VIGNETTE: RAPPING INSIDE MRT COACH

By Ba Ipe

LET me confess. I always appreciate every MRT, or LRT, ride I take to go to various points of Metro Manila. I always encounter plenty of enriching experiences that make my existence quite meaningful.

Let me narrate the MRT ride I took Friday early evening. I was to meet a friend in the heart of Makati City. Knowing the wicked traffic of EDSA, I ventured to take an MRT ride and I stayed in the front coach reserved for senior citizens like me, the PWDs, women with kids, and the “obviously pregnant women” (please, don’t ask me why only obviously pregnant women could take it).

I took my ride at the Quezon Avenue station, the first after the North Avenue station, which is the starting point. It looked like an ordinary ride, as I saw most commuters attending to their gadgets, either texting, reading, watching movies and other video clips, or playing games. Others just stared on the windows to see the outside world. I gallantly stood to give way to others to take the vacant seats.

But it was at the Cubao Station that a beautiful story unfolded. A wheelchair-bound young guy and his attendant entered the coach. We gave way and they stayed right at the center of the coach. I did not notice how it started, but one of the commuters, a slightly elderly woman probably in her late or mid-60s, broke the ice and talked to the PWD guy, who deftly answered her with a smile.

The PWD told the woman in a sweet audible voice that he is a fulltime call center agent, but does rapping on the side. Since I was standing in front of the PWD guy and his attendant, I promptly asked him to give us a sample. And the rap artist did it without hesitation.

At that point, we had reached the Annapolis-Santolan station. The MRT train was traveling at a slow pace to prevent conking again. By that time, the PWD started dishing out rap music, narrating his experience as a person with disability and telling us his inability to do functions, which every normal person could. I remember his lines or something to this effect: I knew he is an authentic rap artist.

“Kahit ako’y may kapansanan
Hindi ko titigilan
Ang mangarap ng kabutihan
Sa kapuwa, sa bansa.”

The rap artist told us that that doing rap music is not easy. He does not memorize lines unlike classical songs. As words come into his mind, he sings in the usual sing-song style, a common character of rap music, he said. As a classicist, I could not help but barge in the discussions and told the commuters that rap music is no different from “balagtasan,” where poets recite their lines extemporaneously.

I asked the rap artist his rap music name and he said he is known as Righteous One. His attendant gave his real name: Joshua Berenguer. He has an FB account. I have checked it and he is fairly known in the rap music world. He must be quite an intelligent and sensible young man.

The elderly woman asked her age and he said he is 23. She dutifully pulled a P100 bill from her handbag and handed it to the rap artist. Of course, it was not payment. It was more of a honorarium to create goodwill.

The MRT trip was punctuated when his attendant, or the guy pushing his manual wheelchair, realized they were going the wrong way. This prompted them to go down at the Shaw Boulevard station so that they could take the train going to the opposite direction and alight at the Quezon Ave Station, their original destination.

That was the end of the sideshow.

My attention was abruptly called by a beggar who touched me to ask for some money. I gave him ten pesos. “Maawa na kayo sa taong bulag,” he blurted out and other commuters responded by giving their share. Near the Guadalupe Station, the beggar stood up apparently to prepare to alight there. This was where a funny incident happened.

As he stood up, his purontong pants went down, almost exposing his genital. It was a good thing his long shirt covered his personal property. Two ladies helped him to put up his pants. But one woman could help to say that it went down because of the weight of the many coins he had in the pockets of his pants. He did not wear a belt.

Santa Banana, I told myself, he must have more money than me. If that was the case, he could have at least 500 or six hundred pesos of coins in his pockets. Until that experience, I did not know that beggars ply their trade inside the MRT coaches. Wow!

These are not all. When the coach was nearing the Buendia Station, commuters could not help but notice the perplexed face of an elderly woman, who must be in her 70s. She said she did not know what to do. She was supposed to go down at the Guadalupe Station. Somebody said she missed it. She was lost.

She went down at the Buendia Station. Out of my civic duty, I conducted her to go to the other side of the track and take another train to go to Guadalupe Station.

But not without saying: What a day!