Manila days

Manila mornings begin with a cool shower at seven. On weekends, I laze around in bed until nine. It seems like a luxury to be able to do that without having it at the back of your mind, what your mother-in-law might think of you if you're not up on time, or that Baa might give you a guilty start to the morning by offering you bed-tea, just to make sure you abandon that hub of sweet-slumber.


On Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, a cheese or a wheat pandesal is gobbled down with a cup of Spanish style coffee or a chocolate drink, stirred in a borrowed porcelain cup, with a piece of black plastic cutlery. Classes begin at 9 am on these days and it's a 15 minute walk to Ateneo de Manila in the 39 degree heat. I usually make it on time for the Philippine national anthem at 8:50 am. standing awkwardly, suddenly a statue, wherever it is that the national anthem catches me unawares.

It's an imitation of what the natives do. But I'm awkward because I've never done that before. And I'm living a year in my life when I can't anymore sing my own national anthem with pride; for I can't remember the newly introduced creation. "Saya thunga phool ka hami eutai mala Nepala..." as opposed to "Shreeman Gambhir..." The first was hardly a national anthem. The second, doesn't even register in the memory of my generation or that of my parents' and grandparents'.


These three days of the week, I'm busiest, running between New Media Culture and Hypnotheraphy.


Tuesdays and Thursdays are mornings that rise slowly. It doesn't begin until I have showered after reaching out thrice for my cellphone to check the hour. These are extended breakfast mornings too, when I can stir myself a tub of Nesvita Oatmeal and stir a cup of coffee, while my room-mate Germie microwaves her Pancit Canton noodles to go with her pandesals. We are briefly transported to teenage on these days, discussing life, books, men, girls we spite, teachers we admire, and our respective countries and their politics. Two 30plus women- easily transferred to our Utopias.


The walk to Ateneo is always the same. It begins at the Tri-cycle stand. I shake my head in a no-thank you to all the rides I'm offered until I make my way past Ministop convenient stores, while Katipunan has already sprung to its full, with clatter of the people and the things. The streets are black - the tar covered in the smog from the cars. It's a brisk solitary walk- one of my fetishes- that takes me across the street, over the footbridge to Ateneo. The walk through the Ateneo clearance is more pleasant. It offers me a few minutes of delivery to a different world, like being in a forest, soon to be dispelled by the encounter of the sprawling Ateneo campus.


The campus is large enough to spend a day getting caught up in its labyrinths. Everything about the campus gives you a feeling of removal to a place with wide open spaces. The only crowded location is the Cafeteria. Every building has it's own hall and cafeteria and all of them equally crowded by teenagers at all times. It's always the smell of cooked meat swirling in the heat fanned across the hall by huge electronic devices that first hits my nostrils. It's a smell I first disliked but am getting used to, gradually. Plain vegetables are a rare species. Veggies will always be eaten with either pork, beef or chicken. Fruits get sold out quickly, which means you get to the fruit stall, first thing. There are stalls everywhere- four dozens of them in one hall! But only one sells fresh fruits.Or I'm yet to discover the others.


Cafeteria- it's where Yuri cracks his Indonesian jokes and Bryant tee-hees them. It's where I sit for minutes, wondering what to eat. It's where I sometimes stand, eating alone, what I don't even recognize.


Much of the day is otherwise spent in the library- The Rizal Library- freezing in the aircon. It's my haven.The network on your phone goes off automatically when you get there, making it the best place to hide. You can get lost easily in the thousands of titles in there, as the staircase goes winding up to the third floor, entire sets of halls divided by bookshelves and scholars bent over books on couches and desks.


5:45 pm is when you go back to your dorms. A walk back through the clearance, sometimes, shin-deep in rainwater which falls in barrels in Manila.

Sometimes, just a late afternoon walk in the humidity that embraces you like a furnace. It's a walk punctuated by visits to bookstores, restos or the fruit and pandesal stalls, with my classmate Debbie, with Germie, or by myself.


It's the evenings in the dorm that become most unbearable. You coop yourself up in the room, your eyes staring perpetually at the computer screen or flip through pages, making an attempt at writing your assignments or finishing your readings. But you end up writing a piece like this instead because you are too tired of being in the same room everyday, only made easy by brief visits to the kitchen table or the refrigerator.


Your only get away is the common room. You will sit there and strike up conversations with the boys, asking them why they're pursuing philosophy at such a young age or why they are so interested in doing maths instead of- maybe literature, while the TV plays adverts and soap operas in Tagaloa. It has become a tongue familiar to your ears now. There are words in it you can identify, but can't understand.


Manila evenings, always tiring. Always filled with the pride of having your liberty to yourself- the consolation. But also evenings, that magnify all your fears, aspirations, yearnings and illusions.