Karma

By Nora Ongtengco

KARMA encompasses the twelve laws of existence that govern our lives. They are spiritual guidelines that can help us maneuver through this life. Our actions can ultimately decide our fate. In this story, we follow the fate of an aspiring young Filipino boy and his dysfunctional family living in the 1970s. Their pursuit of love, significance, and security is a deep human need that is present in all of us. Being a Christian does not necessarily make one impervious to the seductive idolatries of this world. In actuality, Christians usually struggle mightily with their faith and have much to lose. It is human nature to fall, to falter, oftentimes failing to fully comprehend why. It is by design. Only by understanding KARMA can we avoid life’s deleterious pitfalls. But without enlightenment, forgiveness, and redemption through God’s grace, we will never find true peace and fulfillment in this earthly life of ours and beyond.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Oct 30, 2017
• ISBN: 9781640274129

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Fortress

Barry sat aloof. His slender legs dangled high atop the clay-tiled roof of his mother’s house. It sure is hot today, he thought as he leaned backward. The hot tiles would have scathed his back and legs where it not for his trusty blanket, an old, thick wool carpet with its worn and faded Native American design. The maize sun warmed his olive-colored skin and generated a faint salty sweat.

In the distance, a few half-dozen tall palm trees swayed to and fro, slow-dancing to the gentle, intermittent pulse of the ocean breeze. The same breeze helped cool his briny perspiration. On the ground at the base of the trees, he noticed a few fallen coconuts that had broken, revealing their inner fibrous husks and the white edible fleshy fruit inside. He suddenly craved for some coconut milk! After refrigeration, nothing, he thought, was more refreshing on a warm, lazy afternoon than sitting back and sipping cold, sweet milk straight up from a large freshly cut-opened coconut through a long paper straw.

Not too far from his perch, he spotted some small children with their shrieky pre-adolescent voices, gleefully playing hide-and-seek. He noticed that they would begin each segment by huddling together; then like a ripple effect after a pebble is thrown in the water, the children would scatter and quickly spread out away from the designated it, darting here and there, deciding where best to crouch and lay motionless, before the next exciting phase of seeking ensued.

He chortled a little after he saw one seeker turn to raise his head from his hands and peek before the proverbial 10 count. There were many good places to hide, including some low-lying tropical scrubs, large broad-based palm trees, and massive fountains, all within the preselected and agreed-upon domains. He knew those hiding places well, for he had gone to conceal himself in the same places a hundred times before. But that was a long while ago.

As he raised himself up from his recumbent position, he leaned forward and gazed directly below and recognized some chattering belonging to some of his peers. He turned to one ear and listened clandestinely. Most of them were in their late teens, like himself. Most of them were, similarly, from well-to-do families, expected to follow in their parents’ footsteps as doctors, lawyers, and a few of them, as awaiting heirs to future grandiose entitlements. So they would prance around pretentiously, their clothes remaining untarnished, compartmentalizing themselves in their silk-stocking invisible net of cliques.

He had always been stupefied by many of the neighboring elephantine mansions. They were massive, breathtaking architectural works of art. He breathed out a few long, heavy sighs.

The rooftop offered a good bird’s-eye view of the myriad of nearby well-manicured green lawns and gardens. This was his favorite place to be on a bright sunny day, a few renegade cirrus clouds wistfully dotting the Pasadena blue expanse above.

As many times before, he would have to fetch a tall ladder and climb up to the roof to escape and feel free of the goings-on below. It was never a simple ascent. Each rung would cause an apprehensive wobble. But it was a time away from Sylvia, his mother, a necessary respite, Barry thought, even for a little while.

On his climbs, he would avoid peering directly downward at the deep abyss revealing the narrow alleyway below him to allow the momentary disequilibrium to fade. Barry would struggle to stand erect and fight his qualms by focusing on the horizon. Staring off into the distance he would discern the silhouette of distant hills through the afternoon eastern haziness, part of the great Angeles National Forest Reserve.

He admired the regal beauty of the terracotta tile roofs more intimately from this vantage point. He liked to count the many chimneys jutting from all the rooftops in his neighborhood. He would survey and scan as many distant flues as he could, his eyes squinting as his tally progressed rooftop to distant rooftop.

The zephyr became playful, flickering his well-combed hair as he perused in the opposite direction. The radiance of the sun shone with a blinding glare that forced Barry to shade his eyes with his hand.

Across the way next door, he observed a small bright red hummingbird darting from tree to tree. Barry smiled. How wonderful it must feel to fly, hither, thither, and yon, wherever you want to go. Nothing or nobody holding you down, he pondered.

Barry was born a little over a score ago in one of the most affluent neighborhoods of Pasadena. He had always remembered being pampered by various hired nannies who would come and go according to the whims of his mother. As he matured, he learned, early on, not to get too attached to his turnstile caretakers. But he truly believed Sylvia loved him, for she was there customarily each night to closely oversee the designated nanny who was assigned to put him down to bed, as per her instructions. He was never left alone, nor given time to feel lonely. His whole universe was cared for and pampered by others!

He dutifully obeyed his mother and requited her love with his obedience, but he thought she was unfailingly strict and unmoving. As in many Filipino families, the matriarchy claimed the ruling authority at home. But, moreover, Sylvia preferred to breathe the helium of aristocracy and so forbade him to socialize with any children outside his neighborhood whom she felt were beneath their social and financial prominence.

After all, his father was a hardworking, successful, and highly reputable banker in Costa Mesa. Because of his vocational obligations, his father seldom saw Barry, except for the festive public social gatherings the family was obligated to attend.

His father would often come home late, exhausted, famished. While consuming, correction, inhaling, his customary formidable mountain of food, consisting of a heated mound of long-grain white rice with a hearty meat and vegetable dish of some sort, followed with a few compulsory bubbly glasses of Pinot Grigio (all mandated for him by Sylvia), his tired father could usually utter a curt conventional Hi, son or Need anything, son? in between mastication cycles, just before prostrating himself upstairs to a post-prandial sonorous slumber. The peck on Sylvia’s cheek at the bottom of the staircase became almost ritual-like as time passed, perhaps, a small gate fee before the ascent?

Barry accepted his privileged status. He acknowledged that the first pacifier in his mouth was a silver spoon. His family was well respected, held in high esteem throughout the social and business community. In this hierarchy, Barry, an only child, had grown to know his place. Part family investment, part heirloom, he learned to wear his badge of privileged elitism well.

He was expected to study hard, aspire, and succeed in school. Those had always been the marching orders. No excuses. No weak links. Failure was not an option. Only the crème de la crème, for only the shiny penny glittered. His path toward a medical career was already predetermined, meticulously and painstakingly choreographed. By mandate, he matriculated exclusively in the finest private schools. Barry was an investment that must produce a golden yield lest dull the luster of its worth.

In premedical school, as if by rote, he excelled, a perennial fixture of the dean’s list. He was innately intelligent, handsome and statuesque, well educated, but for all sense and purposes, he was a loner, an introverted recluse. The gift of savoir faire and passion for friends would escape his grasp early on. The emotional chip was deemed unessential in the hardware of an automaton. His intelligence and proclivity to be the best was to be sufficient enough.

We are not who we think we are. We are not what others think we are. We are what we think others think we are.

Barry’s mother maintained and well kept the prodigious house, staffed by a tireless army of entrained nannies. Every floor sheened with cleanliness. Every piece of furniture seldom wavered far from its specified coordinates. Every antique looked like it belonged in a museum. The Steinway was more for display than Debussy. A cobweb could not beseech lodging. Even the flowers knew their places. They stood at attention, as if in reverence, as she passed by, ready for the daily inspection.

As for Barry, he was assigned a personal driver, a cook, and a housekeeper whose service to him extended inside and outside the house. Barry was brought up oblivious to any other way of life.

Sylvia herself became accustomed to the life of entitlement and extravagance. Acquiring wealth became her obsession. Her husband helped to perpetuate this upscale lifestyle and made all her materialistic yearnings come to fruition. She passionately avowed to protect and nurture it. As a result, she monitored the house staff like a hawk and reigned like a military commander.

Working and living in such fruited opulence was, by no means, consolation for Sylvia’s docile and submissive servants. Her overbearing and rigid auspice was, oftentimes, unpalatable and difficult. One might wonder if they also felt some distaste when engaging her heir apparent. Did they forebode a clone in the making? For the seed, they might have feared, seldom fell far from the tree.

But there was a time when things were different, he recalled, reminiscing with a bit of melancholy. The memory of the past almost felt surreal. Everything then, in retrospect, seemed a little more vivacious and carefree, especially around Christmastime.

Oh, Christmases past! Everything seemed bigger. Happy faces abounded, decorations lit up the halls, green Christmas trees blinked their scintillating multicolored lights, vibrant carolers sang joyously in the atrium. There was much more room for God.

And of course, he could not forget to mention the food! Food everywhere! Some people ate to live. They lived to eat! Oh, how the air seemed different, inundated with the intoxicating aroma of his all-time favorites foods—sinigang (a delicious tangy stew made with tamarind), chicken adobo, pork lechon, pancit palabok (a rice noodle dish).

Then there were those scrumptious desserts, including the refreshing halo-halo, served cold with shaved ice, jackfruit, beans, and evaporated milk; turon (banana fritters); and delightful chocolates and other countless confectionaries. And who could ever get enough of leche flan (a rich caramel custard)?

Had something really changed? The house was always made to be filled with important people with substance, the same assortment of Filipino foods, the same ornate concoctions of decorations, and servants scurrying around ad nauseam. For some reason, it just did not feel the same now. The food did not even taste the same.

He did remember one thing that was only present for a short time in the distant past. The sound. A sound that would be almost indiscernible, but when he listened carefully, he could hear its very intermittent and haunting presence. He often wondered where it came from, for it had seemed to pervade ominously throughout the house. Was there a ghost?

The sound was soft and muffled, but melodious, and had occurred only after lights out during the quiet twilight hours of the night when he was half asleep. It had a distinct effeminate quality, but would last only a few minutes at a time, and emanated from somewhere within the bowels of the house.

Then the subsequent morning, afterward, there would be this trace lavender scent from some burnt candles that permeated throughout the first floor. The strong smell from the Clorox the nannies used on the floors could not mask it. It would definitely still be there.

Had there been once, for a time, a timorous poltergeist or cherub in their midst? And what caused its eventual demise? He had always wondered and had no explanation for its disappearance. He had no recourse but move on and continue the pensive rumination of his past.

He cherished their Sundays. He was just a little tot back then. They would be dressed in their Sunday best. The chauffeur would drive them back home from mass, and the three of them would routinely take their traditional hour respite in the family room while luncheon was being prepared in the kitchen down the hall.

The soft gray bedsheets with the elegant sheen would already be pre-placed over the sofas by the servants. He would then hop onto his assigned loveseat sleeper sofa and lay his head down on the pillow. It was always perfect for him!

It was kiddy-corner to the leather chaise lounge where Sylvia and his father would lay together, side by side, covered with their favorite Oriental throw blanket with the mosaic design. Only the very tips of their feet would be seen sticking out. There they all rested quietly until the usual faint creaking of the floor was heard as the head servant walked to Sylvia notifying them that luncheon was served.

He fondly remembered that, during formal parties, he would often