By Bill Odunga

Outside every campus gate there is always that rustic tavern that plays old music. Male students pop in for nyama choma or to watch European soccer for many hours on end. How they sustain this on a 300ml bottle of soda beats me.

It is here they senselessly tease each other and trade insults as some even contemplate suicide over 22 men who do not even know that they exist.

Ladies, too, visit this shebeen. Not for the soccer or the unappetizing stake or the cold drink.

They have more prurient pursuits. The campus local is not famous for its hygiene.

They go there for other guilty pleasures; usually embodied in the size of vehicles parked outside ka-local and the drivers of such automobiles.

girth

Mostly, such drivers are old relics whose shirts cannot adequately contain their girth at the midsection.

Which is surprising, because these are the same girls who watch Mexican soaps and drool over models with chiselled bodies.

I have been around long enough to know when a campus girl is going out to meet these old pensioners.

You will always tell from the too much make up and how economical they are with their dressing.

They prefer high heels and ever so playfully in a way that their pastor or mother will not approve.

They sit on a stool, cross their legs, allow the hem of their skirts to ride up their thighs, and then wait to be admired.

As men in campus, we have learned the hard way that it is not us they hope to attract.

So we stick to our lanes as we lick the mouths of our soda bottles, cheering or jeering the matches.

It is a good thing to know your place in the life’s grand scheme of things, because when for as long as everyone stays on their lanes, there would be no traffic.

On a good day, the girl will order for a drink. Often, they go for a befitting drink, one that says she is shy.

One that portrays her as innocent. Of course, we know that she left her innocence at the campus hostels.

Similarly she also left the right dress for the pretentious demeanour she now wants to showcase.  Smirnoff Black Ice does the trick.

The script then goes something like this: a man will stagger her way and offer to pay for her drink.

She will accept, and they begin to flirt. Later, when the boys are not looking, she will accept his second offer to drive her back to school. Never mind its one block away.

She will accept this too, stealthily though, so that we do not see her leaving to spend the night with a guy old enough to be her father, or worse grandfather.