Says a Man to His Horse

I grew up riding the kalesa. They used to be found everywhere--well, at least in my little Chinatown district called Binondo. I used to ride it everyday to and from my grandmother's house for my afternoon naps after nursery class. I loved the feeling of the fresh, cool breeze against my face while sitting higher up than anyone else on the road. I would watch how the kutsero would skillfully navigate the cart through narrow eskinitas, and at the same time dodge stray dogs and cats and children. For a time, I dreamed of driving my own kalesa, coursing through the streets, with my trusty horse at the end of my reins at my disposal. But my mother would smother my wishful thinking by covering my face with a towel because the wind was full of icky dried-up horse dung.

Some years passed, and I grew up. Beyond the kutsero in front of me, there, I began to see the pitiful scrawny animal... the horse. Its nuzzle was covered with a mixture of its own foamy spit and watered-down oatmeal breakfast, and its eyes completely blindfolded with a piece of leather. Its probably once long, beautiful mane had been cropped into short stumps and clumped together with brightly colored flower hair clips. Sometimes, on a wider road, the man in front of me (who, from behind, had started to look hideous to me) would grab his horsewhip, and without batting an eyelash, strike the animal's behind. It winced in pain, but blindly responded to the pain and ran faster. How horrible it was to see people enjoying the conveniences of comfortable transportation, when another perfectly-alive creature survives in the polluted streets, sporting a flea-bitten coat of fur and treading on its own feces.

I have entered college now and grown up for real. It has been almost a decade since I have last ridden a calesa. In fact, they have become less common in this part of the city called Binondo, which I do indeed regret, because it was one of the things that made Chinatown different. Today, the rain was pouring as I was walking home from the LRT station, and I saw a kalesa parked on the side of the road. Unexpectedly though, the kutsero wasn't sitting in his throne of a seat in the cart. He was dredged, despite wearing a raincoat, and was adjusting the horse's headcollar. Something seemed to be wrong with it, and the horse appeared to be hurt, pawing the ground restlessly with food still covering its mouth. As I watched the man desperately trying to relieve the horse's pain, I saw the horse slowly leaning its head towards its master, and the man reached out his hand to stroke the animal's head. There was a bond between them that I had never seen--a beautiful friendship between two lives intertwined in order to survive.

Through the rain, I could not see clearly, but the man looked like he was saying something to the horse,

"I need you to live. I need... you to live."