Snapshots from the Seventies
Written by Paul Catiang
I was around four or five when Mommy first told me about Dad. She said that they couldn't marry because he was already betrothed to someone else from birth, as is the custom among upper-class Indians. The exchange and merging of property was supposedly a done deal—there might have been some resort island involved, as a dowry. In the years that followed, the mental images that came to mind involved a mix of Bedouin tents, elephants, peacocks, turbans, all manner of exotic clichés my young imagination cobbled together from the Arabian Nights and the World Book Encyclopedia's volume on entries under the letter I.
The years came with more meeting and finding affinity with characters with relatively humble backgrounds and obscure but legendary fathers: Arthur Pendragon, Telemachus, Luke Skywalker. I wouldn't begin to find out the actual story until my dad first contacted me by email in May 2005, around ten years ago. A flurry of email exchanges took place between him in Bangalore, me here in Manila, and Mommy in Maryland. Somewhere in that exchange, Mommy sent me this photo:
That's them on the upper left side of the photo. This is their only picture together that I have, possibly taken in 1975, the only year they spent together. Then, Mommy would've been 33 and Dad, 29.
Mommy's caption: "Philippine dinner was held to honor Christine Ho, girl to the left of Conrado de Lara, our accountant. To his right is your Tita Terry, across me, then your dad with a naughty smile, and to his right is Carmen Espino Santos."
They met in late 1974 in Manila, while working for International Research Associates, an American-owned market research firm. Dad had come over after a four-year stint working in market research in the United States, and it was the wish of his father—my grandfather—that he get acquainted with the industry in Southeast Asia. All this was to prepare him to assume leadership at the Bureau of Commercial Statistics and Intelligence, a market research company my grandfather founded in Bombay.
