Read The Bamboo Stalk for Free Online

abroad. I begged him to go abroad with them but he refused.
    â€˜Two days after you were born, they did go abroad, but if only they hadn’t!
    â€˜Ghassan 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 wasn’t 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. I’ll never forget how Rashid looked when he heard the news. He started beating his chest with his fist and shouted, “They didn’t kill him. It was us who did it. It was us who did it. We shouldn’t have supported Iraq.” I don’t understand, even now, how someone could cry with such feeling over the death of someone he’d never met, and how someone could accuse himself of committing a murder when he hadn’t done it.
    â€˜After that there were rumours that a third Kuwaiti had been killed, but it wasn’t 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.
    â€˜It was Walid. Fear of flying hadn’t 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 couldn’t do anything about it.
    â€˜After Walid’s death, the old lady agreed for the first time to have contact with your father by telephone. “I didn’t really want to speak to you, but I just wanted to let you know that you’re in for a run of bad luck. Look what happened to your friend after that horrible thing was born. It’s a curse, like its mother,” she told him.
    â€˜Your father bit his lip and floods of tears rolled down his cheeks. “Throw them out and see how your luck changes,” his mother concluded. “Then come home and you’ll find I have a mother’s heart and I’ve forgiven you the horrible thing you’ve done.”
    â€˜My grandmother hung up. Rashid bowed his head. With the receiver still in his hand, fighting back his tears, he said, “My mother says . . .”
    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 wasn’t on Kuwaiti Airways.
    A few days later I made my second move, but this time it was from my father’s country to my mother’s country.

PART 2
    Isa . . . After His Birth
    â€˜He who does not know how to look back at where he came from will never get to his destination.’
    José Rizal
    Â 
    Â 
    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 grandfather’s 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 – 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