THE COLLEGE OF TEARS
TEARS OF FRUSTRATIONS.
The tick tock of the clock clicked away into the night. The stillness of the night amplified the sound and the timepiece seemed to be the only living thing in the single room dinned by the buzzing of the mosquitoes that festooned the night eager to get a drop of the red juice from the inhabitant were it not for the treated mosquito net that covered the lone soul in the almost empty room. The radiance from the security light outside penetrated through the windowpane and lighted the room with a ghostly glare such that Soili could still see from where he lay on the floor on a very thin mattress, the remains of the Ugali that he had tried without much success to feed on the night before.
A very large rodent scurried across the room dropping a few utensils that Soili had left piled up on the floor of the room. He did not try to haul up his head or scare away the usual visitor that fed in the sewage during the day and in his house during the night. His ribs ached from sleeping on the thin mattress on the floor but that was not what had caused him to have a disturbed night. Something else was bothering him and even at this moment, he could not actually tell what is was. He seemed to have woken up from a really bad nightmare that even he could not remember how it was. It seemed to linger in his sub-conscious grudgingly prompting him to wake up and change the reverie. But he was awake!
A vicious hunger hit him hard and his belly roared like a rock reverberating out of the sides of a steep hill, accelerating on its way. At first, he thought that he had forgotten to eat but he dismissed the idea after he remembered that the day before he had not taken lunch at all. He was out back to his former college to clear from the university and collect his graduation robe which he had paid an agonizing three thousand shillings equal to the rent that he paid for his house for a whole month. He had wondered what was so special about the damn cloth and he had even inquired from the campus authorities whether he was renting or purchasing the bulky garment.
Soili however remembered that he was too unhappy the night before to touch any of the food that he had cooked. Three months after he had left campus, he had found himself a poorly paying job as an accountant that barely managed to put food in his mouth leave alone his table. He had also rented a single room house where he slept bathed and cooked. If it had a hole on the floor, it would have served as a latrine as well. It was situated in the estate of Hamza where occasional floods happened from busted sewages filling the atmosphere with the bad odor of human stench.
The glitter of a corner of a briefcase lying idly on the floor caught his attention. It was illuminating from the security light outside. He had used the security light a lot of times to cut on his electricity bills by using it to light his room by leaving part of the window open. The briefcase contained his clearance papers and the bank slips which he had used to pay for the graduation gown to be used for the event that was taking place in a day’s time. This was what was keeping him awake. He needed to travel back to the campus where he had spent four painful years to collect his gown. At least this was going to be a happy ending after all.
He closed his eyes to lock away his state from him. It opened him into a misty world with shadowy outlines dancing before him a timeless dance of mockery. His memories shaping the mosaic of his imagination into corresponding dreams carried him away into the dreamland of overlapping experiences and events. How the mosquitoes at times managed to find their way inside the net was a mystery to him. A harassing itch on his forehead awoke him from the sleepy stupor as a lone fellow who had sucked enough whined away into the morning light escaping just enough before the grid could stop him. Soili clapped a splash of blood into his palms as the fellow lost his life that had been so much fed just a few minutes ago. What a waste!
He folded the mattress and pressed it away into a dark corner to give him some working space in the small room. He took a cold bath despite the electric heater hanging against the wall on an ancient rusted nail. He only used it when it was extremely necessary to heat his bathing water despite catching pneumonia a few times. Who wanted to pay a heavy electricity bill because of bathing water? He skipped showering at times. The strong tea escorted Soili out of the house en route to his former campus. Despite the repulsive encounters he had faced in what he had come to nick name The College of Tears, he could not help but feel a surge of hope shoot through his chest at knowing that he would be leaving formally from the College of Education and External Studies.
The chill of the cold wind in the Central Kenyan highlands town hit him and he smiled at it. He had slept outside on these cold nights. He did not have to anymore. He had a house that at least sheltered him from the winds. The previous week he had come to confirm that his name was on the graduation list and he was relieved to find out that he would be graduating with a Second class upper division which was what most students managed after the struggle with the system for the four years. It was almost impossible to get a first class honors and only around five bookworms managed the feat.
It was queuing that Soili hated on his first day at campus and it was queuing that he was going to do three months after he left campus. Co-incidentally, it was at the exact place that he had queued to have himself registered at the college. Despite him arriving very early, there was a procession of his classmates waiting at the queue to be served. The one lady and two gentlemen serving them were elegantly dressed and you could tell by their size that they were also well fed. They engaged in an animated chat only pausing for a second or two to serve one or two students. With this kind of misplaced priorities, one could hardly notice that the queue moved at all. It was this kind of incidence that caused students to riot but, they were not students of the university anymore and any disturbance would result into a gruesome court action.
Ten in the morning, operations stopped. The good some lady and gentlemen had gone off for tea break. Soili was not moved at all. He used this chance to talk to a few acquaintances that he had not seen in the last few months. The queue however did not distort. Nobody dared move away from the queue in fear of being displaced. At lunch time, the operations stopped again for the lunch break. The students picked their gowns and left with a pledge to bring them back or risk losing their result slips which means that there would be no prove that they ever stepped their feet at the academia. That was what a piece of garment was worth; an entire education system.
Finally his turn came. He saluted the gowns crew with a cynical “hi” which was more of a “goodbye” than a greeting. He was sure that he might never have to tolerate their insensitivity again. The lady held the booklet having the names of the graduates; the same list that he had looked at a week e earlier with a smile to find that he had been sentenced to depart from the College of Tears with the promise of a celebration. He had invited the entire village and they were going to journey the entire a hundred and fifty kilometers to come and receive their learned son from the University.
Soili’s mother had extended the same invitation to the entire clan and they prepared a huge festivity for him. They were going to come in four mini buses. Soili’s friends had travelled from as far as Mombasa; a whole day’s journey to come and celebrate with him. A few days ago, his brother had called him to inform him that they had ripened a whole consignment of bananas for the party. Neighbors gave their contributions for the party as everyone wanted to be part of it. Some of the people that had called him to inform him that they would grace his celebrations on Friday were foreign to him. Everything was set for an ostentatious celebration because Soili was the second person to graduate from the highest institution of learning in the village since time in memorial. The last one was twenty years ago.
“What is your name?” the lady asked in a voice that startled Soili. It was as if he had hesitated which he knew he hadn’t. The gentleman gave him the kind of look you receive from the custom guys at the Migingo Island that induces even in the most law-abiding traveler an almost irresistible urge to confess.
“My name is Soili Muguna” He replied waiting with a pen in his hand to sign against his name before he received the gown. The lady’s finger immediately fell on the list with a thousand and one names. They were set in an alphabetical order and so it wasn’t all that hard to find the names. The painted fingernails caressed the pages of the booklet with the lady licking at them from time to time to allow them to stick to the pages. Soili started to even gape at the fingers and swallowed hard every time the lady licked at them. As she came to the end of the list, she looked up at Soili and whispered almost to herself, “I can’t find that name.” She checked and re-checked but even Soili could see that his name was not on that list.
A shot of despondency ran through his entire system. He felt the world beneath him crumble threatening to gulp him down to the Hades below. The ambiance around him seemed to be pressing firm against him and he involuntarily took in a deep gasp that caused a stifled shriek to escape from his already open oral cavity. A miniature thread of perspiration ran from his armpits shuddering his body with its wintry temperature, causing him to shiver despite himself. He knew the drill. It would be a lot harder to get his name back on that list than to shove that Biblical camel through the eye of a needle. The red tape required to just right a gaffe that one person made would be used to choke him from the eminent ceremony if he did not paint it green as early as now.
He moved from one agency to the next; from the registry to the dean’s office and back to the principal’s. They all seemed to be laughing at him. No one could explicate how the name got omitted from the list when the names were being transferred to the ultimate pamphlet to be read in the graduation ceremony. They seemed to be blaming a phantom escritoire who was opportunely not there and her cell phone was also conveniently off. No one denied the fact that an error had been committed; the predicament was to own up that error. No one wanted to face the gigantic vice-chancellor to elucidate why a last-minute name was being added to the booklet for the graduation. The chancellor office was twenty kilometers away and it required a two-day notice for one to be able to secure a rendezvous.
Now that someone had to pay for the mistake that was committed in the dean’s office, they had to find a sacrificial lamb. This sacrificial lamb had to meet certain credentials and conditions. One of these was the fact that, that name was not to find its way to the list no matter what as the vice-chancellor would want an explanation. The other prerequisite was that the lamb had to be without blemish and as far away as possible from any campus office or staff. These kinds of considerations left Soili as the solitary creature between the devils and the hearty meal. He was going to be sacrificed.
Seven in the evening and he was standing at the principal’s office; the senior most authority at campus level. The old man just looked at him without feelings and said, “There is nothing I can do. You just have to wait for the next graduation two months from today.”
Soili didn’t say a word. It was no use trying to get these people to understand what was going to happen after this kind of a verdict. He had nothing to say to them. After a moment he decided that they were broken vessels leaking nonsense. They would not be there when he tells his friends to travel back the hundred and more miles back to where they had come from because there would be no ceremony. They would not be the ones to tell his father and mother together with the rest of the clan to eat the food they had prepared for the party because they were not going to travel to the capital. They would not be the ones to eradicate the speculations from his guardians that he had been kicked out of the graduation ceremony because of unpaid fees, indiscipline case, or failing to achieve academic credentials to graduate with the rest of his classmates.
He left the campus with a curse stuck in his throat. He was wondering who to release it to. The entire college? No, that would be unfair with that psychology lecturer still inside who had counseled him the time when Haizec Kai told him that she had found another man better than him and he had gone without food for days before the don could reach out and help him. The principal? He did not know what to do with the principal because although he had not omitted his name from the list he had the power to have it back there; power which he was too a coward to use. The dean? Yes, it was her office that refused to own up the mistake. She was the one that deserved the curse. He decided to leave the matter to God to exercise judgment in his own ways. He had read from a Bible sometimes back that ‘Justice and Righteousness are the foundation of his throne’.
Friday 9th September 2011, the graduation day. Soili is seated in front of his workstation at work doing some accounting for a court case in which a national corporation has failed to pay the arrears to the company that he works for. He is supposed to establish how much exactly they owe Waithaka Motors (K) Ltd. He knows that all his classmates including the ones he had beaten in class were at the graduation square. Some of them illegally because they could part with a few coins to have their names on that list. He had seen it that day when they refused to correct a mistake. A dude that had a punitive case was on the list. If there was anyone he should be taking to court, it should be those greedy cowards.
He had appeared like a liar. He had been sacrificed for what he did not do. Three months after he left the college of tears, it still reached out at him from his desk in the office. His father called him umpteen times to make sure that he had not failed. A friend or two called him to curse him aloud for inconveniencing them. A relative disowned him. A tear rolled down his manly cheek and despite his every effort to conceal it from the secretary seated across him, she still noticed it and gawked loudly attracting attention in the entire office. None of them had university education. They hardly understood how difficult it was to just graduate from The College of Tears.
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