What Makes Cities Sink?
Quillted (quill•ted) by Ma. Anna Mikaela S. Gana
Where I come from, the rain does not wait to be invited. Unlike Christmas—or perhaps, much like it—the rain does not wait for a season, nor a time of the year. It comes unannounced, almost arrogantly. It marches right in, never minding my doorwoman named Sierra, rattling windows with its whispering winds, banging on roofs like two fists on a locked door begging to be let in. Children run out to greet it, with only one slipper on, sending paper boats down the rushing—now clogged—gutters. For a while it was a game of who could launch the sturdiest ship, who could keep theirs afloat the longest. After all, they have the entire day out of school to use the intermediate pad for boats and not quizzes. But eventually the boats will all sink, as boats always do when they are made of paper and washed out dreams.
By dusk, the game will be over. The river of rainwater deepens, creeping into dirty kitchens and storefronts. In some homes, the floor is cleared for sleeping banig stacked on chairs. In others, prized possessions—century-old radios, faded photo albums, the one working electric fan—are piled on top of Uratex dressers like offerings to some cruel water god. By dawn, whole blocks will be submerged. Cars paid for over 10 years in installments are eaten up by the gushing waters. Slippers left outside doorsteps would float and never find their way back.
And yet, for all its fury, the rain is blameless. It does not choose where to fall, nor does it conspire, nor does it mean harm. It is the farthest from cunning. It simply comes, as it has since the beginning of time. But the same cannot be said for those whose duty it is to keep cities dry and warm, its citizens, even warmer. Come May, they promise heaven and earth in the guise of “new and improved” drainage systems, pumping stations, dikes, shiny lifeboats, with each ribbon-cutting event captured as if a coronation. Yet somehow, when the next storm comes, those lifeboats are nowhere to be found—as these people are.
Perhaps it’s because no boats were ever even built. Or that they were built from the cheapest wood, the kind that rots faster than a term in office. Funds vanish like mist, diverted to “other priorities” as if just about anything else matters more than a drowning city begging to be saved. Projects remain forever “in progress.” Just as the neighborhoods we call home are submerged in water and in greed, certain pockets grow heavier, heavy enough to sink any honest effort, heavy enough to make them forget how to swim.
So, what really drags a city from down under? Is it the rain pouring from the heavens, or the weight of gold and emerald buried deep in hands that never carried the only working electric fan up to the roof where it can remain unsubmerged? Perhaps, cities do not sink because they are weak and frail, but because those tasked with saving them are too busy guarding treasures that aren’t theirs, whose only worry is that the emerald-tiled jacuzzi be filled with nasty rainwater. And as long as they cling to that weight, the water will keep rising.
The tragedy is not the innocent rain, nor the floods themselves, but why they come about. Filipinos have grown accustomed to wading waist-deep through muddy streets and call it resilience; but resilience is not immunity. Resilience is the painful art of surviving what we should never have been forced to endure to begin with. When leaders praise the “strength of the people” while standing dry in their shiny garages and polished offices, you wonder, do they see strong people at all, or just a population too tired to resist? After all, clothes are heavier when wet. Bodies, too.
One day, the water will rise high enough to reach even those offices with plush carpets and dry shoes. But by then, the people may no longer be asking for lifeboats, but something else entirely—vengeance.