But I wasn't really your good student

I must have been stuck in academic ground, but not so stuck. I recall I spent more time reading Sheldon and Robbins, maybe Wallace and Ludlum, than solving my Algebra problems. Then after a visit at the padian, the public market in downtown Marawi, I somehow got into the habit of going there, especially after I made friends with student activists. I must have been slumming, but walking through the dirt road, skipping the mudpoles, crawling through holes in the wall, wading along the lakeside, made me feel I was living the best times of my life. I was also beginning to shed off my squeamishness, my biases, and frequented the food stalls down the stairways and when I had a little money, hunted for tiny bric-a-bracs at the antique stores. Once, as a way of welcoming my older sister to Marawi, because she decided to follow me and take up Midwifery, I took her there and we got lost. Two Maranao boys must have noticed, because my sister could not hide her panic, and they took fancy on frightening us some more. They kept on following us wherever we made a turn and did not let go of us until I stopped at a stall selling bolos and chose a long and big one and paid for it, too, and when I turned my head, of course, the two crazy Maranao boys were gone.

There was a part I missed though, which Mimi and her activist boyfriends like telling and retelling. I should have tried watching a movie inside one of those dilapidated moviehouses in Marawi, they said, and have the experience of my life. In the eighties they usually showed Sharon Cuneta or Robin Padilla movies, and Mimi and her friends happened to adore these two stars whose movies they could not wait to watch at Iligan when they did not always have the money or the time. Farmers selling their products at the market would usually come to Marawi in the morning and by noon they would have completed their business and had done some shopping too, so after lunch when there was a movie they liked to watch, they would kill time inside, while waiting for the passenger outrigger boats that usually left the wharf at three or four in the afternoon. You sat with your shoes on your seat, lest you sat on someone’s phlegm, Mimi's friends would say, sniggering, and Mimi would protest.

“No, they spit on the floor naman, you’re so anti-Maranao for a Maranao. It’s the seat bugs you have to watch for, Shei, not their spittles," she would deadpan, “or you’ll go home scratching your genitals.”

“No. The guy next to you might mistake you for a spittoon, Shei. It’s dark inside you had better watch, bring an umbrella if you must.”

No kidding, the experience was a big miss. Old men would have their heads under your seat, chasing after the coins or the tomatoes that had rolled down the floor. The hen or the roster they had bought or traded for their goods would be cackling or crowing midway through Sharon’s monologue; or the boy vending corn and peanuts would be pushing his cart up and down the aisle screaming, Ay mais! Ay lugasing!

Mimi was some kind of a lodestone, and if I had this strong sense of class allegiance, long before I started to read Marx and Engels or any of these local guys, I owe it to the times we shared together, when to be poor and in the right felt good. I was more of a loner, really, and didn’t care about other people’s poverty. On campus, there were guys I sat in class with, who you knew should have better stayed in their lairs than try school as rebel returnees. They really did not stay long: mid-way through the first semester they would disappear without excuses and I didn’t care. I was really too phobic to even try to get to know them, so they were really lost to me since Day One. But Mimi, who spent high school at the Trade School in Marawi had lots to say about them. Some of these former MNLF rebels, she would tell me, were her classmates, and one reason why she is so anti-pyudal, was because at the height of the secessionist movement when the Maranao elite joined the rebellion to be in command, these boy classmates of hers, who were now too overaged to be in high school, served as the commanders’ slave-boys and nannies, bearing the latter’s rifles for them, their bedpans, their thermoses, their mosquito nets.

Mimi would become a permanent influence in my life. Around that time that I frequented their house at Barrio Santos, her brother’s wife was also in the house, doing the laundry and awaiting the birth of another son. The brother himself was sweeping the yard of the mosque in Quiapo, doing his bit as community organizer. We still don’t know the end of Mimi’s brother’s long story, but the short of it is he took girls home and that he beat them all until they each left him, dragging along the kids he sired. Mimi’s mother is a Tausug whose family moved to Marawi sometime after the war in the seventies. The father was a Tagalog assigned in Marawi as a forester, who left her mother when she was pregnant with Mimi, a conference in Manila for an excuse. The way I remember the house in Barrio Santos, it had plenty of light and laughter. Beside Mimi and her mother, an aunt lived there, and there was a standing joke among these three women about the man that never came back since twenty-five years ago (that was Mimi’s age when I went a lot there). He must have never finished conferencing, they said, because he has never sent in another word since he last took leave. When Mimi finished Med school and was working as an intern in Zamboanga many years later, this same father came back an old man with a story about a wife that died of cancer in America. Mimi did not make any complaint; just shook his hand and smiled. And looked on while Mother and Brother jammed it up with the returning stranger. She however could not take to calling the old man Dad, like he wanted, and kept on saying Sir, which hurt, he said. He courted and married her mother again, in proper Tausug custom, but when the son Mimi’s brother sold the car he bought him, the old man went back to America, to process his wife’s papers for an excuse, and when he did not succeed the first try, he stopped trying altogether until he was not to be heard from again.