Essay: The company of ghosts

that is not how I have seen the dead, or heard them, at all.

When I was seven years old, my maternal grandmother died. I never really knew her, but when I visited Oas, Albay, my parents’ hometown, she would always ply me with questions. Did you like the food? How is your schooling? Does your mother teach you to play the piano? She used to be a fat woman, her soprano vibrating round and round the church during Sunday Masses. When she became older she looked diminished: thinner, her hair like a white veil.

And one day, a wire informed us that she had died of tuberculosis. My mother went to her room and wept quietly. Later, she packed her clothes, along with the clothes of my father and my sisters. I didn’t go with them because my final examinations were near.

I was left in the care of the housemaids and of my paternal grandfather. Lola Juana was foot- loose, and she used to bring me everywhere. I read her Tagalog Komiks every week and listened to the radio melodramas with her. When I had a cold, she would rub my back and chest with Vicks Vapor Rub, then finish it off by massaging my forehead and neck. I slept beside her in her room, which she always locked, the night my parents and sisters went home to Albay.

But the next morning, I was found asleep on the floor of the sala. The maids were frightened. They told me that my dead grandmother must have pulled my