The Journey Back

The Arrival

He blinked at the harsh sunlight pouring over the tarmac as he walked slowly from the small airplane—small for him but not quite for the tiny island’s inhabitants. He wore white shorts a few inches below the knee, light blue cotton T-shirt and gray and white sneakers. He felt a light tap on his arm and stopped walking to look down at the face of a man of mid-forties with a pepper-and-salt goatee and a foot shorter than him. The man was his Uncle Macky, he was told. He was neither his father’s brother nor certainly his mother’s. He was a distant relative of his father. He had stayed in his Uncle Macky’s home in Manila the first few days of his stay in the Philippines.

He vividly remembered how he was welcomed by his Uncle Macky’s family—his family too, though he might need a family tree to trace how they were related. There were about twenty of them all huddled in the spacious living room. Some of them were elderly women who wore a sort of colorful bonnets on their hair, ears exposed, and long-sleeved garments and loose-fitting trousers of some sort. It was his first time to see such outfits but reminded him of Malaysian clothing. The elderly men however wore plain shirts and pants, most of them sporting long beards. Then there were children and teens too. He thought there was an occasion but it turned out the occasion was his ‘homecoming’.

“Raza, meet your family,” Uncle Macky introduced with that accent of his. “You have to bear with them, though, not all of them are very conversant with English. You can talk with them, they may understand you, just don’t expect a fluent answer.”

He began introducing each of the family members starting with the elderly men, then the elderly women who signaled him to come over. To his surprise, the women held his head close and he was kissed in the cheeks. But it wasn’t certainly described as a kiss. The lips slightly touched his cheeks but the tip of the nose did with a sniffing sound. Though he found it strange, it didn’t feel offensive; rather it felt warm and comforting, somewhat motherly. The elder women smiled and exchanged babel of excited comments he didn’t understand. The younger generations just sat nicely and occasionally smiled at him while Uncle Macky introduced each one. There was his ‘Kuya’ Jayson, ‘Ate’ Riz, ‘Ate’ Leny, ‘Kuya’ Don. He already knew ‘kuya’ and ‘ate’ meant ‘elder brother’ and ‘elder sister’, respectively; but he never got to use it at home. The little ones were prodded to give a small gesture of respect since he was older than them. They took his hand and touched their foreheads lightly with the back of his right hand.

It was mostly Uncle Macky who talked, interpreting for Raza and for the other relatives. Most of them do understand English and can talk it, but as Uncle Macky said, he shouldn’t expect them to be fluent. But when they were talking among themselves, they used their own language. He caught plenty of times his father’s name in the whirlwind of conversations. The air was filled with chatting and laughing. They looked really happy and he wasn’t sure if it was because of his coming ‘home’.

Uncle Macky said to him smilingly, “They say you look just like your father. Only you’re a lot taller than him when he was your age.” It was true he looked like his father with his dark hair, equally dark eyebrows, long lashes and pointed nose. And he was definitely taller than him ever since hitting puberty. The only things he got from his mother were her hazel eyes and light complexion.

He was treated well; he was asked to eat more even though he was already full. He slept in this room comfortably only to wake up very early in morning to see the owner of the room sleeping on the living room sofa, snoring loudly. That was probably part of what they call “Filipino Hospitality”.

Aunt Noora, Uncle Macky’s wife, gave him a little tour of the city to see a few landmarks and sites but he wasn’t really that interested. He was after all there out of compulsion.

“What? Baba, I don’t want to go there. Is this some kind of sick joke?” He asked, bewildered when he was at their home back in Singapore a month ago.