“Kuntahay”

BIBIBI is a hand-crafted sake named by its maker Aki Ikeda after the “sound sunlight makes when hitting the water”.

Ikeda, her mother, and sister also produce in their sake brewery in Shikoku, Japan another sake that has won over the experts. Its name: Fufufu.

Since I read these lines in the February/March 2018 issue of “DestinAsian,” I have been thinking about the stories in sounds.

We attempt to render in words experiences captured by sounds. What if there is no sound? Can there really be none at all?

Ikeda’s wordplay lingers despite my having no experience with the Japanese language nor of sake nor of living in Shikoku, where, in a kelp factory converted into a brewery, three women and a “toji (master brewer)” make sake in winter with spring water harvested from the “flanks of Mount Hoshigajyo”.

I have seen, though, how sunlight bounces off water from watching the sea as a child, as a mother watching her sons lent for a moment to the sea’s embrace, as a watcher of waves returning, breaking apart, and departing again as another year turns the corner and disappears.

There is no limit to what we imagine.

At the start of this week, I walked with thousands of others to the Office of the University Registrar (OUR) at the University of the Philippines (UP) Diliman. The acronym is incongruous for an edifice that reminds each person approaching the building of what divides us from those within.

The OUR processes the documents of all those seeking to enter the UP System. Last July 30 underscored the difference.

On the first day of general enrolment for all UPD students from undergraduate to graduate levels, private high school students in Metro Manila also “lined up” to submit their applications for the UP College Admission Test (UPCAT) to beat their batch deadline.

Hence, there were no lines to speak of outside the OUR. I walked on T. M. Kalaw Street, sharing this with other pedestrians and motorists, because the sidewalks circling the OUR were covered by mats, tents, and trash left by people squatting on the sidewalks.

The listlessness and silence prevailing in the sidewalks contrasted with the chaos swirling outside the gates of the OUR. No matter what one’s business was, the objective to get inside the building (or leave it) directed the energies of each person in that melee.

UP is a metaphor for survival. Despite the platitudes of equity in education, struggles are omnipresent in a system that pressures, sieves, privileges.

In the middle of a queue that was not a queue, I remembered “bibibi”. The sound of light meeting liquid turning fluid for this Cebuano, though, is “kuntahay”.

Imagine.


(mayette.tabada@gmail.com/ 09173226131)

*First published in SunStar Cebu’s August 5, 2018 issue of the Sunday editorial-page column, “Matamata”