Page 18 of The Death of Vivek Oji

Chika removed her hands, shaking his head. “I still have to talk to Ekene. Whatever happened between you women is between you, but my brother and I need to sort this out.” He walked out of the room. Kavita watched him leave, then listened to his raised voice a few minutes later as he and his brother broke things even further. It was how he always did nowadays, pushing her aside gently, not listening to her. Sometimes it felt like he had stopped listening to her years ago, and she just hadn’t noticed. Like they were living in two separate worlds that happened to be under the same roof, pressed against each other, but never spilling, never overlapping.

—

After Vivek died, their worlds drew even further apart. Chika didn’t want to ask any questions. Kavita, though, was made of nothing but questions, hungry questions bending her into a shape that was starving for answers. They quarreled now, every day, from morning to night.

“Will it bring him back?!” Chika finally screamed at her one night, after dinner, standing in the kitchen. “All these your questions, what will they do? My son is dead!”

“Our son!!” Kavita screamed back, throwing a plate at him. He ducked and it shattered against the wall. “Our son!Our son!”

He had stared at her, then walked out of the room, but Kavita didn’t care. She wasn’t like him. She wasn’t going to give up and sink into whatever trough of grief Chika wanted to fall apart and wallow in. Her questions were real. Who had returned Vivek’s body to their door? Who stripped off her child’s clothes, wrapped him in akwete, and delivered him like a parcel, like a gift, a bloody surprise? Who had broken his head?

It took the police several days to get around to making any kind of report. They blamed it on the riots that had happened the same day Vivek died, the market coughing black smoke over that side of town. “We had a lot of casualties there, Madam,” the officer had said. “This is what happens when touts take over a town.” He leaned back in his chair, his eyes bloodshot. “My condolences to you and your family. We will continue investigations.”

“They won’t continue anything,” Chika said dully, as he and Kavita left the station. “Vivek was probably robbed.”

“Then who brought his body home?” Kavita asked. “How did they know where we lived?”

Chika turned his flat eyes on her. “At least someone did. At least we have a body to bury.”

He said it as if that was enough. As far as Kavita was concerned, that made him a liar, just like everyone else. Just like the police officer who told her weeks later that there was nothing more they could do for her. Just like Vivek’s friends who kept telling her they didn’t know what happened. It didn’t make anysense. In those last few weeks of Vivek’s life, his friends had been with him almost every day. Someone had to know something. They were just refusing to tell her. Kavita was sure of it.

She didn’t care if all the Nigerwives thought she had gone crazy, because she wouldn’t just bury her son and shut up. If it had happened to them, they would be behaving exactly the same way. They had no idea what it was like to know in your marrow that someone had an answer to your questions, that someone around you was lying. They had no idea how every breath for her was hell. She was going to find the truth, even if she had to rip it out of his friends’ throats. Someone had to know what happened to Vivek.

Nine

Osita

Iknow what Aunty Kavita wants to know. I want to tell her that she is not prepared for the answer, the same way I was not prepared. That it will hit her like a lorry, spilling its load over her chest and crushing her. But I also know that I’m afraid of what she will find out, if someone will tell her what was happening, if Vivek told someone else what was happening.

If someone saw me that day.

Stop looking. I want to tell her to stop looking.

Ten

Vivek

Ifelt heavy my whole life.

I always thought that death would be the heaviest thing of all, but it wasn’t, it really wasn’t. Life was like being dragged through concrete in circles, wet and setting concrete that dried with each rotation of my unwilling body. As a child, I was light. It didn’t matter too much; I slid through it, and maybe it even felt like a game, like I was just playing in mud, like nothing about that slipperiness would ever change, not really. But then I got bigger and it started drying on me and eventually I turned into an uneven block, chipping and sparking on the hard ground, tearing off into painful chunks.

I wanted to stay empty, like the eagle in the proverb, left to perch, my bones filled with air pockets, but heaviness found me and I couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t shake it off; I couldn’t transform it, evaporate or melt it. It was distinct fromme, but it hooked itself into my body like a parasite. I couldn’t figure out if something was wrong with me or if this was just my life—if this was just how people felt, like concrete was dragging their flesh off their bones.

The fugues were short absences that I became grateful for, small mercies. Like finally getting to rest after having your eyelids forced open for days. I hid them from my parents and grew out my hair, thinking that the weight dropping from my head would lighten the one inside of me. It worked—not by making anything lighter, no, but by making me feel more balanced, like one weight was pulling the other and the strain on me had been lessened. Perhaps I had just become the fulcrum, the point on which everything hinged, the turning. I don’t know. I just know that I hurt a little less with each inch of hair I refused to cut.

Looking back, I really don’t know what I thought it was going to protect me from.

Eleven

Everyone knew that death entered with the upcoming elections. It was all anyone was talking about: if moving into civilian rule was a good idea, whether the military rulers could handle the country better. People argued in their homes and beer parlors; voices were raised, blows were thrown, and the violence sometimes escalated into bloody clashes on the roads. The day Chika brought Vivek home from university, they had run into traffic, cars crawling over potholes as people danced into the streets, whooping and singing.

Chika leaned out of his window, irritated. “What’s all this?” he shouted at a boy who was crossing in front of the car, waving palm fronds and holding a bottle of malt in his other hand, brown foam spilling over his knuckles.

The boy turned to him with a broad smile, his teeth catching sunlight.

“Abacha don die!” he shouted back. “Abacha don die!” Hedipped between two cars, narrowly missed being hit by an okada, and was lost in the growing press of people.

Chika pulled back into the car and a hesitant smile spread over his face.