The College of Tears by Stanley Mungai (red white royal blue txt) 📕

“Then what?” she asked noticing that he had referred to her without the usual ‘my dear’.

“I will kill him.” Soili said frankly.

At that moment, the world he had built for a whole year fell apart. The sleepless nights he had spent crying over her pains and concerns were trashed in the dustbins of rejection. The hopes he had built a mountain of visions with were swept away by an ocean of dismissal. The esteem he had built for years on earth got trampled on by a mighty foot of betrayal. Even as he walked into his room alone, he felt a sharp pain cross his chest and he knew it was real when he almost collapsed on his bed. Stinging tears welled up in his eyes and he wasn’t sure whether they were from the night’s experience, from the pain suspended in his chest cavity or from both. Only one thing remained. The Immense love she had for her was still there.

He almost woke his roommate Sayona by groaning deeply of pain from a bleeding heart. Sayona stirred in his sleep but did not wake up. The tears came down, tumbling and wetting the pillow which he now clung to as if it was a lifeline. He turned to the mirror and almost jumped, startled by his own reflection. It was his face twisted in pain and his bloodshot eyes that scared him. Tears of blood. Honestly if that dude hurt Haizec Kai, he would kill him. “He better love her better than I do.” He told himself and then stopped as if a knife had been thrust in his back.

How did he miss that from the description? He was too freaked to concentrate and focus his mind. He looked as if for the first time at the mound of blankets raising and dropping at regular interval of the breathing roommate. Yes! It was him. He stood up and dropped the pillow on the floor. This is the devil you do not know. Son of a bitch. Sayona!

Cannot Graduate.

The tick-tack 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 odour 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 honours 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 kilometres 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. Neighbours 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-immemorial. 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 traveller 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