Water and Fire

 

          Amirasolo and Other Essays

Part 1. Tondo on my Mind                                                                                          

Essay  7. WATER AND FIRE

There was one more game we loved to play when we were kids. That was the annual "basaan" or dousing with water on the feast day of St. John the Baptist every June 24. A practice that seems to be on the wane, in our neighborhood at least, because when last we went on that day to eat out, there were no longer anyone on the streets with dippers of water for dousing passers-by. It must be the lure of the internet. The kids nowadays would rather spend time playing computer games than prowling the streets and dousing people with water.

St. John was the one who baptized Jesus at the Jordan River. I don't know when or who originated this practice, but it was said that what the water-dousers were doing was just a reenactment of that biblical event.

Biblical though it may be, June 24 was a day most dreaded by office workers who have to go to work in the morning, because they knew that there is a line of boys and istambays (bums or out-of-work men) waiting along the sides of the streets with water-filled dippers.

Just for fun, that's what the water-dousers would say to justify their actions. This is the tradition, they would add. So, the only thing all those doused with water could do was cast hateful looks at the culprits, nothing more, because those istambays were capable of doing something worse---hurl expletives at them for example, or pick up a fight.

But I confess that I and my childhood friends truly considered June 24 a fun day. It was a day we all look forward to. A day or two before, all of us will be buying water guns and water grenades which we'll use on that day for our water-spraying battles.

But what we did was but child's play compared to what the teenage boys of Lualhati Street did. We boys did the water-spraying for fun. We were all laughing while we're at it. But those teen-agers played that water-spraying battle with intensity and real animosity.

There were two teen-age 'gangs' on Lualhati Street. They were not criminal gangs---just two 'barkadas' or peer groups who weren't friends and who were rivals for I don't know what. The name of the gang whose members lived on the south end of Lualhati Street before Lakandula was Vhoraks. The other gang who hanged out on the north end before Sandico was called Sophists.

The boundary between their respective territories was the digging at the intersection of Leandro Ibarra and Lualhati Streets. The two gangs might have arranged the night before for them to do 'battle' in the morning, because we saw them early the next day lined up on either side of the road-digging with their respective water-spraying weapons. But perhaps, the battle might have been impromptu, with the challenge hurled and accepted on the very day and hour.

The water in their water guns and grenades was not clean water. Not only was the water not clean, it was also laced with ground siling labuyo and urine. Their target were the eyes of their opponents and their objective to inflict pain on those eyes.

Ha ha ha....That truly showed how much they hated each other. 

As I said, they fought with intensity and genuine animosity. They kept on spraying each other for several minutes, and would have kept on doing so until their water run out. But it so happened that a boy from each side fell into the digging, and both, upon bumping into each other, promptly exchanged fist blows. It's good that there were men watching who proceeded forthwith to stop the fistfight between the two boys, and who prevented the other boys from each side from coming to blows themselves.

It was a spectacle we younger boys enjoyed watching. We never imagined that we could be as intense and belligerent as them in playing that silly though fun game.

I don't know why or how June 24 was selected to be St. John the Baptist's feast day because  no one could have  known when he was born or what the exact day of Christ's baptism was. But June was a very apt month indeed for events connected with the pouring of or dousing with water, because the wet season starts on this month. The Philippines has two seasons only, the wet and the dry season. The dry season is our so-called summer which begins in March, or even as early as the third week of February, when the cool air drastically becomes warm.

If June is the start of the watery months, March is the start of the fiery ones. That's why we in the Philippines designate March as Fire Prevention Month. But our fire, the fire that gutted our neighborhood in 1969, occurred in April, on April 9 to be exact, about a month after I graduated from elementary.

It was around 12 midnight when we were awakened by cries of "Sunog! Sunog! (Fire! Fire!). I scrambled out of our double-decked bed. I was on the bottom bunk and my brother at the top. I shaked his shoulder to wake him up. It was panic time. When we looked out the window, a most frightening sight greeted us. The scene outside was all orange, gray, and black. Orange flames blazed and gray smoke billowed against the black sky just a few houses away from us. Aside from my mother, my brother, and my two sisters, we have living with us a female cousin of my father and a housemaid. My father was abroad at the time.

We lost all of our possessions in that fire, except for a few bundles of clothes, several photographs, and important documents. The television set, refrigerator, and other appliances and furnitures we just left behind, because aside from having no big men to carry them, our house was insured anyway and those furnishings can eventually be replaced after the insurance company paid us out. What I really regret losing were our toys and the album of artworks I did for the art class of Mr. Joe Mortera who was also our scoutmaster at the Holy Child Catholic School

We were lucky, because my mother had our house insured one week before the fire. What prompted her to do so was the fire that occured earlier. That fire raged just one block away from our place. It so alarmed my mother that she got in touch a few days after with a fire insurance agent.

I don't know the name of the insurance company, but I know where its office was. That's because I was the one my mother brought along with her when she claimed the money paid by the insurance company. The office was on the ground floor of a building at Ayala Avenue corner Herrera Street in Makati. The name of the building was Rufino Building (now Rufino Pacific Tower), which is owned by the family of my future publisher Reni Rufino Roxas, owner of Tahanan Books for Young Readers. The insurance payment was 10 thousand pesos which is very small these days, but enough then to start building a house.

I heard that a woman died in that fire which started on the second floor of a grocery store. That grocery store was along Lakandula street, the street next to where we live. The woman was a live-in sales girl, most likely from the province, who was said to have placed a burning katol (mosquito coil) beside her kulambo (mosquito net).

The story seems dubious to me now, although I admit that I believed it then. Because why would you still use katol when you can already sleep inside your kulambo without those pesky mosquitos buzzing around and biting you. But we never know. There were perhaps others sleeping outside the mosquito net.

That 1969 fire was just a minor fire. It razed only about two blocks of houses. The major fire that lasted eleven hours was still to come nine years later, in the summer of 1978, again on the month of April. But thank God, a miracle happened then. Our house, and the whole two blocks that were gutted in the 1969 fire, were spared. You can just imagine our relief and joy upon seeing our and our neighbors' houses still standing. The wind must have danced. It must have shifted or changed direction everytime the flames were about to lick our neighborhood.

(Photo above shows me receiving my gradeschool diploma from Msgr. Jose Jovellanos of the Holy Child Catholic School)