MANILA, Philippines - If you hear it from oldtimers, particularly from the southern Tagalog region, they would refer to the long All Saints’ and All Souls’ holiday as Undras, with an “r,” the better to impart the custom of pangangaluluwa, a-souling.
Undras itself antedates Halloween, with its ritual of serenading the dark night of souls in order to help them find their way through purgatory, or at least towards a semblance of light, if not an altogether better place.
In the suburb of Diliman where we spent childhood, trips to the cemetery during Undras were a rarity, as the family merely chose to light up huge candles at the gate and on the main walkway on Nov. 1 and 2, letting them burn through the night down to balls of wax.
Only our grandmother was still around, the last survivor from the old generation, the rest of our grandparents on either side long buried in crowded Manila cemeteries.
Sometimes we would exchange ghost stories, or else dust off the classic Maximo Ramos compendium of local ghouls, “The Creatures of Midnight,” and relisten for the nth time to the Peter Paul & Mary hit, “A Souling,” from a live album when records were still made of vinyl and turntables weren’t yet hip-hop instruments.
Who knows when the “r” fell from the word to become what broadcasters and other media today call Undas, more easily rolling off the tongue, yet still part of our heritage like the aswang, tiyanak, kapre.
The city itself goes through a demographic change, a large chunk of the population moving toward the cemeteries, to cope with traffic rerouting and overpriced candles and flowers for the departed.
Undas or even Undras remains relatively untouched by western commercialism, except maybe for the pre-Halloween parties and trick or treat fixations in the exclusive villages, or the stalls of eateries that sprout along the curbside of memorial parks to sell pizza, hotdogs, bibingka. But the preferred ritual is to bring along one’s own food and provisions, maybe a guitar and no radio please, and beverages should be non-alcoholic.
Witness the assembly of confiscated items at the entrance of cemeteries like the urban legend Jason’s weapons, the medical stations that check blood pressure, the soldiers and metro aides guiding traffic as if herding souls through purgatory, the purgatory of our cities, the cities of memory.
At night on the first of November the cemeteries become a sea of candles that cannot be extinguished even by a light rain, and it is as if the slope of crosses comes to life, it is another plane the living are glimpsing, the plane of everlasting dead who might never have died after all following this ritual of visitations, of Undras or is it Undas.
Other times we choose to search among the dusty CDs for the Coldplay album, “Viva la Vida,” with that line that goes “For some reason I can’t explain/ I know Saint Peter won’t call my name.”
Or this: “Just because I’m losing/doesn’t mean that I’m lost.”
There it goes, soon another year will be burned down to wax, and the best we can do is wonder where the lost “r” went, or was buried, part of the mystery of local lexicography and the gesture of remembering our dead.