Catching Up

I was in a taxi earlier today, and we were passing through the Magallanes area on the way to Taft when suddenly, a man on the sidewalk tripped just outside my window. The fall was so bad, so desperately clumsy, that it made me take a second look. The guy running was dressed in dark, drab and dusty clothes, and, as the taxi driver would comment later, "He looked like he came out of a trash can." He ran, and fell on the dusty Metro Manila sidewalk, his faded yellow slippers bending. But he immediately stood up, and ran off again.

I'm sure he was bleeding somewhere.

The next moment people from around the area started screaming a shared, incoherent warning. Fingers were pointed, people were running, and a man hastily looking into his bag ran past, another person close behind him carrying a long, black bat. Immediately, we locked the taxi doors. But the running stranger had already been spotted on a distant overpass, people's eyes never leaving his retreating back.

But maybe I'm too dramatic.

I became really, inexplicably depressed though, seeing that happen within a 100-meter radius of myself. I had never witnessed anything remotely realistic before - although, yes, some idiot pocketed my Nokia while I was walking in front of him/her past McDonald's SM MoA. Seeing that man run, watching all those people shout with raised fingers, I felt so very depressed. I think, someday, I should like to live in a Philippines where people steal because they are evil, not because they are poor.

I barely saw what he had been carrying, and somehow, I wonder what it had been.