The Death of Vivek Oji(3)

Ahunna rolled her eyes and stepped in. “You men like shouting too much. Just let the dowries cancel each other, and no one pays anything.” Dr. Khatri drew in breath to protest, but she held up a hand. “You can keep Kavita’s dowry for her children. I don’t want to hear pim about this again.”

So that was that. Kavita’s dowry was a small collection of heavy gold jewelry that her mother had brought into her own marriage, passed down through the women before her.

Picture: Chika with Kavita in their bedroom, newlywed, the heavy necklaces and bangles pouring over his hands. “I don’t even know what to say. It’s like the treasure you read about in books.”

Kavita took them from him and returned them to their box. “For our children,” she reminded him, not knowing there would only be one. “Let’s just forget it’s even here.”

Most of the jewelry stayed in that box for the next two decades, nestled against the deep red velvet, gemstones and gold links gleaming in the dark. There were times when Chika and Kavita sold one small piece or another, when things were difficult, but they held on to most of it, planning to use it to send their son, Vivek, to America. But when the jewelry finally came out of the box, it was Vivek’s hands that lifted it.

Picture: the boy, shirtless, placing necklaces against his chest, draping them over his silver chain, clipping his ears with gold earrings, his hair tumbling over his shoulders. He looks like a bride, half naked, partially undressed.

There is another boy in this picture now. His name is Osita. He is as tall as Vivek, but broader at the shoulders, his skin like deep loam. He is Ekene’s son, born of Mary, and his eyes are narrow, his mouth full beyond belief. In this picture, Osita’s face is carved and dark with alarm. He stands with his arms folded, his jaw set against something he cannot predict.

Vivek smiles at his cousin with gold droplets falling into his eyebrows. “Bhai,” he says, with a voice like a bell. “How do I look?”

Osita wished, much later, that he’d told Vivek the truth then, that he was so beautiful he made the air around him dull, made Osita hard with desire. “Take it off,” he snapped instead, his throat rough. “Put it back before they catch us.”

Vivek ignored him and spun around. There was so much light trapped in his face, it hurt Osita’s eyes.

“I would do anything,” he said, after Vivek’s burial, “give anything to see him like that just one more time, alive and covered with wealth.”



* * *



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The market they burned down used to be just after the second roundabout if you drove down Chief Michael Road, past the abandoned office buildings and the intersection with the vulcanizer, that short man with a scar breaking his right cheek. His name was Ebenezer and he had been working at that junction for as long as anyone could remember. Kavita used to bring their family car to him when the tires needed repair. It was a silver-gray Peugeot 504, which Chika had bought after years of working at the glass factory, replacing the old rundown car he’d been using. As a child, Vivek would place a small palm against the hot metal of the car, balancing from foot to foot as he watched Ebenezer work. The scar was thick against Ebenezer’s skin, a shiny clotted red pushing out from the brown of his face. When he smiled at Vivek, the scar fought the folding of skin and his mouth rose properly on only one side.

“Small oga,” he used to tease, as his hands moved metal wrenches and tubes and force-fed air. Vivek would giggle and hide his face in Kavita’s skirt. He was young then, alive. Kavita could drop her palm and it would fall to the back curve of his boy skull, the soft hair and the warm skin underneath, the formed bone shaping him. Years later, when she found the length of his body stretched out on their front veranda, under four yards of akwete material in a red-and-black pattern she said she’d never forget, the back of his skull was broken and seeping into her welcome mat. Kavita lifted his neck anyway, to press her cheek against his and scream. His hair fell over her arms, wet and long and thick, and she wailed.

“Beta!” she screamed, her voice carving the air. “Wake up, beta!”

One of Vivek’s feet was twisted sideways next to a fallen flowerpot, soil spilled around his ankle. Everything smelled of smoke. His shoeless feet revealed the scar on his left instep: a soft starfish, colored in deep brown.

On the day Vivek was born, Chika had held the baby in his arms and stared at that scar. He’d seen it before—Kavita always commented on its shape whenever she rubbed Ahunna’s feet. Kavita had been without a mother for so long, her love for Ahunna was tactile and rich with childlike affection, a hundred thousand touches. They would sit together, read together, walk in the farm together, and Ahunna would give thanks that she’d given birth to two sons and been gifted two daughters. When Ekene and Mary had their child Osita, Ahunna had wept over his little face, singing to him in soft Igbo. She couldn’t wait for Chika and Kavita’s baby to arrive.

Now it was a year later, and Chika felt something building in him slowly as he held his newborn son—like folds of pouring cement hardening into a sick fear—but he ignored it. These things were just stories; they couldn’t be real. It wasn’t until the next day that a messenger boy from the village came to Ngwa to tell Chika that Ahunna had died the day before, her heart seizing at the threshold of her house, her body slumping into her compound, the earth receiving her slack face.