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NewScientist!

Life

...my hair covers a tiny shame etched permanently upon my head from secondary school. I was a smallish, final-year student and perhaps the youngest in my class and new because I had transfered to Union Secondary School Awkunanaw Enugu from Boys' Secondary School in my town - which made me an easy target for bullies. From being bullied for too long in school, I became fairly brave. Brave, but not enough to face Ray, a mountainous junior student that inherited notoriety from the defeat of its original owner—my own classmate who used to be a terror to everyone.

Ray was ten-percent human, the rest of him cut from satan's flesh. It was hard not to find him implicated in any vice in school—rape, theft, fights... That Friday morning, I was late to class, walking in proud steps as a senior. There was Ray with some of his classmates sitting under a tree. "Hey! Heeey!! Come here!" I ignored him and walked on, my swag evaporating with fear. He sprang to his feet and soon caught up with me, dragging me to the corner where his accomplices sat. "Kneel down! Why are you late to school?" Kneel down before a junior student? I wrested my tiny wrist from his grasp and next, he sent a stool crashing on my head. Blood had no power to draw pity from a bully who's malice had grown too familiar with it. He punched me further in the head, as if intent on manual perforations. He was mad that, rather than receive his punches with obedient courage, I was warding them off and even threw a few retaliations.

Over a decade past and, one day, I was driving out of a new estate in Maitama, where I had gone to discuss business with the construction firm in charge. A group of labourers stood at the gate, pleading entrance, swatted off by baton-wielding guards. They flagged me down, the labour crowd: Two familiar faces, one of them, Ray! They wanted to know if I knew the site manager, so I could put in a word for their employment. They could lay paving stones, they said. Are you not...not...Ray? From...Awkunanaw Boys' Secondary...? Classmate to....? Recognition! Shock! I alighted and gave him a hug, struggling to make him feel comfortable, seeing as he looked withdrawn from old guilt. He looked spent, his past aura and might conquered by poverty. We exchanged numbers and for some time, I made efforts to see how he could be engaged in any construction opportunities, no matter how small. But then I remembered the crimes, the impunity by which a secondary school boy committed evil and got away. Had he been sufficiently transformed by experience? Should kindness be so irrational as to recommend present skill without concern for ugly past? Does such ethical discrimination not worsen things, by pushing a man who is ready to work back to the streets? I shut that door violently, for caution, not for revenge.

Later it struck me how most of those guys we feared back in the day are now suddenly empty. We look at them now and wonder how they rose to social power merely on the back of our own fear. I watched Ray leave the last time we saw at an eatery. Stripped of all artificial significance, he returned to his true, banal self, magnified in the past only by circumstance. Ray was, finally, a human being: mere meat with skeletal support on random locomotion. *It then dawned on me how, upon leaving any form of power and limelight, people are restored to common humanity.* All along they had been kept aloft by fellow humans who mistook power for substance. *Life.* ©Salem E