I live on a street which has no name. My landlady calls it the shortcut street to Ma-a highway, which I didn’t know existed until a few days after I had settled in a room she let me for a song. I thought it was one of those blind streets you see a lot in the city’s more crowded pavements downtown where you are stopped in your tracks by some sorry boarding house or a junkyard strewn with garbage and corrugated iron. Barely finished when they started letting the rooms, the floor was unpolished, the locker unpainted the day that I looked in. I had the honor of doing the painting and the polishing myself, so of course I chose tile red for the floor and mahogany for the closet, and they do well by the white water-stained walls. I have five windows, or two pairs on the side that looks into the shortcut street, and an unpaired one on the room’s front side.
There are two sides to where I live. On the “back side” is the shortcut street, littered on both sides with makeshift shanties attached to or hanging by the back fence of a private elementary school or a big house. A morning trip to buy a packet of shampoo at the corner store is a sightful of life’s sundry details: you walk right into a family breakfasting around a small table right by a fireside with a black kettle still boiling water, half-naked men scrubbing their thighs by the wayside tap while their wives scrubbed laundry over wooden washboards, little children being dragged towards washbasins, old men squatting with cups of coffee between their knees.
The “front side” is the middle-class neighborhood of First Street whose faces you seldom see as they hardly go out of their gates on foot. Most of the houses are built tall, shaded with big trees, climate change sensitized, sotospeak, but for the controversy over the hillside development way up, not to mention the diggings for gold and lime here and there, which threatens to bury the housing subdivision in a landslide one fine day, oldtimers in the NGO circuits say. I worry, of course, mostly for the nice houses who may not outlive the trees. But I reckon that by then I’d be in Ireland making my own diggings at William Butler Yeats library, or in nearby Ho Chi Minh City, consorting with holdover commies.
By then, if my landlady’s own modest projections hold true, they would have made a two-story or three-story building in place of our humble hovel. There will be three or four rooms to a row, all bachelor’s pads, said she, which she will let at 3k apiece, twice dearer than what I pay her presently. Strange that well-married people always prefer bachelor boarders for co-occupants in the vicinity, couldn’t stand to see more of themselves, but I didn’t tell her that. What I wanted to say to her was, I reckon I can afford to rent three rooms by then, if I could still enjoy visiting rights to the country.
Projecting on you again? Please to excuse me, just my own little take at macho swagger. Did you know that in pre-Christian Beowulf hubris is amply rewarded, not severely punished? But in Catholic Ireland Yeats wrote a prayer for her daughter saying may she grow up without an opinion. I don’t know why he prayed that, maybe he wanted his daughter to be good and stupid, that she may marry properly and not be one of them disgraced divorcees. I wish Catholic men shut their big mouths up and stop bothering God and women, how thoroughly ignorant they could be. And by the way, the opposite of hubris is not humility, but grief, which according to Sappho has no place in a house with a resident poet (namely Herself). Humility is post-Christian acquisition, like wedding ring is post-marital clamp on one dirty finger. But I’ve gone a little way off your turnip heads must be going in a spin following me. I am making soup as I write this and outside it rains and children from the shortcut street are running and shouting. I stay inside, held in by the waiting for the roof to start dripping.
Yes sirs, there’s a leak in the ceiling that once every so often drips water onto my red tile floor. One fine day I will fix it, it’s just Vulcaseal or the gutter clogged with mango leaves, and will grill the windows as well. Right now I don’t want to outstyle my landlady as yet. Already she is distressed with the pots I planted with green veggies right outside my door. Not her idea of ornamental gardening, I reckon, and on days that I am gone and it doesn’t rain, I come home finding the plants drying at the roots.
