Pungko sa Bunsuran

Welcome to the Bunsuran Caravan.

In what I hope could be a sustainable engagement, I begin this affair with a brief education tour on the Asi language, from which bunsuran comes from.

When I was a scrawny kid in a mountainous island called Sibale off the cost of Mindoro, I used to spend the first break of daylight sitting on the bunsuran, watching the birds welcome and celebrate a new day up the branches of the mayugango tree right in front of our yard. Bunsuran is the first of five to seven steps of the movable bamboo stair leading to our house. Our house--of bamboo, apitong, and cogon grass--had two such stairs, one in front facing east and one in the abuhan--the kitchen--at the back, facing west.

The bunsuran is the repository of my childhood dreams. It is where I munched over-ripe atis for breakfast, watched airplanes pass by to distant destinations, and contemplated my unknown future. It is at the bunsuran where I learned to read scraps of Taliba which my father used to wrap goodies whenever he came from a trip to Mindoro.

The bunsuran is a comfortable nook to make gossip. I still remember the occasion when my mother came down from the house to meet a neighbor bringing the happy news of a relative giving birth to a bouncy baby boy. Right there in the bunsuran, I knew from hearing adult talk about the unmarried relative becoming pregnant and how she tried hiding it from the barrio folks. My father fixed tools, talked and blew cigarette smoke to his fighting cocks while sitting on the bunsuran.

In the Asi language, the bunsuran is the Alpha and Omega of the house. One entered the abode passing through it. It is the last part of the house that the pallbearers step on for the final journey of the dead. In our superstitious island, the stair is removed when one leaves and no house caretaker is left, allegedly to prevent the spirits from going inside. The bunsuran takes the brunt of the weight of humans and the material goods they carried inside the house. Even animals, like our backyard sow, knew its use in removing body itchiness, by passing through the stair's hard post and rubbing her body to it back and forth.

The bunsuran is unknown in a world whose buzzword is globalization; in an era of high-speed elevators and push-button conveyor systems. But an island where there is no 24/7 electricity, no Internet, and no stock exchanges that keeps track of capital movement--not even a COMELEC that deliberately miscounts votes and no President who orders luxury cars smashed to win pogi points--the bunsuran is there to stay: a movable fixture of the house that bears witness to the coming and going of an age and culture that is still strongly anchored in beauty, simplicity, and utility. It remains a repository of dreams and articulator of beliefs; a bridge to the window of the Asi soul.

This blogger is a torch bearer of the Asi tribe's Bunsuran Caravan.