Paying Off Life's Debts

By the side of the multistoried, locked week-end villas, chicklets run after mother hen in search of food and ill-clad little girls with unkempt, unoiled hair, crane their necks over a culvert to watch a local snake wind its way towards an unaware chicken busy feeding on worms in the wet earth.

They heave a sigh of relief as the chicken takes flight just at the nick of the time to give its predator a pass-up. Life struggles for its existence in the tin-roofed single-room houses that have sprung up in the shadows of the villas, from which SUVs roll out at night, taking the inmates to a distant eatery for fine dining and the tin-roofed inmates struggle with their gas stoves to bake the handmade bread to douse the fire in their bellies.

The cars roll back at the dead of the night, carrying tipsy inmates, who make their way to their air-conditioned bedrooms, fitted with mosquito nets, as their underprivileged neighbors, packed in their single rooms, slap mosquitoes and sleep away to begin a new day to labor harder to pay off LIFE'S DEBTS!