Purple Hibiscus Read online

“We cannot sit back and let it happen, mba. Where else have you heard of such a thing as a sole administrator in a university?” Aunty Ifeoma said, leaning forward on the stool. Tiny cracks appeared in her bronze lipstick when she pursed her lips. “A governing council votes for a vice chancellor. That is the way it has worked since this university was built, that is the way it is supposed to work, oburia?”

  The woman looked off into the distance, nodding continuously in the way that people do when searching for the right words to use. When she finally spoke, she did so slowly, like someone addressing a stubborn child. “They said there is a list circulating, Ifeoma, of lecturers who are disloyal to the university. They said they might be fired. They said your name is on it.”

  “I am not paid to be loyal. When I speak the truth, it becomes disloyalty.”

  “Ifeoma, do you think you are the only one who knows the truth? Do you think we do not all know the truth, eh? But, gwakenem, will the truth feed your children? Will the truth pay their school fees and buy their clothes?”

  “When do we speak out, eh? When soldiers are appointed lecturers and students attend lectures with guns to their heads? When do we speak out?” Aunty Ifeoma’s voice was raised. But the blaze in her eyes was not focused on the woman; she was angry at something that was bigger than the woman before her.

  The woman got up. She smoothed her yellow-and-blue abada skirt that barely let her brown slippers show. “We should go. What time is your lecture?”

  “Two.”

  “Do you have fuel?”

  “Ebekwanu? No.”

  “Let me drop you. I have a little fuel.”

  I watched Aunty Ifeoma and the woman walk slowly to the door, as though weighed down by both what they had said and what they had not said. Amaka waited for Aunty Ifeoma to shut the door behind them before she left the window and sat down on a chair.

  “Mom said you should remember to take your painkiller, Kambili,” she said.

  “What was Aunty Ifeoma talking about with her friend?” I asked. I knew I would not have asked before. I would have wondered about it, but I would not have asked.

  “The sole administrator,” Amaka said, shortly, as if I would immediately understand all that they had been talking about. She was running her hand down the length of the cane chair, over and over.

  “The university’s equivalent of a head of state,” Obiora said. “The university becomes a microcosm of the country.” I had not realized that he was there, reading a book on the living room floor. I had never heard anyone use the word microcosm.

  “They are telling Mom to shut up,” Amaka said. “Shut up if you do not want to lose your job because you can be fired fiam, just like that.” Amaka snapped her fingers to show how fast Aunty Ifeoma could be fired.

  “They should fire her, eh, so we can go to America,” Obiora said.

  “Mechie onu,” Amaka said. Shut up.

  “America?” I looked from Amaka to Obiora.

  “Aunty Phillipa is asking Mom to come over. At least people there get paid when they are supposed to,” Amaka said, bitterly, as though she were accusing someone of something.

  “And Mom will have her work recognized in America, without any nonsense politics,” Obiora said, nodding, agreeing with himself in case nobody else did.

  “Did Mom tell you she is going anywhere, gbo?” Amaka jabbed the chair now, with fast motions.

  “Do you know how long they have been sitting on her file?” Obiora asked. “She should have been senior lecturer years ago.”

  “Aunty Ifeoma told you that?” I asked, stupidly, not even sure what I meant, because I could think of nothing else to say, because I could no longer imagine life without Aunty Ifeoma’s family, without Nsukka.

  Neither Obiora nor Amaka responded. They were glaring at each other silently, and I felt that they had not really been talking to me. I went outside and stood by the verandah railings. It had rained all night. Jaja was kneeling in the garden, weeding. He did not have to water anymore because the sky did it. Anthills had risen in the newly softened red soil in the yard, like miniature castles. I took a deep breath and held it, to savor the smell of green leaves washed clean by rain, the way I imagined a smoker would do to savor the last of a cigarette. The allamanda bushes bordering the garden bloomed heavily with yellow, cylindrical flowers. Chima was pulling the flowers down and sticking his fingers in them, one after the other. I watched as he examined flower after flower, looking for a suitable small bloom that would fit onto his pinky.

  THAT EVENING, FATHER AMADI stopped by on his way to the stadium. He wanted us all to go with him. He was coaching some boys from Ugwu Agidi for the local government high-jump championships. Obiora had borrowed a video game from the flat upstairs, and the boys were clustered in front of the TV in the living room. They didn’t want to go to the stadium because they would have to return the game soon.

  Amaka laughed when Father Amadi asked her to come. “Don’t try to be nice, Father, you know you would rather be alone with your sweetheart,” she said. And Father Amadi smiled and said nothing.

  I went alone with him. My mouth felt tight from embarrassment as he drove us to the stadium. I was grateful that he did not say anything about Amaka’s statement, that he talked about the sweet-smelling rains instead and sang along with the robust Igbo choruses coming from his cassette player. The boys from Ugwu Agidi were already there when we got to the stadium. They were taller, older versions of the boys I had seen the last time; their hole-ridden shorts were just as worn and their faded shirts just as threadbare. Father Amadi raised his voice—it lost most of its music when he did—as he gave encouragement and pointed out the boys’ weaknesses. When they were not looking, he took the rod up a notch, then yelled, “One more time: set, go!” and they jumped over it, one after the other. He raised it a few more times before the boys caught on and said, “Ah! Ah! Fada!” He laughed and said he believed they could jump higher than they thought they could. And that they had just proved him right.

  It was what Aunty Ifeoma did to my cousins, I realized then, setting higher and higher jumps for them in the way she talked to them, in what she expected of them. She did it all the time believing they would scale the rod. And they did. It was different for Jaja and me. We did not scale the rod because we believed we could, we scaled it because we were terrified that we couldn’t.

  “What clouds your face?” Father Amadi asked, sitting down beside me. His shoulder touched mine. The new smell of sweat and old smell of cologne filled my nostrils.

  “Nothing.”

  “Tell me about the nothing, then.”

  “You believe in those boys,” I blurted out.

  “Yes,” he said, watching me. “And they don’t need me to believe in them as much as I need it for myself.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to believe in something that I never question.” He picked up the water bottle, drank deeply from it. I watched the ripples in his throat as the water went down. I wished I were the water, going into him, to be with him, one with him. I had never envied water so much before. His eyes caught mine, and I looked away, wondering if he had seen the longing in my eyes.

  “Your hair needs to be plaited,” he said.

  “My hair?”

  “Yes. I will take you to the woman who plaits your aunt’s hair in the market.”

  He reached out then and touched my hair. Mama had plaited it in the hospital, but because of my raging headaches, she did not make the braids tight. They were starting to slip out of the twists, and Father Amadi ran his hand over the loosening braids, in gentle, smoothing motions. He was looking right into my eyes. He was too close. His touch was so light I wanted to push my head toward him, to feel the pressure of his hand. I wanted to collapse against him. I wanted to press his hand to my head, my belly, so he could feel the warmth that coursed through me.

  He let go of my hair, and I watched him get up and run back to the boys on the field.

  IT WAS TOO EARLY whe
n Amaka’s movements woke me up the next morning; the room was not yet touched by the lavender rays of dawn. In the faint glow from the security lights outside, I saw her tying her wrapper round her chest. Something was wrong; she did not tie her wrapper just to go to the toilet.

  “Amaka, o gini?”

  “Listen,” she said.

  I could make out Aunty Ifeoma’s voice from the verandah, and I wondered what she was doing up so early. Then I heard the singing. It was the measured singing of a large group of people, and it came in through the window.

  “Students are rioting,” Amaka said.

  I got up and followed her into the living room. What did it mean, that students were rioting? Were we in danger? Jaja and Obiora were on the verandah with Aunty Ifeoma. The cool air felt heavy against my bare arms, as if it were holding on to raindrops that were reluctant to fall.

  “Turn off the security lights,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “If they pass and see the light, they might throw stones up here.”

  Amaka turned off the lights. The singing was clearer now, loud and resonant. There had to be a least five hundred people. “Sole administrator must go. He doesn’t wear pant oh! Head of State must go. He doesn’t wear pant oh! Where is running water? Where is light? Where is petrol?”

  “The singing is so loud I thought they were right outside,” Aunty Ifeoma said.

  “Will they come here?” I asked.

  Aunty Ifeoma put an arm around me and drew me close. She smelled of talcum powder. “No, nne, we are fine. The people who might worry are those that live near the vice chancellor. Last time, the students burned a senior professor’s car.”

  The singing was louder but not closer. The students were invigorated now. Smoke was rising in thick, blinding fumes that blended into the star-filled sky. Crashing sounds of breaking glass peppered the singing.

  “All we are saying, sole administrator must go! All we are saying, he must go! No be so? Na so!”

  Shouts and yells accompanied the singing. A solo voice rose, and the crowds cheered. The cool night wind, heavy with the smell of burning, brought clear snatches of the resonating voice speaking pidgin English from a street away.

  “Great Lions and Lionesses! We wan people who dey wear clean underwear, no be so? Abi the Head of State dey wear common underwear, sef, talkless of clean one? No!”

  “Look,” Obiora said, lowering his voice as if the group of about forty students jogging past could possibly hear him. They looked like a fast-flowing dark stream, illuminated by the torches and burning sticks they held.

  “Maybe they are catching up with the rest from down campus,” Amaka said, after the students had passed.

  We stayed out to listen for a little while longer before Aunty Ifeoma said we had to go in and sleep.

  AUNTY IFEOMA CAME HOME that afternoon with the news of the riot. It was the worst one since they became commonplace some years ago. The students had set the sole administrator’s house on fire; even the guest house behind it had burned to the ground. Six university cars had been burned down, as well. “They say the sole administrator and his wife were smuggled out in the boot of an old Peugeot 404, o di egwu,” Aunty Ifeoma said, waving around a circular. When I read the circular, I felt a tight discomfort in my chest like the heartburn I got after eating greasy akara. It was signed by the registrar. The university was closed down until further notice as a result of the damage to university property and the atmosphere of unrest. I wondered what it meant, if it meant Aunty Ifeoma would leave soon, if it meant we would no longer come to Nsukka.

  During my fitful siesta, I dreamed that that the sole administrator was pouring hot water on Aunty Ifeoma’s feet in the bathtub of our home in Enugu. Then Aunty Ifeoma jumped out of the bathtub and, in the manner of dreams, jumped into America. She did not look back as I called to her to stop.

  I was still thinking about the dream that evening as we all sat in the living room, watching TV. I heard a car drive in and park in front of the flat, and I clasped my shaky hands together, certain it was Father Amadi. But the banging on the door was unlike him; it was loud, rude, intrusive.

  Aunty Ifeoma flew off her chair. “Onyezi? Who wants to break my door, eh?”

  She opened the door only a crack, but two wide hands reached in and forced the door ajar. The heads of the four men who spilled into the flat grazed the door frame. Suddenly, the flat seemed cramped, too small for the blue uniforms and matching caps they wore, for the smell of stale cigarette smoke and sweat that came in with them, for the raw bulge of muscle under their sleeves.

  “What is it? Who are you?” Aunty Ifeoma asked.

  “We are here to search your house. We’re looking for documents designed to sabotage the peace of the university. We have information that you have been in collaboration with the radical student groups that staged the riots…” The voice sounded mechanical, the voice of a person reciting something written. The man speaking had tribal marks all over his cheek; there seemed to be no area of skin free of the ingrained lines. The other three men walked briskly into the flat as he spoke. One opened the drawers of the sideboard, leaving each open. Two went into the bedrooms.

  “Who sent you here?” Aunt Ifeoma asked.

  “We are from the special security unit in Port Harcourt.”

  “Do you have any papers to show me? You cannot just walk into my house.”

  “Look at this yeye woman oh! I said we are from the special security unit!” The tribal marks curved even more on the man’s face as he frowned and pushed Aunty Ifeoma aside.

  “How you go just come enter like dis? Wetin be dis?” Obiora said, rising, the fear in his eyes not quite shielded by the brazen manliness in his pidgin English.

  “Obiora, nodu ani,” Aunt Ifeoma quietly said, and Obiora sat down quickly. He looked relieved that he had been asked to. Aunty Ifeoma muttered to us all to remain seated, not to say a word, before she followed the men into the rooms. They did not look inside the drawers they flung open, they just threw the clothes and whatever else was inside on the floor. They overturned all the boxes and suitcases in Aunty Ifeoma’s room, but they did not rummage through the contents. They scattered, but they did not search. As they left, the man with the tribal marks said to Aunty Ifeoma, waving a stubby finger with a curved nail in her face, “Be careful, be very careful.”

  We were silent until the sound of their car driving off faded.

  “We have to go to the police station,” Obiora said.

  Aunt Ifeoma smiled; the movement of her lips did not brighten her face. “That is where they came from. They’re all working together.”

  “Why are they accusing you of encouraging the riot, Aunty?” Jaja asked.

  “It’s all rubbish. They want to scare me. Since when have students needed somebody to tell them when to riot?”

  “I don’t believe they just forced their way into our house and turned it upside down,” Amaka said. “I don’t believe it.”

  “Thank God Chima is asleep,” Aunty Ifeoma said.

  “We should leave,” Obiora said. “Mom, we should leave. Have you talked to Aunty Phillipa since the last time?”

  Aunty Ifeoma shook her head. She was putting back the books and table mats from the sideboard drawers. Jaja went over to help her.

  “What do you mean, leave? Why do we have to run away from our own country? Why can’t we fix it?” Amaka asked.

  “Fix what?” Obiora had a deliberate sneer on his face.

  “So we have to run away? That’s the answer, running away?” Amaka asked, her voice shrill.

  “It’s not running away, it’s being realistic. By the time we get into university, the good professors will be fed up with all this nonsense and they will go abroad.”

  “Shut up, both of you, and come and clean up this place!” Aunty Ifeoma snapped. It was the first time she did not look on proudly and enjoy my cousins’ arguments.

  AN EARTHWORM WAS slithering in the bathtub, near the drain, when I went in to take a bath in the morning
. The purplish-brown body contrasted with the whiteness of the tub. The pipes were old, Amaka had said, and every rainy season, earthworms made their way into the bathtub. Aunty Ifeoma had written the works department about the pipes, but, of course, it would take ages before anybody did anything about them. Obiora said he liked to study the worms; he’d discovered that they died only when you poured salt on them. If you cut them in two, each part simply grew back to form a whole earthworm.

  Before I climbed into the tub, I picked the ropelike body out with a twig broken off a broom and threw it in the toilet. I could not flush because there was nothing to flush, it would be a waste of water. The boys would have to pee looking at a floating earthworm in the toilet bowl.

  When I finished my bath, Aunty Ifeoma had poured me a glass of milk. She had sliced my okpa, too, and red chunks of pepper gaped from the yellow slices. “How do you feel, nne?” she asked.

  “I’m fine, Aunty.” I did not even remember that I had once hoped never to open my eyes again, that fire had once dwelt in my body. I picked up my glass, stared at the curiously beige and grainy milk.

  “Homemade soybean milk,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “Very nutritious. One of our lecturers in agriculture sells it.”

  “It tastes like chalk water,” Amaka said.

  “How do you know, have you ever drunk chalk water?” Aunty Ifeoma asked. She laughed, but I saw the lines, thin as spiders’ limbs, around her mouth and the faraway look in her eyes. “I just can’t afford milk anymore,” she added tiredly. “You should see how the prices of dried milk rise every day, as if somebody is chasing them.”

  The doorbell rang. My stomach heaved around itself whenever I heard it, although I knew Father Amadi usually knocked quietly on the door.

  It was a student of Aunt Ifeoma’s, in a tight pair of blue jeans. Her face was light-skinned, but her complexion was from bleaching creams—her hands were the dark brown color of Boumvita with no milk added. She held a huge gray chicken. It was a symbol of her formal announcement to Aunty Ifeoma that she was getting married, she said. When her fiance learned of yet another university closure, he had told her he could no longer wait until she graduated, since nobody knew when the university would reopen. The wedding would be next month. She did not call him by his name, she called him “dim,” “my husband,” with the proud tone of someone who had won a prize, tossing her braided, reddish gold-dyed hair.