager sum, we could be enriched by our humanity by assisting others whose plight has turned from bad to worse, conditions brought about mostly by causes not completely of their own liking. For certain, Amir had not intended himself to be robbed in our country. And definitely, he did not desire to walk the streets begging for money.

            There is a feeling of enlightenment whenever we share genuinely. That feeling is unexplainable in concrete terms except that it is the desire of God, the Great Divine, and divinity is at the same time unexplainable in concrete terms. This is the enlightenment we gain in engaging in such form of “contract”, an enlightenment to the fact that indeed we could still be our brother’s keeper.
            In the present world we live in, there are many of those who desire to make the legitimate contract of “the accidental tourist”. To be poor was never the intendment of the unfortunate among us for poverty is not a condition desirable. The beggar with limbs injured makes a contract to us every day. “Look at me,” they say, “I was unfortunate to lose my limbs that I am incapable of work anymore but with a meager amount, you could help me extend my sojourn here on Earth as you also had the privileged of sojourning in this beautiful world full of water and air and sunrise and misty mornings, of radiant trees and blossoming flowers, a world so full of colors and vibrancy.”

            With the meager amount, you could make a man’s life much more sufferable and on the other hand such form of giving will further enrich our spiritual life as Jesus Christ had imparted in his teachings and as Prophet Mohammad (Peace Be Upon Him) had commanded and as Moses had declared. “Love thy neighbor” Moses declared. The produce of our repentance may also appear in other forms such as assisting a dying man on the ground, a poor cousin seeking harbor after a long journey, a desperate neighbor soliciting loan for a crying infant, a friend in dire straits, a hungry child on the streets.

            It should be a gain of principled men to create a world where everyone is brothers and sisters all, regardless of gender and creed or race and nationality. Conflict is of no benefit to anyone and violence is a stain to peace and harmony. We should carry our brothers and sisters like we carry our own children.

            For certain, this is not an edict to let your persons be abused by those who misrepresent their incapacities, for even our own children we castigate when they overdo the limit of our patience and harbor. It is in our hearts that we are able to know when to give a helping hand or when to shy away from those who take advantage of generosities.

            If we ever doubt our propensity for sharing, we should always remember Amir, the Pakistani, the accidental tourist who makes a contract to us in order to uplift himself from an unfortunate situation not of his liking and intensions.

            But you may ask: “Is it an obligation for us to share our blessings? If that is the case, what is the limit then?” This must be the question of any rich man. “In my hurried life as a big banker or as an investment broker, or in my occupation as president of a multinational company, I simply have no time for the works of a Good Samaritan, for I have to work and feed my family and look out for myself and my family. This is the life I live in” and this must be the thought of any rich man.

            To think, how does helping others become an obligation when we only have to live our own lives first and foremost? To this I say sharing is never in the form of an obligation, as we understand the word “obligation” today, for it is blind faith to have a sack of money and go to the streets to look for beggars and poor people just in order to distribute such money---while there is no genuine intention to share. Are we buying faith?

            Generosity could not be faked and sharing should always be genuine. If it were genuine, there would be no question as to how much to give or when to offer a helping hand. It becomes automatic and spontaneous to the man of great heart.

            Sharing is a consequence of our humanity, of us being human beings. When we have already reach the point that we fail to feel sympathy for the misfortunes of others, then we must have reached a point where some parts of our hearts have already been closed through numbing indifference of the suffering around us. Where we could care no more in a world of a dog-eat-dog existence, a fast and furious way of life where only the strong survive and the weak wither. Where being strong is sometimes to have the strength to kiss the foot of other men in order to gain richness.

            Charity is never an obligation but a consequence of our humanity.

            For if there are two man walking an isolated street of the city, one is a rich man who is busy with his work and occupation, in order to generate more wealth for himself or in order to further his ambition of reaching a higher position. And then there was the other man who is merely a laborer with merely enough wealth for his subsistence. And in that isolated street, an old man with a wooden cane lie on the ground, half-conscious and fallen from tiredness and hunger, clearly unable to stand up as general weakness had encroached upon his body. The rich man would pass along the street and come upon the sight of the fallen man. He would take immediate cognizance of course of the tragedy of the fallen man but he has a meeting to attend and time is of the essence. He could not pass this business deal. He would walk ahead and disregard the silent appeal of the fallen man.

            Then the laborer would walk along the same area of the streets and come upon the sight of the fallen man and surely he would recognize the pain of the fallen man, for him himself have been hungry and tired before. Seeing this tragedy, he would approach slowly and enquire if the man is still breathing, and if he is still, he would fish for some coins for the man’s sustenance or he would even buy the bread himself from a nearby bakery, and bring some water.

            In the instance above related, who is the man of great faith? Who is more human and has more humanity? To be sure the laborer had encountered no law or ordinance that makes it an “obligation” to assist a fallen man. The rich man would not have committed any illegal act by disregarding the appeal of a hungry man. But is providing a helping hand an obligation?
            The man of great faith would not even have to ponder upon the obligation of a helping hand for it comes to him naturally. The man of lesser faith also has no pondering upon the obligation of a helping hand because sharing is in fact not an issue to him anymore for he even does not reach the point where he would ponder upon the nature of this act.

            This only we must realize God is like a father who has many children. If some of his children were more benefited and became wealthy while others languish in misfortune, to be sure he would appeal upon his wealthier children to assist their suffering brothers and sisters, for the suffering of the children is also the suffering of the father.

            And all the fruits of this earth were meant for everyone to share, so that everyone will eat. How come there are many still that have no food on their table?

            If it comes to you that in your own self, there is doubt as to the genuineness of your faith---I shall point you to the right way, in order that you would be cleansed by the discomfort of this uncertainty. And this “right way” is by being men for others. There is nothing more that would endear you to the Lord God than by being a Good Samaritan.

            If it comes to you that you already doubt yourself if you ever shall enter the Kingdom of God or not---I shall show you the way. Live your lives as if to live is living not only for yourselves, but also living lives for others. And surely you will not be lost. For certain, there must be some other ways, but this is the clearest path to the destination that the Lord had promised us.
            Even when many of us are the most steadfast of a hunter, not all of us could be good hunters. The children, the women and the old are not good hunters.

            Let us all hunt in packs like many ancient people do. If a people would hunt as a pack, it is a people who shall have no hungry brother or sister left out in the cold. A people who hunt in packs looks out more for the weakest member---the children, the women and the old---those who could not join the able men on their hunting trips.

            But when we became individualistic by nature, many would be left out in the cold, especially in a dog-eat-dog existence we have today.

            “What does faith do to you if many lie naked in the streets?”

            “Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.”[7]



From my book "The Night of Angels".