Page 46 of The Death of Vivek Oji

“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 shoutingHe’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 allowedJuju 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?”