That was how the driver started singing that famous song:
Lif him up haia
Lif him up hia
Da law is goo
I wee lif him up haia
Efrywear I go
I we lif him up haia.
My
attention was like a ball in the grips of Chilavert. The driver's
rendition was an excellent annihilation of a war ship song. A smile
sliced across my face. I thought I was the one hard of hearing but the
closer I listened proved me wrong. Every silenced morpheme, every
distorted phoneme, every corrupt intonation grated my sensibilities.
Throughout
the thirty-minute drive, I stewed in that frog of a voice. The
conductor's shouts of different destinations was a perfect part to a
wonderful two-man orchestra. The bus' engine chugged on despairingly as
the tyres went in and out of the potholes that beautified the long
road. I became a dancer, a reluctant
dancer.
An expression kept floating "lif him
up." My mind arranged it and it became "Lift Him up." And thus came a
question: Isn't the meaning of the word "up" contained in "lift"? Why
then do we have to "lift anything or anyone up when we can simply lift
them?
Thus I rode on the hypnosis of the
vibrating hall beyond my destination. I had become the music. The woman
beside me was saying something like "The driver has fallen asleep." I
did not give the kind of response she expected so she repeated what she
said earlier but with a slight modification. She swapped "The driver"
for "The president." That was when I ripped myself from the music and
shouted "O wa Owa!" That was the song I was singing, no, shouting when I
heard my roommate say: "Kilowa? Gerrout of bed joor. Ooni lo class
ni?
