Manila Floods and Forgotten Promises: An Absurd Tale of a Vagabond, Watermelon Seeds, and Smiling Politicians

The rains in Manila did not fall — they collapsed, like a billion buckets overturned by a drunken god. Jeepneys bobbed like bathtub toys, tricycles spun like lost tops, and office workers scurried in their pressed clothes, darting into malls where the air-conditioning roared louder than the storm. From the safety of glass walls and fluorescent light, they watched the world blur into gray water, and then politely forgot it existed.

Far away yet still in the same city, a vagabond sat in a half-drowned basketball court. The court had once hosted sweaty neighborhood games, but now it served as an ark for one man, one dog, and a collapsing kingdom of cardboard boxes. His lips — cracked, swollen, mutinous from too many watermelon seeds — seemed to spell a wordless hymn. He smiled anyway, as though each seed carried the punchline to a cosmic joke only he could hear.

Soaked in Manila’s floods, a vagabond and his dog sit in a basketball court, while smiling politicians on billboards remind us of promises long forgotten.

Above him loomed the grinning gods of Manila’s May elections. Billboards and flyers, waterlogged but indestructible, stared down with manic cheer. Politicians’ faces swelled in the rain until their eyes seemed to follow him, their perfect white teeth glowing like beacons for a ship that would never come. Flyers stuck to his leg in the flood, soggy reminders of promises of reprieve for the poor — reprieve that dissolved faster than cheap ink.

The elite-backed saints of bureaucracy hovered everywhere: smiling from lamp posts, dripping from tarpaulins, even swirling in the floodwater itself. One flyer floated by the dog, who growled at its grinning face until the paper melted into pulp.

A rotund man waddled past, his folding umbrella so tiny it resembled a wilted mushroom. He stared at the scene, clicked his tongue — a metronome of indifference — and shuffled away. Perhaps he had once cared, but caring had been taxed out of him, exported along with all other luxuries.

The vagabond chewed another seed, lips bleeding, head tilted toward the storm. For a moment, his laugh echoed against the flooded court — absurd, defiant, and lonely — a laugh loud enough to compete with the smiles raining down from the billboards above.

Want to see more of the rotund man’s world? Catch him in Gustavo’s 4AM Filipino Morning Routine: Coffee, Cigarettes & Sarcastic Work Chat — a story of weary mornings, smoky reflections, and the quiet comedy of survival.