By: Iris P. Concepcion
No one did notice the visual calumny except my skulled brain nestled between my two orbs: the elephant is the train.
I am __________, lone voyager to a world never been blitzkrieged by technology. My best armory is my brain, my best skill my nervy fists, my best sight my pair of ears.
He has massive hearing anatomy: my craggy, wrinkly friend. With two eyes on both sides of his face, he has seen both left and right vistas to my own straight, linear vision. We have never seen eye to eye as I view his elongated tusk, an arched trombone that could sniff a friend or foe from afar. His language is cavish in tubular enunciation that knows the only vowel, O. Mine has mixed the west and the east of phonetics with no apparent periods in between.
Lately I have noticed his bony whiskers polished like immaculate porcelain as he mimics the soft, furry tigers of the wilds. Fleas could not approach him, their diminutiveness splat frozen by his gaze. He has never been friendly with the rest of the species in the mammalian world, preferring to pull his weight down to the ground as he shakes and arranges the dimensions of the universe.
I could not begin to understand why a man of my stature, barely reaching five feet, with ashen hair and small feet, could afford to be affectionate with a 6,600 pounder animal who remains unruffled; his tail curls but not to whip, his bottom blurs views but not to blind.
I guess our friendship started when I found myself lost in a barren field, with only a railway in sight. I sat on the ground, squatting with sprightly palm oil seedlings covering my hands and he had appeared from nowhere, like a mirage suddenly gaining a bodily weight. He too, had squatted and as I looked at the garish garland stuck in his fat neck, seemingly forlorn and abandoned, I had realized that he too, had been lost.
I had placed my plants on my feet, protecting them from worms, ineffective pesticides and typhoons. He had discarded, funnily, his obtrusive necklace by wincing his head as it flew away, like a racquetball, to the rail.
My friend, the garland, my palm oil and I, anticipate for the train’s arrival.
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The State Railway of Thailand was designed in 1890s, an era bequeathed with divergent historical milestones ostensibly crossed-out and made unmentionable in encyclopedias. This is an era when the United States population stood at a repetitive 62,622,250 million, the Mormon Church had outlawed polygamy, the first weekly comic paper, Comic Cuts was published in London and when the steak country Salisbury, Rhodesia is founded.
It is here, at this coach Number 8, where a pork noodle advertisement peeks through one of the boards as it surveys the passengers in hunger connotation where I had met __________________________. He is dark as a nightangle with prowlish eyes. I had noticed his feet, where his dead big, left toe rests, atop his sunken slip-ons, in defying comatose phase.
I believe his age to be between 60-70 years old. Barely 4 feet in height, my cargo pants and clinging coins in my side pocket developed an urge to discover his world, with all its traces of blackened past down to his anatomical composition.
"What is your name, Sir," I had said haltingly, dipping my right hand on my pocket coins for supernatural protection.
He even barely heard me, gazing through my eye receptacles like a lost child, see-sawing between what is a carnal being who is myself, and the barren fields outside where rice granaries are absent, trees stolen and fishponds sequestered.
He, instead, took the plastic containers of rice and viands tied in rubber bands and opened them unceremoniously. The smell of curry and melancholy seeped through like weeping orchids about to get plucked. He dug his right hand unto them, eyeing me with unformed tears, judging my aberrance, my pleasantness, my cordiality.
I repeated my query, "What is your name, Sir?", aghast that I could not be heard by such a frail being with a dead toe.
He looked back to the barren fields, dewing his greyish lashes as he performed his painful and punishing, eating ritual.
He had choked on the viand, plausibly a pause from his chewing, and his eyes had reddened like the striking eyes’ fish in the wet market. His mouth had quivered as I saw a cod strip dangling from the corner of his clumped teeth. His sadness injures as his relentless stare bore through my hidden coins, clinging mysteriously to my right pocket like how his food had clung to his mouth.
Stifling a cough, a rice grain ostensibly came out of his nose as he had struggled to contain his motioned, eating procedure. He had wiped it, along with a snot from the margins of his garb, still faithfully arguing with the Gods of Feasts as to why he had been singled out from the boisterous merriment of a festive, wedding banquet.
I had persisted like how a man would do when cornered to fly out from an area with wheezing bullets and massive tanks. I need his name to cast a portrait to his stature of curious diminutiveness, unspeakable anger and fulfillment deprivation.
"Sir, what is your name?" using my palms and fingers to signify the arrows between myself and himself that could yield a connotation of identification by which to address ourselves.
He had opened his mouth then, revealing a mixture of grinded saliva, rice and viand on a tongue purpled, short and wobbled, as he had raised carefully his trembling hand, waving it for my keep, while his head turned right to left, signifying that he could no longer mutter a letter, a word, a sentence to satisfy my frivolous query.
It was then that he had flushed out his recognizable tears, making his eyes glidier and hazier. He had allowed them to drop to his sunken cheeks, bowing his head while closing his cracked lips, wiping the weepy droplets of anguish to his palm receptacles, preserving his exposed undignity by failing to look at his solitary audience. I, who had been closely watching his ordeal, hastily performed a priestly function for souls to be identified like a chant from the hallowed grounds of secret mountains, in the Prayers of Mourning.
I had named him Singood.
As things unfold in furling shifts of his laboriousn feeding task, I had formed what could have been his life before this __th day of _____2011, riding in coach number 8, looked over by a pig-flavored advertisement in his derelict version of Divine Chastisement.
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Singood at five years old had foreseen himself being banished from his natural habitat and surroundings. He had gripped a frog by its neck. He was fully aware of the formed judgment of the Tableau of God's Justices that shall certainly befall him for harming an innocent creation.
He had been a pug with a few circle of friends while growing up, preferring to drag himself to the wilds. Fairly literate that could pass off for intelligence, he had been adrift lately in chasing games with insects, of spiders and cobwebs, of flying mantis and centipedes, of lizards and ants.
He was a kid with a curious penchant to draw moths and fireflies while clipping their wings so that they could not fly.
His parents had been born poor with meager income, earning their keep by selling their backyard produce of cattle and homegrown vegetables. He went to a public school with an airplane cemented near the gate instead of flag poles.
I am nonetheless drawn to the beauty of surroundings that could provide a mysterious setting to my imaginary story of him, this sullen, forlorn and sad creature with curry food.
Extremely disturbed by his silence, I had shifted my gaze to the open scenery of natural habitat of animals grazing the fields as what the Creator had planted them in the book of The Beginning. The sagging breasts of cows are ready for milk squeezing, hefty and hale and sitting like ladies in prairies, waiting for their counterpart males to partake the doughs of bread, freshly baked from a bakery adorned with a figurine of a fat man sitting on top of a latrine with his butt exposed.
The ponds, replacing the barren fields earlier, have flying fish swirling in its centrifugal space, forming circles beside the lush and green rice paddies covered in a backdrop of broccoli-like filled green mountains. From afar, they appear to have been excised from the Book of Genesis, particularly the chapter where God had alloted seven days to put an architectural design to an infant world.
These mountains, expansive, haunting and ethereally arranged, bespeak of an unmentionable natural wonder discovered only by the knowing eye festooned in an adventure of the visuals. Leaves had crawled on the rail track, untouched and beholden to no one. They seemed to be surprised hitting the train wheel, perhps mistaking them for towed tree barks to be pl;aced in wooden trucks after.
Singood had lived here, this land of unending train track with its belt fastened all over Thailand, from the cold mountains of Chang-mai to the bustling city of Bangkok. Its chugging chimneys stretch from the beautiful island of Champhon down to Khlong Chandi, Cha-am, Pran Buri, Phattalung to the crisply named place of the bread toast: Butterworth.
He had lived in Tanyong Mat, where the train station houses guards in starched, unwrinkled uniform, waving flags like men who are tasked to save historical frontiers of this protected territories to ensure them of their rightful places in atlases.
This place has evolved over the years from a sleepy enclave od small traders who had soon occupied and had given way to night, flea markets with their hand me down clothes, house wares and shoes. Recently, it had seen incredible changes like the unruffling of leaves to brown the groundsd with chirpy noise once stepped on by rubber-soled boots.
It is autumn in this autumn-less country with men holding babies like statues. The tots: plump, wide-eyed, anomalously healthy, dressed in kimonos, hooded swetashirts, pants, clothes and shirts, impervious to the polite surroundings of people treating the station as take-off points for airplanes. They are, perhaps, wondering, if the wood panel by the station shall be replaced by a steel ten years from now, with happy and cartoon puppets peeking out from the rooftops.