Pastil

I arrived early at university, too early, in fact, that the cafeteria was closed and the early risers, the handful of students that roamed the school, still had wet hair. I was starving. I waited for the canteen to open. Before I left the house, I only had a cup of coffee, which I ground and brewed myself, the preamble to my morning routine of reading Scripture and praying, taking a warm shower, toothbrushing, and picking the first clothes I could lay my hands on, explaining, by the way, my adventurous fashion sense—I consciously do not think about the pair of glasses I would wear, or my shirts and trousers.

I told the class beadle—my students' term for what we, in my time, called the liaison officer, meaning the person who cascades the information from the teacher to the class; like a spokesperson, in other words—that the class would begin at 8 am. I had an hour to kill. I cleared the seats of dew; it had rained the night before. I edited my lecture slides as the staff cooked the rice and fried the food. There were men delivering ice cubes, rushing off to the next store that ordered from them. Examination of the Abdomen, the title was. I wanted to edit it, make it sound more interesting, but I had no other ideas, and when the hot meal of spicy tuna pastil, the Maguindanaoan dish I had only recently discovered, I consumed it right away.