A DARK NIGHT IN HOSTEL J

By Stanley Kimuge

Sunday night. 9.00 pm to be precise. My phone rang, as a reminder from a friend in hostel J. She had invited me for supper on several occasions but I had turned down the offers in the pretext of being busy.

After a hot debate in my mind on whether to go or not, I decided to walk to the Soweto hostel. I took the shortcut. By the time I reached the Chips Cafe, my shoes had gained sizeable chunks of mud. ‘Gosh! Will this route ever get tarmac?’ I thought to myself.

At long last, I stood at the door of the room on the third floor of Hostel J. It took four knocks for the door to be ajar. I entered. A hug that extended for about two minutes followed. Her room-mate was there too; drowned in the desktop. She must have been rushing through her assignment to be handed in the following morning. I gave her a handshake. That was more than enough.

I sat on the stiff mattress that covered the ‘family-sized’ bed. A few inches away, a sufuria was emanating geysers furiously. Tiny pieces of meat were competing inside the metallic pot on which would jump highest.

Suddenly, there was darkness. The desktop lost its light. Then the coil gradually lost the glow. The room went dead silent, for at least three minutes. An infuriated voice could be heard cursing ‘watu wa power’. Probably an unsaved assignment to be presented the following day had vanished with the power.

It was then story time. The conversation could barely eat into the darkness. To supplement it, I found myself logging onto social media. Sooner than later, my phone battery was complaining that it was hungry for power.

Then came an unusual rhythm from the neighbour’s room. A bed was groaning and shaking at an alarming rate. It was accompanied by hushed voices. Initially, I thought there was an earthquake weighing 4.5 on the Richter scale. Maybe in the next nine months, a laptop would be in the offing. In another scenario, the lucky missile could be shot down by a pill the following day.

Quickly, I scrolled through my phone book. Before I came to Ogega's contacts, the battery was dead. There we were, buried in the rubbles of darkness. She had to serve the half-cooked meal. I hoped that the following day wouldn’t be spent at the dispensary.