“Hon, some good news,” Laura exclaimed one day while we were dating. “All my brothers and sisters are returning to the Philippines this Christmas. If I go, what will you do?”
“If they’re all coming, why can’t we go and get married there at the same time?” She started crying and ran up to hug me. My response stunned me. I could hardly believe what I had just said. Marriage was a commitment I had always run from. My parent’s marriage lasted four years. Mum hauled me out of Africa at the age of five to accompany her to England. There she abandoned me to an alien English family, realizing she could not look after me after all.
From Canada, we landed at Bacolod City on the island of Negros, in the middle of the Philippine archipelago. The landing strip was covered in purple bougainvillea, like Dar-es-Salaam, Tanzania where I was born. Bacolod’s airport was just as decrepit. We descended the rickety portable stairs onto the tarmac. It was hot and humid. Dust swirled around us. The fickle breeze never cooled us. Porters carted our bags by hand and dumped them unceremoniously at the feet of the customs officers.
A myriad of images darted through my mind of arriving in Dar-es-Salaam, to be greeted by family and friends. Today, a mass of Laura’s relatives mobbed us, directing our way to a Jeepney to take us home. The small bus held twenty passengers if they squeezed together. Our luggage was haphazardly thrown and roped onto the roof. The Jeepney’s exterior was covered in shiny aluminium, painted over with gaudy murals of Christ and his disciples.
The bus had windows with no glass, only horizontal metal bars to let in air and keep the passengers from falling out. The whole ride home reminded me of a chariot race out of Ben Hur. I could have sworn I saw upturned buses as crowds hurtled past us—scenes so common in my hometown in Africa.
Whatever trepidation I had vanished when Laura took me the next day to the local market. Here I tasted jackfruit and hearts of palm that I had eaten as a boy in Africa. Just like on those long-ago Sundays, when my whole African family took off to Kunduchi Beach, Laura’s family invited us to picnic on their golden, sandy shores, drinking one coconut after another, then scraping out and eating the soft, milky-white innards. All the Filipino beach lacked was the scratch game of cricket played by my uncles and cousins—and dark servants at our beck and call.
The days to the wedding whirled past—no practice runs. Since my childhood, I had been stuffed into suits like straitjackets, my neck strangled by ties. I had sworn, without expectation, that I would marry in the tropics, wearing no suit at all. My wish came true. I was given a Barong Tagalog to wear—an oversized, white, open-necked muslin shirt—as my formal wedding outfit. I didn’t even have to tuck it into my trousers.
On our wedding day, a white Honda Civic delivered us to the cathedral where Laura had been baptized and sung as a child. Her brother had organized the choir. A group of guitar-toting crooners followed. Leaving the cathedral, we were showered not with confetti, but with petals of exotic flowers. I plucked fragrant jasmine and frangipani right out of the air as they rained down on us, stuffing them into my pockets as I had done as a boy in Africa.
An impoverished young couple pledged themselves to marriage. With no ring to offer her, instead, he poured grains of rice into her soft, delicate hands, as much as they could hold. And he said to her, “I wish they were pearls.”
Many years later, on their most recent anniversary together, he produced a silken pouch of milk-white pearls, that he poured into her shrivelled hands—as much as they could hold—whispering into her ear, “I wish they could all be grains of rice again,” so much had he loved the life they had fashioned together.
