Home again, naturally

People ask me why I always come home to the Philippines when I have breaks from work. Since Kuala Lumpur is a hub for commercial air travel, from there I could easily fly to Sydney, or to Bangkok, or even to Dubai.

Well, I tell them I come home because it would take me only 3.5 hours to fly from KL to Manila. And with budget airlines around, the airfare does not leave my pocket in tatters. I also come home to see again my sister, who has Down’s Syndrome and is taken care of by her caregiver, and who has done so with love in the last 40 years. And when he can take a break from work, I also fly to Cebu to see again my partner, whom I see in something like four times a year.

When I came home this time, I noticed the steep spike in prices. The pork and shrimp chow mein in the airport that used to cost P150 is now pegged at P175. And the cost of petrol, as my amiable Grab car driver informed me in colorful language, is so high that he has to jump over a barbed wire to afford a full tank for his car.

The traffic, such as it is, seemed to flow this time. We only ran into a massive jam when we reached Commonwealth Avenue, where the construction of MRT 7 is now in full swing. The condominiums that were just being built when I left in the middle of 2017 are now finished, and the earth has been excavated for new condominiums to rise, so high they seemed to touch the sky.

And this being the Philippines, lighted Christmas lanterns began blinking the moment dusk fell. Brilliant with light were the images of Santa Claus and his reindeers, with their antlers pulsing with lights of many colors. There were also images of the Christmas lanterns reminiscent of the big parol I used to see in San Fernando, Pampanga, with their intricate, curvilinear designs.

These lanterns used to cost P3,000 each in November of 2009. I remember the price because that was the month my mother died, one month after we buried our father. And that week, one of our helpers asked if we were interested in buying a big, colored lantern alive with light. He must have noticed the gloom that descended on our house, so bereft now that my parents were gone, and wanted to add some cheer to our house. But when he told me the price, I just said “No, it’s too much.” We had just paid the humongous hospital bills and buried our two parents and our heads were barely above the water, and so I settled for a solitary lantern done in red and green, twisting quietly in the air now suddenly still.

During this visit, I wanted to see many friends but the traffic – and the rain that suddenly fell, from out of nowhere – made me stay within Quezon City. I met friends from Ladlad Partylist. I also joined a boodle fight and bingo game organized by the hardworking Councilor Allan Benedict Reyes, my bet for Congressman for District 3 of Quezon City. 

I also filed my certificate of candidacy for Councilor of District 3 of Quezon City at the new office of the Commission on Elections behind SM North.  There were many people in red when I arrived in the building, and I was ushered to meet my former star student and Vice-Mayor Joy Belmonte, who is now running for Mayor of Quezon City. When she saw me she hugged me tightly. She also introduced me to the people around her, and I told her to be careful, she would be the mayor soon, and I would help in any way I can in the realms of education and advocacy for lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgender and intersex (LGBTI) people.

Gladness always come with grief, the way light is followed by dark and day by night. For the week I came home was also the week my cousin died, all of 54 years old, my cousin Bem gone so soon. We were all muted with grief at her passing, her siblings and cousins in the Philippines as well as in Canada and the United States, all linked together by the world wide web. It is so powerful, this web that reminds you of the dried, silken saliva of spiders, sending images of life and death from one corner of the globe to the other with the speed of light.

I also came home to check on my library, which sits on the penthouse of the house my sister owns in Novaliches, Quezon City. I always make sure the thousands of books are safe from the rain water and cleaned of the dust and termites that wreak havoc on them. Some of these books I had bought with money I saved from my scholarships given by the British Council, the Fulbright Foundation, and Asian Scholarship Foundation-Ford Foundation. These were books I brought home in my luggage, or sent in cartons that travelled over the sea, fetched by my father at the post office, and installed one by one on the book shelves of different shapes and sizes.

Some of the books I brought with me to Malaysia, where I am teaching Modern British Fiction as well as Drama, Theater, and Performance at the University of Nottingham. I brought with me Angela Carter’s brilliant book, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories, as well as the stupendous novel Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie and 1984 by George Orwell, a prescient book that seems to have foreseen the many troubles we would face, in the early years of the new century.

Yellowed the pages of the books have become, but their binding holds still, and as I begin to read the crisp pages I wonder at how time has passed, flying on swift wings. I have read these books before, but after 25 years, I feel I am reading them with a new pair of eyes, and thus reading them again for the very first time.

Reading, like falling in love, is a pleasure that you can go back again and again. I wish all my readers the enduring happiness of books and love as we move on, into the next pages of our lives.

(Editor’s Note: It is company policy that if any of STAR’s columnists join local or national elections, said columnists are automatically dropped from the Opinion roster. This is Danton Remoto’s last column.)