I wasn't aware, at first, that I was in the middle of a story.
The date was 3 February 2015. I was on a taxi queue at the SM Megamall Building A on my way to the SM North EDSA Mall to get my car. Why I have to take a taxi from one mall to go to another mall to get my car is another story but it is not worth telling.
Anyway, the next taxi cab arrived. But it wasn't mine yet. A youngish couple got it, a man and a woman, the woman carrying a boy of around 4 years of age, brown as bread, crying. The three got in the back seat of the cab. The door closed. Windows closed, I could still hear the child crying. The taxi does not move.
They were saying goodbye. There were two women peering into the taxi's glass window, waving, blowing kisses, uttering endearments. The crying child stretches his body, like he wanted to fly out towards the women. After a while, the taxi moved on, slowly. Then the two women retreated, passed where I stood, and then one of them wiped off tears from her eyes and said in a whisper: "Ano ba ito!" (roughly: what is this, or what is happening).
I saw the two going inside the mall's entrance, poverty written all over them. Small, burnt skin, cheap bags, with the look of defeat. The crying one was wearing a faded green jacket.
I bet she had given her child away.
I do not know how this story started and how it will end. Maybe the adoptive parents can give the child the education the mother knew she could never give.
Then he'll grow up a writer and compose his life story which may begin with: "The last time I saw my mother was in a mall where she gave me away..."
All I want to say is that this story is much better than the stories in this little book...