abroad. I begged him to go abroad with them but he refused.
âTwo days after you were born, they did go abroad, but if only they hadnât!
âGhassan and Walid were passengers aboard the Kuwaiti plane that was hijacked by a pro-Iranian extremist group on its way to Thailand. Your father went crazy. He was glued to the television screen most of the time. If he wasnât watchingtelevision, he was reading the newspapers or calling his remaining friends in search of news, but all they knew was the same as the news on television. Things got worse. Two of the passengers were killed and people were horrified. Your father broke down when he saw television pictures of the body of one of the passengers being thrown from the plane door at Larnaca airport. He wept his heart out when an ambulance took the body away from under the plane. Iâll never forget how Rashid looked when he heard the news. He started beating his chest with his fist and shouted, âThey didnât kill him. It was us who did it. It was us who did it. We shouldnât have supported Iraq.â I donât understand, even now, how someone could cry with such feeling over the death of someone heâd never met, and how someone could accuse himself of committing a murder when he hadnât done it.
âAfter that there were rumours that a third Kuwaiti had been killed, but it wasnât officially confirmed. Rashid followed the news. Through friends who worked in the newspapers and television, he confirmed it was true. Someone had died on the plane after being hit. He had had a fit and his condition had deteriorated. Without medical attention he had died of a heart attack.
âIt was Walid. Fear of flying hadnât killed him but it may have played a part. Your father sobbed and sobbed. All I could do was fall on the floor and grieve for my husband and his friend, but I couldnât do anything about it.
âAfter Walidâs death, the old lady agreed for the first time to have contact with your father by telephone. âI didnât really want to speak to you, but I just wanted to let you know that youâre in for a run of bad luck. Look what happened to your friend after that horrible thing was born. Itâs a curse, like its mother,â she told him.
âYour father bit his lip and floods of tears rolled down his cheeks. âThrow them out and see how your luck changes,â his mother concluded. âThen come home and youâll find I have a motherâs heart and Iâve forgiven you the horrible thing youâve done.â
âMy grandmother hung up. Rashid bowed his head. With the receiver still in his hand, fighting back his tears, he said, âMy mother says . . .â
As soon as my father had arranged a birth certificate for me, with the name Isa, he contacted a travel agency and asked them to book a seat on any plane going to Manila, so long as it wasnât on Kuwaiti Airways.
A few days later I made my second move, but this time it was from my fatherâs country to my motherâs country.
PART 2
Isa . . . After His Birth
âHe who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.â
José Rizal
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1
From Kuwait we flew to the Philippines to live in the land of my grandfather, from whom I took the name José Mendoza. Mendoza was really my grandfatherâs family name but people often called him by that name alone.
I grew up on a piece of land of no more than 2,000 square metres in Valenzuela City in northern Manila. There were three small houses there, one of which, the largest of the three, had two storeys. That was where we lived, piled on top of each other â my mother and I, Aunt Aida and Merla, Uncle Pedro and his wife and their children. Another house, which was very small and separated from the larger house by a watercourse a metre wide, was where Grandfather Mendoza lived. The watercourse between the