Binibini (Miss)

An incandescent bulb flashed an auspicious wink at her from above.  The wire on which it was strung, alongside numerous others, swung precariously to the wispy warm breeze and against the bare night sky, between wooden posts that marked the width of the road and the permitted boundaries of their momentarily acknowledged existence.  The distant stars watched patiently as she slithered anonymously through the throng and found herself a spot on which to set herself up.

It was two hours yet before it started, but it was already teeming with people everywhere.  Beyond the wooden posts were the Indistinguishable, observing the Othered, pacing the sides of the road like bored and hungry lions looking to be entertained, famished for some joy to relieve their bland, desultory existence. Meanwhile, within the invisible enclosure where some were hunched on the ground, several were seated on plastic chairs, and many were standing, the Othered guffawed and bantered like the Apocalypse was at hand, throwing praise and insults at each other in equal measure, both always given in jest and neither taken seriously.  Beautiful in their abomination.  Dua Lipa blurted out from one small speaker somewhere, its tinny sound struggling to be heard among the rambunctious laughter that hung in the air, lively and carefree like the buntings that vivified houses, establishments, even trees and jeepneys this time of year.  

She is on her own, as she has always been.  No one to assist her.  She is no spring chicken, only finally finding the time for herself once nearly all of it had been spent on putting all her five siblings through school, doing whatever odd jobs became available at the old shoe factory, or at the beauty salons that punctuated every second block in their town.  She takes out a small woven mat, soiled with colour and wearied by time, and lays it gently on the concrete ground.  The small bottles and plastic containers soon follow, like a sorceress prepping for a spell.  As she mutters a short prayer for aid from her chosen God, someone suddenly approaches with a chair, ‘Use this, mumsh.‘  Mumsh.  Mum.  Mother.  They all call her that nowadays, less out of adulation and more out of age.  She does not mind.  To her, joy is ageless.  She is well past being told what she should and should never do; and she would gladly take the respect and acknowledgement.  ‘Salamat, ‘nakshi.’  Thank you, Child.  She knows that where age affords her freedom, youth obscures its true essence.  

She gets down to work.  She turns a bottle over her left fingers, waiting doggedly for the contents to sluggishly make its way out.  Her eyes wander, and she can see they all have these implements of varying shapes, sizes and colours.  Some plastic, some wooden, all superfluous.  She can not even afford base that did not make her wait on it.  It does not matter.  Her reflection now shows up a few more lines than she is used to, the weight of gravity evident in some parts, so she carefully spreads the liquid porcelain onto her time-stamped features, carefully filling in the troughs so that the blinding lights do not notice.  She has one brush that she uses to expertly shift the colours she had applied to her lids with her ring finger.  First red, and then pink.  Like Barbie.  Recreating youth is easy in theory but impossible in practice.  Time is the most incorruptible of human inventions, and no amount of money nor backstreet aesthetic intervention can ever bring it back.  She tints her cilia with mascara.  She lines her lids heavy in the same black colour.  She sweeps her patchy brows in place before drawing delicate brown batwings over them.  She takes a muddy pot, dips a finger in and taps it geometrically along the sides of her face at a 45-degree angle.  Her already hollowed cheeks do not need much more attention than she had already given them if she were to play this game against Time.  Finally, she reaches for her wand and waves it across her lips, the red as vibrant as life itself.  She purses some, and she is halfway done.  

More colours, more textures, more laughter and more emotions slowly fill the enclosure.  Smooth skins and agile bodies. Untouched mixing with the enhanced. Voices in varying pitches hooting and screeching in shrill revelry, like parakeets trying to out-squawk each other. All in one wonderful concoction of humanity too unfathomable for the uninitiated. She gently takes out a scrunched up plastic carrier bag from which she reveals a long, slinky fabric that shimmered in the same rouge she had just applied onto her lips. She slides herself into it the way a snake moults out of its skin.  Her skinny frame, made frail by years of hard labour, squirmed defiantly to fit into its dream.   Once in it, her dark coppery skin shone luminous against the red.  The dress is slightly shorter on her than it should be, but at this point, shame is her only competition, and she will never let it win.  She rests herself on her borrowed chair and takes out a small netted bundle.  In it, a flattened indeterminate accessory.  She plucks it out of its receptacle and deftly runs her fingers through it as she distends it back to life, like a flatpack from IKEA. With remarkable difficulty, she maneuvers it over her head, the flimsy hair on which she had tied up in a very neat bun.  ‘Here, mumsh.’  A pair of hands appears out of nowhere and attends to her obvious rigor with the task at hand.  She holds an end to her nape while the stranger fixes the other onto the crown of her head.  Once in place, the stranger styles it some more with intricate precision, spraying here and there, running their palms over and around it, smoothing, polishing, adding a professional gloss, as if chiselling a raw diamond into a gleaming gemstone.  Another person unexpectedly shows up before her, bearing a palette with an array of brushes, and starts adding colour peaks to her troughs, refining the project she thought she had finished a few moments earlier, their masterful strokes turning her amateur image into one magnificent masterpiece.   Someone else is cleverly installing a pin at the back of her dress to stop it from unzipping, while another plunks a pair of faux whimsy onto her lids.  Before she knew it, a coterie of connoisseurs had employed themselves on her, each charitable with their talents and magnanimous with their compassion.  She is on her own but never alone.  This she realised the first time she came to these affairs.  Nothing gets past anyone in these liminal spaces, no matter how busy or self-centered everyone can seem to be.  They have all been taught very early on that scarcity meant everyone is competition, but they are also nothing if not obstinate.  Even where there is very little, there is always something to share.  Generosity is a muscle, amongst many, that they learned to train because they all wanted to survive.  All these give her joy.  That is why she chose her name, ‘thunderous joy’.  And that is why she keeps coming to these affairs, why she carries on.

A voice booms over their reverberant exuberance, and rousing music explodes into their eardrums.   ‘Happy Fiesta everyoooone!’  blasts from above, sending everyone into a frenetic rush: to touch-up, finish up, level up their excitement.  She distributes her gratitude to her voluntary aides before deploying them back to their rightful wards.  Everyone gets poised for it to begin.  Every corner she looked now, there is some majestic creature alchemised by exclusion and transformed by solidarity.  Gorgeous into stunning, Othered into otherworldly.  ‘Welcome to our annual Miss Transgender Queen San Isidroooo!’ came onto the airwaves, signalling the commencement of their Beauty’s exaltation, as if they did not already know they were beautiful and celebrated that fact every minute, every day.  Someone is called out of the enclosure and into the den.  Then another one.  And another.  The heady mix of festive joy and riotous ridicule was deafening.  She is up next, someone tells her.  She teetered her way up the wooden makeshift stairs that led to the platform propped up and steadied by two layers of vertical, humongous metal drums, making for an improvised stage.  The voice calls her in, the pronouncement a clarion call to generational resistance and an invocation to divine provenance.   ‘Candidate number 4… Misssss… Ligayaaaa… Dagondooooong!’  From the periphery where she is unleashed, she takes a deep breath, lifts her chin and smiles like she never once had it rough in her life.  When she finally steps into the blinding fluorescent lights that seemed to penetrate her skin through to her bones, statuesque and collected on her 3-inch crimson heels, the bored lions come alive in a deafening, thunderous and uproarious applause, their initial heckles turning into admiration, the obvious envy in their eyes into undeniable covetousness.  As she meets everyone’s gaze, steely in its confidence and reflecting the mockery back onto their empty, bewildered faces, in her mind, over and over, again and again, clear as spring water; she is beautiful, she is sublime, and she is here.  And no one, not even her chosen God, can claim otherwise.