Once in a blue moon, I think about Pillar. Pillar, the petty thief, that is, not the structure. It was in my final year of high school, in the boys’ dorm. I woke up to a ruckus in the middle of the night. It must have been 3 AM.
The boys were gathered in front of the three-storey dorm building. Someone had broken into the rooms starting from the ground floor and worked his way up, stopped by each room, going bunk by bunk, waking the boys up one by one, and threatening them into submitting their valuables – mostly phones.
He was alone and worked his way up; no one dared to fight back, one man against many boys. The oldest of us was not more than 18. My room was on the middle floor, Liberty House. Our rooms were divided by houses. Independence House occupied the ground floor. Liberty and National, the middle, and Peace and Unity, the top floor. There was one more house besides Independence, but I don’t remember its name.
Pillar, the petty thief, had made his way to National after a successful operation on the ground floor. And then, someone in the National House dared to fight him back. The gist was that the boys thought he had a gun, he threatened to shoot if anyone came after him, and with that, he bought the forced cooperation of his victims.
When he got to National House, there was this very menacing boy. He wasn’t put off by Pillar, or maybe he loved his phone more than his life, or perhaps, he was just fearless. He fought back, and then, emboldened by his actions, the other boys joined in fighting Pillar. Scared, Pillar jumped down one floor and made a beeline for the fence. I still wonder how he was able to escape if all the boys descended on him in that room. Maybe they thought he had a gun for real, maybe they only intended to deter him, not hold him hostage. A lot of maybes.
I wish I remembered the fearless boy’s name; he’s a hero who deserves to be named. Nonetheless, because he saved me from the ordeal of meeting Pillar, I never faced him. The Liberty House room, my room, was next to National’s. Pillar was coming right to my room after National. The thought of having Pillar wake me up rudely from sleep is not one I savor. I would have been so scared. I remember how thankful I was that he didn’t get to my room. I was not scared of losing any valuables. My phone, a small Nokia torch, was either safely hidden inside one of my school sandals or in my Guardian’s house; my more valuable phone, a Nokia Xpress Music, barely slept in the hostel. I was scared of the other boys stealing it from me more than I was Pillar. They’d stolen quite a few things from me to teach me a tough lesson to never keep valuables. But the other boys did not seem worried about the prospect of theft; they displayed their valuables and kept them in the hostel. I guess they must have learnt how to safeguard their valuables from spending time in the dormitory – I only joined in my final year of High School. Good for them, not for me.
If I didn’t have any valuables that Pillar could steal, why was I so scared at the prospect of him coming into our room? Maybe it was the fact that I feared he’d have smacked me so hard when he found out I didn’t have any valuables for him to steal – a waste of his time. Or maybe because I was scared that he’d smack me so hard that I’d easily give up the location of my Nokia Torch. But I’m also sure that he didn’t take that risk for a mere Nokia Torch; some of the boys had more valuable Symbian-powered phones.
Another regret is that I slept through all of this ordeal. When Pillar started his operation, when the boys in the room next door fought back, it had awoken the whole hotel, and some people caught a glimpse of him running away. Not me, I was deep in sleep, oblivious of what was happening around me. As a boy, I was wound to sleep deeply and not wake up intrinsically. Most mornings, Sigmund helped wake me up. He was my bunkmate. Eventually, he woke me up, and everyone dashed outside. His words must have been, “won’t you wake up, there’s a robbery going on, and you’re sleeping”. Discombobulated, I followed everyone outside. And from outside, the boys made a protest march to the Principal’s home. I guess the rationale was that if he, the Principal, couldn’t provide safe security for us, he had no business sleeping peacefully. Eventually, we marched back to our hostel, and we heard the news that Pillar had been caught by the Police on the street. They caught him with so many phones and knew he must have been a thief. Or maybe, Pillar looked like a thief. I never met him, don’t know what he looked like, but some of the boys met him. He was a senior when they were in junior class. He was one of us, an ex-student who knew the ins and outs of the dorm. Apparently, it was not his first time; he’d robbed the dorm before and also robbed the girls’ hostel too.
A career petty thief, he must have been. I wonder what became of him. Of Pillar, the petty thief with an incongruous nickname.
Miracle.