“I wonder what caused it,” she said.
“Maybe the Muslim thing again,” he suggested. “You know how people can get about the Northerners.”
Mama Ben shook her head. “I don’t know why. They’re just people who came here to work, make small money for their families. Why must they always go and disturb them?”
Ebenezer shot her a look. “Because of what’s been happening in the North. Are we supposed to just fold our hands and watch how they’re treating our brothers and sisters?”
“But it’s not the ones here that are doing it. So why disturb them? If you want to disturb anyone, eh hehn—go to the North and look for their trouble there!”
Ebenezer shook his head. He didn’t feel like arguing with a woman over this matter.
“Besides,” she continued, “it was probably just a thief.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Is it not coming from the direction of the market? He probably stole something, and one of the traders shouted, and you know how it goes from there. Tire. Fuel.”
Ebenezer sat upright. The market, he thought. The noise was coming from the market. Chisom was still at the market.
“Chineke m ee,” he said, inhaling air in a short, shocked burst. “My wife is there.” He jumped up and started unlocking the door. Mama Ben grabbed his arm.
“They’re getting near!” she said. “Don’t open the door, abeg.”
“And what?” he snapped. “I should leave my wife in the middle of it and hide here with you like a woman?”
“You want to go into the riot? Are you mad? They will just finish you one time.”
“Hapu m aka!” He shook off her hand and lifted the protector, ignoring the screeching it made.
Behind him, Mama Ben cursed. “Don’t go oo! It’s better you stay here,” she warned. “I’m sure your wife is fine. Is it now that she will need you?”
Ebenezer stopped, then turned around and stared at Mama Ben. “What did you say?” She folded her arms stubbornly. He slammed the steel gate down behind him, staring at her in shock through the bars. “You are a wicked woman,” he said before he turned away.
“Ebenezer!” she shouted. “Ebenezer!”
He ignored her and stayed on the inside of the crude gutter at the edge of the road as he walked toward the market. In just the few minutes since the first shouts, he could see even from a distance, the scene had deteriorated into chaos. The road was full of cars and okadas with frantic passengers. One man wiped at his head with a handkerchief, stared down at the mess of blood in his hand, then locked eyes with Ebenezer for a moment as the motorcycle whizzed by. Ebenezer swallowed hard and started to jog. He was filled with guilt and shame for having been safely tucked away in Mama Ben’s stand without first thinking of his wife, out there at her stall in the market, with no metal protector to hide behind. He wondered if she had run when the chaos started, if she had hopped on an okada, whether he would see her from the side of the road. But he knew Chisom was stubborn, that she wouldn’t abandon her merchandise in the market, riot or not. It would be like throwing away money—it would make no sense to her. She probably would have delayed while trying to pack it up, and who knows what could have happened to her in that time? A stray bullet from one of the touts, or the police if they showed up. Jesus Christ, he thought, what if someone got hold of her in the middle of all this madness? What if she were raped? His mind jumped from that and landed on, What if someone raped her and she got pregnant? Nausea swirled through him and he started running. As he got closer to the market, he could see thin dark streams of smoke waving up into the sky. “Chineke, the market is on fire,” he whispered to himself, shocked into a halt. Now he was imagining Chisom burned to death, or just burned enough to survive, horribly disfigured, her face peeling off like those women up North who’d been attacked with acid. Ebenezer started running again. He had to save his wife. He couldn’t imagine losing her because he’d been with that woman, who had clearly wished evil on Chisom from the beginning. Who knew what she had put in his food? After all, he would normally never behave like that, going to another woman’s house. She must have done jazz on him. It had to be. But now he felt as if he’d broken her spell; now it would be okay. As long as he found Chisom.
As he was running, he passed a couple arguing on the side of the road. It was the tall girl with long hair. The man with her was holding her arm, shaking her till her hair fell in her eyes.
“We have to go now!” he was shouting. “Do you know what they’ll do to you?”
She pulled away from him so hard that she stumbled backward. Ebenezer saw her skirt flutter in the air, covered in small red flowers, but then he was past them and they were behind him and he couldn’t hear anything over the noise in his head and the air.
When he got closer to the mob, he slowed to a quick walk, trying to keep to the side. People bumped his shoulders and he was pushed a few times, but no one really disturbed him. They were focused on wherever they were going. Later he learned that most of them were heading to the area near the mosque, in the main market on Chief Michael Road, where a group of Hausa people plied their trade as shoemakers in a little market. An altercation there between a Hausa trader and an Igbo customer, a prominent shop owner, had escalated until the Hausa trader slapped the shop owner. In moments a crowd had gathered, coiled and furious, ready to make every other Northerner pay for that one man and his impertinence. This was not their town—they couldn’t talk anyhow here and expect to get away with it.
Ebenezer waded through whole sections of the market, now in ruins, the air full of smoke from the parts that were still burning. The muddy alleys were strewn with bolts of colorful fabric trampled by many feet; vendors scrambled about, trying to salvage them from the muck, crying and swearing and afraid. The smoke was worse by the time he got to Chisom’s shop, where she sold buttons and needles and sewing machine parts and thread. This area was already deserted. Some of the stores had been locked in haste, as if that could protect them from fire. Others had goods tossed about in front of them, discarded by traders who had tried to carry their merchandise away but found their arms overfull. He reached the wooden door to Chisom’s shop, with its flaking light blue paint, and coughed as he called her name. Particles of soot had settled on the white fabric draped for sale in the doorway.
“Chisom!” he shouted.
“Ebenezer?” She emerged from the back, her face marked with dried tears, but calm. “You came!”
He rushed forward and embraced his wife, who stood numb and shocked in the circle of his arms. “You came all this way,” she said, disbelieving.
“Are you all right?” he asked, patting her face.
Chisom nodded. “I was packing up the things as fast as I could.”
“Forget the things, jo! Can’t you smell the smoke? You want to stay here and wait for the fire to reach you?”
“I’ve almost finished. I just didn’t know how to carry them out. We can’t afford to lose the merchandise.”
Ebenezer looked at his wife and the determination hammered into her face. Her tenacity, he realized, was something he could learn from. How to stand in the face of actual fire and not run, how to do what it took for them to survive because she’d decided to. She could have been hurt, could have been killed, but she had done it anyway. Ebenezer felt ashamed at how hard he’d been fighting her about seeing a doctor. She had packed up the things, not knowing how she could carry all of it, simply because she was ready to handle that part when the time came. Now the time had come and he was there, as he should have been, as he always should have been. Why should she be carrying anything by herself when he was her husband?
“I’m here now,” Ebenezer said. Chisom gave him a small, unsure smile and he embraced her one more time. “Let’s go,” he said. He carried most of the Ghana-must-go bags she’d packed and they made their way out of the market, stumbling s
lightly but together. They flagged down an okada who recognized Ebenezer, and together they climbed aboard, balancing the bags awkwardly as they left the market behind.
Most of the market burned to the ground that day. It was years before the government got around to rebuilding it.
Seventeen
Vivek
Here is one of my favorite memories with Osita. We are in my bedroom. My parents are out and we are alone. I am lying with my head on his bare stomach and he’s playing with my hair, pulling on the curls and watching them spring back. Sometimes he rubs my scalp and I turn my head to kiss his ribs.
“I had a dream,” I tell him.
He looks down from the pillows surrounding him. “Tell me,” he says, in that way where I know he’s genuinely interested, he wants to hear my dreams, my stories.
“I dreamt that I was our grandmother,” I tell him. “I looked in a mirror and she was there, just like the pictures, and she spoke to me in Igbo.”
“What did she say?”
“Hold my life for me.” I wait for his laugh, but it never comes. “Do you believe in reincarnation?” I ask him.
“I’m not sure my belief matters,” he says. “If it is, it is, whether I believe it or not.”
“You know what I’m asking.”
My cousin gives me a small smile and twists some of my hair in his fingers. “They talk about you and her in the village, did you know?”
I have never heard this before. I sit halfway up, leaning against his body.
“They talk about how she died the same day you were born,” he continues, “how my father got into an argument with your dad about your name. But you weren’t a girl, so . . .” Osita shrugs, lets the story die off.
“What do you think?” I ask him.
My cousin looks at me with a gentleness he shows to no one else. “Who are we to define what is impossible or not?”
“You’re just saying that,” I tell him.
He shakes his head. “I mean it. You know what’s been happening in your head. You’re the only person who knows. So ask yourself if it feels right, and somewhere, deep inside of you, there’s a compass that will tell you whether you’re right or wrong.”
I smile at him. “Is this how you make decisions?” I tease.
His eyes sweep over both of us, naked on the bed, and he doesn’t smile back. I feel a thrill as his gaze touches me; I know it is a precursor to his hands, his mouth, the marvelous rest of him.
“Only the important ones,” he replies, and then he reaches for me.
Eighteen
Three months after Vivek died, Chika tried to force Kavita to stop asking people about him. She didn’t listen to him, of course. She thought it was a ridiculous thing to ask—as if she could stop, as if there was any reason on this earth why she should stop. Her son was dead and buried in the village, in Ahunna’s compound, next to her grave. Chika had put a concrete slab over the ground where Vivek’s body was; Kavita tried not to imagine it crushing him. She would have spent all her time beside it, but the answers weren’t there. They had carved an inscription into the concrete. VIVEK OJI, it said. BELOVED SON.
Chika had wanted to add more, but he didn’t know what else to say and Kavita had other things on her mind, like finding out what had happened to him, so the two of them left it like that. Besides, it said everything—he was beloved, by his parents and his friends—and that, Kavita supposed, was why none of those friends were talking to her, even though all she wanted to know was what had happened to her son.
Just that morning, Vivek had had breakfast with them. He had stayed at home the night before, instead of running off to Maja’s or Rhatha’s or Ruby’s house. Kavita was delighted. In the morning, Vivek had tied his hair in a bun on top of his head, twisting it up tightly, then taken a bath and brushed his teeth. Kavita had watched him spoon heaps of powdered milk over a bowl of cornflakes, then tilt a thermos of hot water over the bowl and stir it around, and she had smiled. This had been his favorite breakfast since he was small. Of course he picked out his three cubes of sugar, let them dissolve into the milk; of course he ate the cornflakes quickly—he’d never liked them soggy—then tipped the bowl to his mouth and drank the sweetened milk. Kavita remembered every second of it as if she was back at the table with him: the last time she would ever watch her child feed himself. That act of putting nourishment into his body—it was such an alive thing to do.
In that same day, only hours away from the breakfast table, Vivek would be lying on the veranda, his body cooling in her arms. How can? It wasn’t possible.
He’d told her that morning that he was going to see the girls. She didn’t know which house he meant; by then, the girls had blended into an amorphous group, Juju and Elizabeth or Somto and Olunne or any other combination. Their houses were the only places he visited. Even before the burial, Kavita had asked them all if they’d seen him, if they knew anything about what happened.
“He came to our house first,” Somto told her. The girls lived with their parents in a white duplex in a residential area near the glass factory. “We were making pancakes for breakfast.”
“But he’d already had breakfast,” Kavita said, her eyes swollen from weeping. She was twisting one of Chika’s handkerchiefs in her fingers, the damp cotton taut against her skin. Somto smiled a little. She’d been crying, too. “It was pancake day, Aunty Kavita. He always comes for pancake day.”
Kavita frowned. “I didn’t know that. Since when?”
The girl shrugged. She had braided cornrows that crawled into two large plaits dropping down her back. “Since he came back from uni. We invited him that day when we came to your house for the first time. His favorite part was flipping the pancakes. When we first tried to teach him how to do it, everything just splattered on the floor. It was such a mess!” She gave a small laugh that quickly trailed away. “But then he got really good at it. I can’t . . . I can’t believe he’s gone.”
The girl broke into tears and all Kavita could feel was drained. It was interesting, she thought, how people mourned Vivek. Somehow she felt like they didn’t have the right to cry in front of her. After all, was it their son who had died? Was it them that had held that baby on the day he was born? No, it was just the two of them together in the hospital as Ahunna died, just Kavita and her child in that bed, all mixed up in love and uncertainty, Chika beside them like an afterthought. She regretted what had happened next—the depression that followed, when she pulled away from her child in grief. She should have held him tighter, as the world was whirling around them. It had always been her and her baby.
The loss of him felt cumulative, as if he’d been slipping away so slowly that she’d missed the rift as it formed in his childhood. It was only once he’d become a man that she realized she couldn’t reach him anymore, that he was gone, so gone that breath had left his body. No one else could feel that lifetime of loss. No one else had lost him more than she had, yet they cried in front of her as if it meant something. They’re still children, Kavita tried to tell herself, not mature enough to do her the courtesy of keeping their tears in their bedrooms, among their own complete families. But still she thought of them as selfish brats without home training or compassion or empathy, and this in turn made her angry at these girls she knew she still loved, somewhere under the rage and pain and the grief that she felt belonged to her and only her.
She even had trouble sharing it with her husband, but it was easier with him because he’d fallen into that same darkness that had taken him when his mother died. Chika’s grief dragged down every centimeter of his skin, pulling muscles and bones along with it, making it hard for him to stand up. He took time off work, lying in bed in a singlet that grew dirtier every day. Once in a while, when she issued a tired command, he’d drag himself out of bed, wash himself with blank eyes, and climb into bed again. Kavita didn’t feel inclined to try any harder to get him out of it. She k
new about him and Eloise—he wasn’t intelligent enough to hide it from her, and he’d been faithful up till then. It was so obvious when he stopped; all the little changes were stark and loud. She didn’t mind what his grief was turning him into. Part of her felt like he deserved to go mad: while she had been pouring herself into their child, he had been pouring himself into her friend.
She hoped he never found his way out of that bed. She hoped he would rot inside it.
Eloise even had the nerve to be calling and checking on them. Kavita started hanging up the phone whenever she heard her voice. Let the woman figure out what she knew. She wouldn’t have picked up the phone at all, except for the chance that it could be one of the girls calling with information about Vivek, something they hadn’t confessed to her yet. She also hung up when Mary or Ekene called. To Kavita, they were now the same person, and she would never forgive them for what had happened at their church. Chika had insisted on inviting them to the burial, but once that was over, as far as Kavita was concerned, so were they.
While Chika lay in their bed, Kavita stayed in Vivek’s room. She ran her hands over the walls, over the posters he’d ripped out of pop magazines Eloise had brought back from the UK. The woman’s interest in her child seemed false and ugly now; perhaps it had all been a way to get close to Chika. Kavita reminded herself that it didn’t matter. Eloise could have Chika if she wanted. Nothing mattered. Her eyes ran over the pictures without really registering them: Missy Elliott. Puff Daddy. En Vogue. Backstreet Boys. He had put them all up before he went off to uni. Kavita wondered why he hadn’t taken them down afterward, once he’d changed. Or maybe he hadn’t changed as much as it seemed. At night, now, she slept in his bed and cried. Sometimes she thought she could hear Chika crying, too, through the wall, but she never went to him.
Sitting across from Somto in Rhatha’s sitting room, Kavita watched the girl cry and thought how ridiculous it was that she could still look so pretty even while sobbing. There were no inelegant strings of mucus swinging from her nose, no shiny saliva pooling in her mouth when she opened it to wail. Somto wept mostly with tears, gleaming against her skin as they fell. She dabbed at them with the hem of her dress, the skirt full and wide, leaving enough material to cover her thighs even as she bent to reach her face.
The Death of Vivek Oji Page 13