Just some unfinished tea

 Dear Germie,

I'm sitting here in a cafe near my home, where I normally come to sit and work from and be alone. Sometimes, to meet friends. Today, to be the invisible companion of a film star (Rajesh Hamal)

I met a friend today, who had a warm conversation with me about the ways he thinks he's weird. And he gave me some examples of how he has small difficulties that can become major-- like drinking water. He has the fear of drinking water. Like I have the fear of crowded spaces.

My fears are abundant-- most of them are related to just being and loving. I've always felt deprived of love even when I was loved to death. But I'm learning now that much of how I feel comes from being neurodivergent. It's been such a revelation!

I wish I was sitting here writing you a nice letter. Instead, this is just me rambling and giving you life updates. I wish you would give me yours. I wish you would use your witch powers to manifest a meeting for us in Malaysia. I've never been to Malaysia. And I haven't seen you for fifteen years. It would be quite nice.

I imagine we would spend every day of our time there talking into the night and then fall asleep surrounded by books and things. That's how our dorm room was back in Katipunan. Books, biscuit and chocolate wrappers and us. Your sprawled on the bed reading. Me, gathered in my corner of the room, writing away on my new acer. You, speaking Taglish and sometimes Visayas on the phone, as early as 6am. Me, stuttering away in Newa once in a while when we got Skype to work. 

Small pleasures that made us whole.

I miss you, Germie. And I miss talking to you about things. About how I'm tired of seeking love. How I wish men came with a sense of loyalty and how I know I don't need men to love me and yet I seek so much. I wish I could tell you: I'm tired of having my heart broken and yet, I offer it to be broken every single time. Maybe it's time to find my own version of Ja.

For now, here's some unfinished tea for you. I miss you.

persepolis

who would have known the craving for a plate of biryani for lunch and a swarma for dinner were only the needs of a pregnant woman? during those days, they were lost in translation of missing the sharp Asia spice that brought one home- if only in the form of food.

she had no memory of how she discovered Persepolis. but it must have been one of those walks back to the dorm after university with DU, that led to this eatery.

so, Persepolis was a restaurant of plain settings, with Iranian rugs thrown at the foot of tables and paintings from Tehran pulling you into the walls.

her classmates noticed her love for the paintings and decided on Persepolis as the location for her birthday celebration. they brought out a Goldilocks chocolate cake and created a day for this pregnant girl, who was unaware of the baby growing inside her and unaware of how she was soon to have no home and no more birthday celebrations.

but that evening, she had had the happiest birthday in her life, as she bit into her swarma and later drank down her green mango shake- sour, sweet, chilled- like the memories of a home left behind.

Dearest Germie,

Sometimes, I think of the patch of sunlight that shone on that building we could see from our bathroom- the first hint of the morning for our eyes, that had become accustomed to reading under the light of the electric bulbs. Even at six in the morning, we had to turn on those light. You would tip-toe against the floor boards early in the morning, trying hard not to wake me up. But half awake, I'd hear you on your phone, talking to Ja sometimes, but mostly to Sean, in a tongue, I knew wasn't Tagalog, but something I'd started to recognize for its rhythm. I loved how the rhythm naturally slowed down and tripped when you talked to Sean and it made me think, some day, I'd sound like that, speaking to my little one.

Space. There was a lot of that in our little dorm in Katipunan. We were free, connected to our families only in our hearts. We were free to wander for hours in the National book store or the little book store next door to us, like it was the ultimate way of claiming our identities. How much we sought from the world in those evenings that ended in a 20 minutes walk back to the dorm from the Uni! We were free to spend the night, talking to the undergrad kid who thought Derrida was an emo. We were free to think we would take the MRT one morning and keep moving out of Manila.

And we knew it was a time of our life that would never return.

They're building beautiful new bungalows behind our house here in Kathmandu. I hate how they fragment my view of the sky and block light and breeze in my room. The morning sun now appears on the walls of the newly constructed houses before it does in the garden. Every morning, I stare at the sun shining on those buildings and think of Manila mornings, that began and ended with you. I guess, I miss you.

Love,
P

P.S. And right now, the thought of biting into a soft, warm pandesal with melting cheese, while sipping a cup of Spanish style coffee is driving me out of my wits. They were always a part of our breakfast conversations.

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.

BLACK

There's a place in this city that's black. It isn't gray, or brown or even a distant charcoal. But black.

It's a triangle, a part that juts into the corner of the ground floor of the building that has the lotto. (People queue up here endlessly guessing at their lucky numbers.)

Next to it is the part that runs in in a half-moon, the crescent serving as a dumping place.

The triangle is the bedroom and the cresecent is the dump. This is where the poor sleep. The men, sometimes two, sometimes, three, sometimes just one, almost merge into the blackness of the triangle. They will lean against the iron shafts that separates the building from the road, while they eat from plastic bags or paper that spreads to shield their food from the road. The colour of their skin is brown when it is still visible to your eye. But otherwise, they are the same color as the walls, coloured in soot.

Why is the place so black? It's not like it is painted black. But it does look like a place that has been spray painted with soot. Even graffiti.

When the rest of Manila passes it by in Aircon cars and ingenuous tricycles and jeepneys, the men sleep as though in the deepest trance.

The heat.
The crowd.
They don't seem to matter to these men. Doesn't matter to the man, who will just sleep. He continues to sleep even when the woman, carrying ham in her arms walks past and knocks off his bottle of water in careless antic. Nothing matters to this man.

Sometimes, I pass the black and it's deserted. I am left wondering where the men without shoes disappear. Where do they disappear barefeet, while I walk swiftly to keep the heat rising under my flipflops trampled underneath.

It's almost as if the place consumes the men and creates them all over again, just to bring the black triangle to life. For without them, there is no life there, but for a graffiti of silkworms done in a geometrical pattern. The worms look like they are dancing when the men come back. But otherwise, just stick to the wall, in black.

I avoid the black corner as much as I can. I try not to pass it in the night. I try not to pass it when alone. I try not to pass it if I feel like I want to see nothing black that day. But it's the part of the city that interests me the most. It's a part that's actually never hurts me or makes me cringe. (Or maybe I cringe).

But it's the only part that remains confined to itself, redefining itself like a phoenix with the presence of the men. It's like an act staged, over and over again for just my sake. To the others who walk that way, it's just another part of the city.