a lunch, a 12-course chinese lauriat right in chinatown, i was supposed to attend yesterday. a birthday bash, the big five o, for one of my co-workers i couldn't say no.
but what do i know, i got lost somewhere in the incestuous boundary between little italy and chinatown. and i conveniently forgot my mobile, too.
i ended up eating alone in this greasy buffet along lafayette. i sat across a young mother feeding her infant with morsels from her own adult tray. the kid, with teeny sparkly stud earings, lapped everything her mother chopsticked her.
as i was about to clean up my chinese styro bento box, i noticed the little kid was wearing a relatively huge gold pendant shaped like a ram. i wanted to ask the mother what it was for, you know, like was it an amulet against something malevolent. but i reckoned she would not understand me or worse, she might just scoff at me for looking asian but not being able to speak any chinese, at all.
accomplishing nothing, i decided it was apt to reward myself with another long stretch of sleep again. without any iota of compunction as to missing an appointment, i took the local train back home. but not before buying the times for me to scan through the ride.
inside the station, a busker was playing the erhu, the chinese two stringed bow instrument, by the turnstiles. the station agent shushed him before he announced that there was going to be major delays with the train arrivals for the hour.
buried in page a3 of the times was a picture of three gaunt kids from bohol who didn't die, unlike 28 of their schoolmates, after eating fried caramelized cassava fritters the day before yesterday.
after a tune that somehow mimicked bird chirrups, the busker launched into a melancholic passage. midway to his new tune, the train unexpectedly came on time.
i didn't bother to look for the account accompanying the photo of the poisoned kids. it felt like i've pored over that account before. i just couldn't place when.
all i could think of was whether my kababayan lunching at this opulent chinese mess hall knew about this news already.
but even if they did, i was not certain this would dampen their will to celebrate. not that i think of them as callous. hell, i don't even know now what to think of them, of us, people from a country where such grisly news is no longer news.
as i was nearing my stop, i couldn't help but imagine what was on the mind of a mother of a dead child. or whether she was still even thinking.
for how can a bereaved mother really think these days? just early that day, she rummaged for the last bill in her purse to give to her kid as lunch money, the one she planned on setting aside so she could buy at the end of the month what her child had long been dreaming of - a new pair of flashy sneakers.
then later that day, someone brought her home the limp body of her child still wearing those ratty sneakers he had on when he left her smiling this morning, clutching proudly his lunch money in his twitchy, sweaty hands.
i was the only one who got off at my stop. no hangers on, as well, in the station. but I swear, i could hear an erhu played with so much pluck, phrasing with a clarity things i could never make sense of.