Page 33 of The Death of Vivek Oji

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. VIVEKOJI, it said. BELOVEDSON.

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, eventhough 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.”