The Death of Vivek Oji

by Akwaeke Emezi

  She sucked her teeth and Kavita’s tears stopped, mostly out of shock at Somto’s rudeness. Olunne pinched her sister’s arm to make her shut up.

  “Is it me you’re talking to?” Kavita said, incredulous.

  “We were just trying to protect him,” Elizabeth said. “We didn’t want anything to happen to him. We took care of him.”

  Kavita turned to her. “Is that so? Where were you on the day he died, then? Where were all of you? Can someone finally answer me that one?”

  A silence followed her words, heavy and thick. Then Juju spoke up reluctantly, her voice low. “He was at my house. He had started going out in dresses and I tried to stop him. I told him it wasn’t safe, but he said he was just going down the road, that it wouldn’t take long. Usually he’d come back quickly, but that day—” Here, Juju’s voice broke. “He didn’t come back at all. And there was the riot at the market—”

  “And it burned down,” Kavita completed, her voice flat. The akwete cloth over Vivek’s body had smelled of smoke.

  Juju nodded tearfully. “I think he walked too far and someone caught him,” she said.

  Kavita’s throat clenched. She imagined the scene: Vivek caught in a mob, someone staring too much before shouting He’s a man, bodies pressing around him, tightening like a noose, hands ripping off his clothes, someone throwing a stone that broke open the back of his head. Her boy crumpling to the ground. A sob tore through her and she folded in half to keep it in.

  “Aunty Kavita! Are you all right?” Juju reached out to touch her arm.

  Kavita dragged herself together, past the pain, and straightened up. “So you think that’s how he died?” She directed the question to all of them. “He went out like this”—she gestured to the photographs sprawled on the floor—“and the rioters caught him?”

  They all nodded. “It’s the most likely scenario,” Olunne said.

  “Then how did he get back here?” asked Kavita. “Who brought him back?”

  “Maybe it was just a Good Samaritan,” said Juju. “Someone could have recognized him, and if they were too afraid to stop the attack, the least they could do was bring him home.”

  Kavita covered her mouth with her hand. She wanted to at least hold herself together until the children were gone. “I see,” she managed to say. It wasn’t as if she’d thought his death would have been anything other than violent. There was too much that was suspicious about how she’d found him: the injury, his missing clothes. Yet hearing all this, and knowing how he had been dressed when he’d gone out, knowing that he might have been lynched—it sliced her up inside.

  “I should have cut his hair,” she said to herself, although she didn’t know what difference it would have made. Would he still have worn dresses? Eyeliner? Would life have been more dangerous if he didn’t have all that hair to convince people he was a woman? She pinched the bridge of her nose with her fingers and took a deep breath.

  “We’re sorry, Aunty Kavita,” Olunne said. “We just wanted you to know the truth.”

  The truth, Kavita thought. You’d think it would bring relief, after all the time she’d spent begging for answers, but instead she just felt an empty finality. It was over. Now she knew what had happened, now the mystery was solved, now they’d handed her this unknown version of her son to deal with, and it was too late to ask him any questions, to talk to him and find out what was going on, to learn about the person he’d been behind her back. It was over.

  As if she could read Kavita’s thoughts, Juju leaned forward. “If you have any questions about any of this, Aunty, you can always ask us. We won’t keep anything from you again, we promise.” She turned to glare at the others. “Right?”

  They nodded quickly, their heads bobbing.

  “We’re telling the truth,” said Elizabeth. Somto and Osita kept silent, even as they nodded their agreement. Somto was trying to stamp down her own anger; Osita was ashamed because the secret-keeping was heaviest with him. Kavita was his own aunt; if anyone should have told her, it was him. Instead he’d nailed his tongue to the bottom of his mouth and allowed Juju to handle this whole meeting. But his shame couldn’t overcome his fear; his secrets kept a padlock on his throat.

  “I think all of you should get out,” Kavita said, her voice tired. The children jumped to their feet, murmuring apologies. Olunne bent and picked up the photos, then put them on a side table without saying anything. She ran her fingers over them gently as she left. Kavita walked them to the door, but as she was closing it something occurred to her.

  “Juju,” she said. “What name was he going by? You said he sometimes wanted to be called something else.”

  Juju paused. “Nnemdi,” she said. “The other name was Nnemdi.”

  Kavita nodded and locked the door behind them, the name heavy in her head. Why did it sound so familiar? She latched on to it, worried it for days, until it replaced the image of a bloodied Vivek looping in her mind.

  When the name finally clicked, it startled her. She picked up the phone and dialed a number with shaking hands.

  “Hello?” said a man at the other end.

  “Ekene? It’s Kavita.”

  Her brother-in-law gasped. “Kavita! Oh my God! I am so happy that you called. How are you? How is Chika?”

  “Do you remember when Vivek was born?” she said, as if he hadn’t said anything.

  Ekene paused for a moment. “Yes, of course.”

  “And you said we should have given him an Igbo name, at least as a middle name?”

  “I remember. Kavita, what—”

  “What was that name you said we should give him?”

  “Why are you—”

  “Just tell me the name, Ekene. Please.”

  He sighed through the line. “Nnemdi. It’s not a common name, but it was for Mama. Because they had that same scar on their feet.” She could almost see him shrug. “If it was our father who’d had the scar, he would have been named Nnamdi, you know? But Chika didn’t agree. If Vivek had been a girl, maybe he would have agreed. I don’t know. He was very somehow about the whole thing, so I just left it alone. Why are you asking?”

  “Did you ever tell this to Vivek?”

  “No. I only talked about it once, with Chika, before the naming ceremony. That’s it. What’s going on, Kavita?”

  Kavita felt as if the breath had been snatched out of her lungs. “Thank you,” she said. “I’ll call you back later.” She dropped the phone on his protestations and crumpled to the floor. How had—? If he had been a girl . . . What did that mean now? And he had ended up a girl anyway, with the name they had denied him—ended up beaten to death and thrown in front of his own front door, and she, his own mother, had known nothing about it because he didn’t trust her. Kavita sat on the floor, falling in and out of crying spells, until Chika came home and found her.

  Kavita couldn’t even speak. She just pointed to the photos on the side table, and watched her husband walk over to it. His body was still lean after all these years, his arms swinging easily from his shoulders, the back of his neck like a smear of clay. She watched as he picked up the stack and flipped through it, watched his eyebrows contract into a storm and his mouth open as he shouted, until his anger shook the glass in the picture frames on the wall. Then she told him what Juju and the others had told her, told him that Osita had known, and Chika raged even more, hurling the pictures away from himself until Vivek fluttered all over the parlor, settling on the carpet and sofa and side tables, his face frozen.

  Kavita stared at her husband as if he was acting out her own confusion through the lines of his body. She told him their theory—that their son had died in the riot, had been beaten and stripped—and it was only then that the heat finally drained from Chika’s body and he collapsed next to his wife, his face like ash. Kavita knew the images that were playing in his head, knew that his anger at Vivek’s secret was w
ashed away by the realization that someone else had killed him for it. At last, Chika dropped his head on Kavita’s shoulder and wept. She put her hand to his cheek, to feel the wetness there, and murmured words she couldn’t remember later.

  * * *

  —

  That night, in bed, Kavita looked up at Chika from where her head was resting on his chest. “He was calling himself Nnemdi,” she said.

  Her husband’s body stiffened.

  “How did he know?” Kavita asked.

  “How did he know what?” said Chika.

  “That that was almost his name. Ekene said he never told him.”

  “When did you talk to Ekene about this?”

  “Before you came home. I called him. I wanted to know how Vivek knew that name.”

  “You told Ekene?” Chika started to sit up, anger stirring again in him, but Kavita pushed him down.

  “Don’t be silly,” she said. “I didn’t say anything. I just asked him if he’d ever told Vivek the name and he said no. He said the name was for Mama, because of Vivek’s scar. I always wondered about that.”

  “Ekene was being superstitious. He should know better than to repeat such nonsense to you. Forget the whole thing.”

  “But how did Vivek know?”

  “I said forget it, Kavita!” Chika pushed her off his chest and turned over on his side, away from her.

  She waited a little bit, then slipped an arm around him. “I want to visit his grave tomorrow.” She felt his muscles loosen and he gave her a brief nod.

  “Go to sleep, nwunye m,” he said. “Enough of this name business.”

  * * *

  —

  The next day, they went to the village house and stood at the foot of Vivek’s grave, with its large rectangular gravestone. Kavita couldn’t help but imagine, for a second, Vivek’s grandmother reaching out from her grave next to his, through her casket, through the soil, splintering the wood of his to take his hand. At least he was not alone. They were together, the generations before and after, gone from the here and now, leaving the rest of the family floating in life.

  Kavita knelt down and ran her hand over the inscription. Something felt off, wrong. “It’s our fault,” she found herself saying.

  Chika looked down at her. “What’s our fault?”

  “That he died like that, like an animal.”

  Her husband crouched down next to her. “Mba, it’s the fault of those hooligans who did it.”

  “He couldn’t trust us,” she continued, ignoring him. “He was hiding in everyone else’s house as if he didn’t have a home. We didn’t know anything about our own child’s life.”

  “That wasn’t Vivek. He was sick, Kavita. He was mentally unwell. That’s why he was dressing like that.” Chika put a hand on her shoulder but she shook it off.

  “Stop saying that!”

  “He was sick. He just needed more help. We should have seen it.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.” Kavita stood and rounded on her husband. “We don’t know anything about him. You just had this your idea of who your son was supposed to be, and you were so busy having your affair that you missed out on his last months on earth. We can’t keep insisting he was who we thought he was, when he wanted to be someone else and he died being that person, Chika. We failed, don’t you see? We didn’t see him and we failed.”

  Chika’s face blanched as soon as she mentioned the affair. His first instinct was to deny it, but there was no redirecting her away from the truth. He could only watch as she got to her feet, rage darkening her face, and stormed to the back door. There was a garden hoe lying there, and in a flash she grabbed it and marched back to the headstone.

  “What are you doing?” he said, trying to step in front of her. But Kavita drove right past him, and then she was raising the hoe, slamming it into the headstone, the flat metal sparking against the stone.

  “Kavita, stop it!”

  She swung again and again, ignoring him, and Chika just stared, too shocked to try and restrain her. Kavita was grunting and crying—more in anger than grief, it felt like—and the gravestone chipped under her onslaught. She was aiming at the inscription now, and he cringed as he realized it.

  “We—can—at—least—get—one—thing—correct!” she snarled between swings. Tiny cracks blossomed across the surface of the gravestone; chips littered the grass. Chika took a step back to avoid one flying into in his eye. He folded his arms and decided to let her get it out of her system. She swung until her arms were tired, then stopped, panting; the long handle of the hoe hung from her hands, banging gently against her knees. Her face was covered in sweat and her hair stuck wetly to her cheek.

  “Are you finished?” he said. There was a small wound in the gravestone now, open and fragmented around the edges. Kavita whispered something and Chika took a step closer. “What is it?” She looked up at him and he wrapped his arms around her, the pain in her eyes wild and pounding. He was surprised when she didn’t pull away.

  “You have to fix it,” she whispered, her voice thick and clotted. “You have to fix it.”

  Chika held her tightly. “Of course,” he said, though he was confused by what exactly she meant. “I’ll fix it. Of course I’ll fix it.”

  It was only when they got home, and he made her some tea and sat with her on the veranda listening to the birds from the plumeria tree, that she finally explained what she wanted: their last gesture for their dead child, their belated apology. “He might still be alive,” Kavita said, “if he’d felt safe enough to be himself in our house, instead of walking around like that. How could we protect him if we didn’t know? And he told them not to tell us because he couldn’t trust us, and he was right not to. Can you imagine what we would have done?”

  Chika’s jaw clenched, but he knew she was right. If Vivek had been alive, he would never have conceded her point, but when you’ve stood on ground and known your child’s bones are rotting beneath you, rage and ego fade like dust in a strong wind.

  “Besides,” Kavita added, too calmly, “you owe me.”

  Eloise hung between them and Chika bowed his head, knowing he had lost. Kavita had stated her price, and his choice was clear: pay it or lose her.

  He called the contractor and ordered a replacement headstone with a new inscription. He didn’t tell anyone in the family about it, but he knew they visited the grave, so when Ekene called him and said, “Better late than never,” Chika accepted it. He said nothing more to Kavita about his shame, or the new headstone, or the photographs. Kavita said nothing to him when she took them out of the drawer and arranged them in an album, which she hid under her side of the mattress. She pored over it for hours when Chika was out of the house, trying to find the child she’d lost, trying to commit to memory the child she’d found.

  Twenty-three

  Osita

  I went to Vivek’s grave on his birthday, very early in the morning.

  I knew Uncle Chika and Aunty Kavita were going to arrive later that day and spend the night, so I came the day before and slept in my grandmother’s room. When it was dawn, just the earliest part of it, the cracks in an eggshell before it splinters open, I went out into the compound and stood in front of his grave, with the new marker Aunty Kavita had forced Uncle Chika to put in. He hadn’t had much of a choice after she tried to destroy the old one.

  The air around me was damp, dew clinging to the grass and the leaves, and at the head of the grave the small star fruit tree, struggling out of being a seedling. I wasn’t sure why Aunty Kavita had picked a fruit tree that would feed on Vivek’s body. Uncle Chika probably would have selected something else, like a palm tree. Did she look forward to the day when it would actually have star fruits hanging from its branches? Would she pick them and eat them as if she was absorbing him, bringing him back inside where he’d come from? It would be something like Ho
ly Communion, I imagined, body and blood turned into yellow flesh and pale green skin, bursting with juice. Or maybe she would never touch the fruit—maybe no one would—and they would fall back to the ground to rot, to sink back into the soil, until the roots of the tree took them back and it would just continue like that, around and around. Or birds would show up and eat the fruit, then carry Vivek around, giving life to things even after he’d run out of it himself.

  I squatted next to the grave, my legs still tired from sleep, then gave up and sat down on the marker after looking around to make sure no one was there. I had brought a black-and-yellow polythene bag with me, knotted firmly. Sitting on my cousin’s grave, I started to work the knot loose. It was tight; I had wrenched it closed with shaking hands, planning to burn it, certainly never to open it again. Then it had stayed under my bed in my room for months. Sometimes I would bring it out and hold it to my chest, fighting the urge to rip it open. I always put it back. But today; today’s own was different.

  It took me a few minutes and the application of my teeth for me to get it open, and then I parted the plastic mouth and folded the bag back. Lying inside was a dress, made of soft cotton, except for the parts that had stiffened with old blood. I had folded it carefully when I put it into the bag, and now I smoothed the square it made in my lap. It was a deep blue, like what I imagined falling into the sea would look like if you kept trying to find the bottom. There were red hibiscus flowers splashed all over it, yellow dots quivering at the stamens. They hadn’t been printed to scale; these hibiscus were smaller than real ones would be, so that more of them could fit into the blue. It had been Vivek’s favorite dress.

  He was wearing it in one of the pictures Juju was going to show Aunty Kavita, but I had taken it from her room the morning after we all met at the sports club, so that one never made it to Aunty Kavita. Juju was still asleep when I left and I didn’t wake her up. Saying good-bye would have been too much, too somehow, given what had happened that night. So I had walked quietly across the bedroom floor to pick up my boxers and trousers, balancing carefully as I put them on, then wearing my crumpled shirt and singlet. Juju’s bag was lying on her dressing table and I reached inside it with a delicate hand, fishing out the photo envelope. I flicked through the pictures quickly, looking for the one I’d seen at the sports club. The girls had seen that particular picture, too, but they knew Vivek and they would have thought he was just playing around, as he often did with us. Maybe it was my guilt making me paranoid, but that photograph felt like exposure, and I couldn’t let my aunt see it. God forbid. If she told my parents about it, I couldn’t begin to imagine the consequences.