THE DECORATED CELL

The queue

Mukuba Mall. Kitwe. A Friday afternoon in 2019.

I was in a queue at Atlas Mara Bank, waiting to withdraw petty cash for the office. The kind of errand that lives in the margins of a working day. Unremarkable. Quickly forgotten. I had done it dozens of times.

My phone buzzed.

I looked down. An email notification. The sender’s name registered before the subject line did.

Chevening Scholarship Committee.

My hands moved to open it before the rest of me caught up.

I had not made it to the next round.

Around me the queue continued its slow shuffle toward the tellers. A security guard crossed the banking floor without looking at me. Someone behind me cleared their throat. The ordinary machinery of a Friday afternoon kept running, indifferent to what had just come apart.

I composed myself. Reached the front of the queue. Withdrew the petty cash. Signed the slip. Walked out.

Got to my car. Sat down. Did not start the engine.

For the first time in longer than I could clearly remember, I was completely still.

---

The life behind the application

What had collapsed was not just an application.

I had spent months constructing my case for Chevening. Identified the right UK universities, been accepted to a number of them. Paid for IELTS tests. Tracked down a recommendation letter from my supervisor at UNZA, a man I had not spoken to in years. Requested another from my managing director at work, which had taken its own particular kind of courage to ask for. I paid someone online to professionally upgrade my CV. Updated my LinkedIn profile, polished every section, made sure the version of myself visible to the world matched the version I was presenting to the committee. I watched YouTube videos on how to interview well. Read the profiles of previous scholars. Worked carefully on becoming the version of myself the selectors were looking for.

That last part is worth sitting with. Not becoming better. Becoming the version of myself the selectors were looking for. There is a difference, and I did not notice it at the time.

Behind all of that was a life I had already scripted.

The UK first. A year of study. Come back with a Masters in Engineering, the specialisation that would open the right doors. Then the PhD as the final piece, the qualification that would make the whole sequence coherent and complete. Land the job at the UN, the IMF, the World Bank. Dollar salary.

It was not a vague dream. It was a sequence. Each step unlocking the next. I had built the whole staircase in my head before I had climbed the first step of it.

Sitting in that car park in Kitwe, engine off, petty cash receipt still in my hand, the question arrived for the first time.

Do I actually want this?

Do I actually want the life on the other side of it. The years it will consume, the trade-offs it will make for me before I make them myself, the Sunday evenings dreading Monday, the work that does not give back what it takes, the person it is building me into without ever asking if that is who I want to become?

The thing itself. The actual life on the other side of the credential.

I did not have a ready answer.

That was the first honest moment.

---

The next logical step

The path does not get built in one dramatic choice. It gets built in a thousand small ones, each reasonable, each rewarded, none of them ever interrogated too closely because the direction feels obvious and the momentum feels like progress.

There was an engineer in my neighbourhood when I was growing up. He appeared to be doing well. The kind of man a young boy notices and files away without knowing he is filing anything. I decided, somewhere in primary school, that I wanted to be like him. No one suggested it. I simply watched and absorbed and concluded. A direction chosen before I had the language to examine the choosing.

Work hard at school. Get the grades. Make it to university. Become an engineer.

I committed to it completely. Broke the night at Kabulonga Boys with double trousers against the cold. Studied until 5am. Targeted David Kaunda National Technical School because it was the only destination worth naming.

I got DK. It was extraordinary. It was also, within weeks, simply life. Same daily rhythm. Different building.

I got UNZA. Graduated in September 2012. Family dancing the night before. My mother there. People genuinely proud. On the inside, something quieter. An arrival that did not feel the way arriving was supposed to feel.

So I enrolled for CIMA accountancy. Night classes at ZABTUC on Chachacha Road. Another piece of furniture for the room. Nobody says it directly. But the signals are everywhere. Because in a field full of graduates, standing still feels like falling behind. You keep moving. The goalpost keeps moving with you. Nobody questions the direction because the direction feels like progress. Then a Project Management qualification through a UK institution.

Then the MBA at Copperbelt University, years of evenings and weekends, the hardcover degree arriving with my name printed on the cover. Family proud. Another crowning moment. Another morning that arrived like any other.

And then, examining the CVs of people at international organisations, I decided I needed one more thing. The Chevening. A year in the UK. The launch pad for the MSc, the PhD, the staircase I had already built in my head.

That is how the application began. Not as a considered answer to what I was actually building toward. As the next logical step in a sequence of next logical steps that stretched back twenty years to a boy watching a man in his neighbourhood and deciding, wordlessly, that this was the life.

Here is what is easy to miss in a life like this.

Every step was real. The discipline was genuine. The effort was enormous. The credentials opened actual doors. But there is a difference between choosing a path and following one. They can look identical from the outside. The difference is interior, and it matters enormously in the long run.

A path you chose can be re-examined. Recommitted to. A path you simply followed has no foundation to return to when things grow hard or hollow. You cannot recommit to a decision you never made.

At no point in twenty years of next logical steps had anyone asked me the one question that might have changed the angle of everything.

Is this the life you are choosing, or is it the life that has been chosen for you?

---

The decorated cell

The cell in this story does not look like a prison cell. It looks like a career.

The UNZA degree on the wall. The CIMA certificate beside it. The MBA slightly larger, hung with care. The LinkedIn headline updated each time a new qualification landed, another line added, the profile growing longer and more complete with each passing year. The CV carried like a board of medals, each qualification another ribbon to pin on. The longer the list, the more it felt like proof of something.

Each addition makes the room feel more like yours.

Each addition makes it harder to see the walls.

The longer you furnish it, the less the walls look like walls.

I had written in my private journal that I wanted to be the biggest CEO Zambia had ever seen. I meant it. The ambition was real. But ambition and direction are not the same thing. I knew what I wanted to become. I had never asked why, or whether the version of arrival I was building toward was actually mine.

The sunk cost makes the question harder the longer you wait. Every year invested in a direction makes stopping to look up feel more dangerous. The identity built around the credentials is real. To examine it honestly risks discovering that the room you have spent years furnishing is not the room you would have chosen.

But there is something worse than that discovery.

Not making it. Reaching the end of a working life having built excellently toward a version of success you never actually chose.

---

The seeing

I drove back to the office. Filed the petty cash. Sat through the rest of the afternoon.

But the question did not leave with the day.

In the weeks that followed I began, for the first time in a long time, to examine my life rather than simply build it. Not dramatically. I did not resign or relocate or announce anything. I simply began paying a different kind of attention.

I sat with my journal and wrote out what I wanted. Not what I wanted to achieve. Not what I was trying to accomplish. What I was actually choosing to build, and whether that and the credential chain were pointing at the same thing. The act of writing it down, which I had been doing in Anupam notebooks since 2010, had always had this particular power: it gave me enough distance from my own life to see it clearly. What came back on those pages was not what the qualification chain had been pointing toward.

The Chevening rejection had removed an excuse. While I had been waiting to be selected and validated and sent abroad to become the person who could then start building, the actual life had been available. Not as a consolation. As the thing itself.

A few months after that Friday in the car park, I stopped keeping my options open and chose. Not when everything was figured out. Not when every milestone had been reached. Before all of that. On one knee on the shores of Lake Tanganyika, with a placard in the sand and a ring in my hands.

---

The cell was real.

The decoration was real.

And so, finally, was the seeing of it.

---

What are you decorating that you have never stopped to question?