The Death Of Vivek Oji Quotes

Some people can't see softness without wanting to hurt it

Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.

If nobody sees you, are you still there?

Alone is a feeling you can get used to, and it's hard to believe in a better alternative.

I'm not what anyone thinks I am. I never was. I didn't have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn't even exist to them. So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?

How much of my mother's life I missed because I was a child

Love and guilt sometimes taste the same, you know.

Fresh starts were good; that separateness was where you could feel yourself, where you could learn who you were apart from everyone else.

He didn't belong to you...You keep talking as if he belonged to you, just because you were his mother, but he didn't. He didn't belong to anybody but himself.

His grief was chasing him from room to room, begging him to spend some time alone with it.

Maybe we were all pretending to be fine because the world gave us no other option.

I often wonder if I died in the best possible way - in the arms of the one who loved me the most, wearing a skin that was true.

Ikept the book for the title, for how it was spelled. Beautyful. I had no idea why that spelling was chosen, but I liked it because it kept the beauty intact. It wasn’t swallowed, killed off with an i to make a whole new word. It was solid; it was still there, so much of it that it couldn’t fit into a new word, so much fullness. You got a better sense of exactly what was causing that fullness. Beauty. I wanted to be as whole as that word.

He was so beautiful that he made the air around him dull

If you didn't tell other people, was it real or was it just something the two of you were telling yourselves?

You are crying,” she said. It was only then that Osita noticed the tears slipping into his ears. It was evening and the light was leaving. “It’s raining,” he told her, slurring his words. She laughed. “It’s not raining.” “It’s raining inside me,” he said and a wave if darkness took over.

What do you do when you’re not allowed to be angry at God?

Hold my life for me.

When you’ve stood on ground and known your child’s bones are rotting beneath you, rage and ego fade like dust in a strong wind.

If this story was a stack of photographs—the old kind, rounded at the corners and kept in albums under the glass and lace doilies of center tables in parlors across the country— it would start with Vivek’s father, Chika. The first print would be of him riding a bus to the village to visit his mother; it would show him dangling an arm out of the window, feeling the air push against his face and the breeze entering his smile.

When it was dawn, just the earliest part of it, the cracks in an eggshell before it splinters open.

They were keeping me alive in the sweetest way they knew how, you see.

He smelled like grass and wind and clothes that had been dried in the sun.

I felt like I was always running just a few steps ahead of them, holding secrets they couldn't catch up to.

Panic was a vulture inside my body, trying to get out, pecking and flapping wildly at me.

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

She moved like the ground was falling away beneath her feet, the future rushing toward her.

They fit into each other's lonely worlds.

You can chase the truth, but who could avoid the moment of hesitation when you wonder if you really want what you’ve been asking for? Kavita knew that what the

I would say it was too late, but time has stopped meaning what it used to. I don’t mind anymore. I see how things work now, from this side. I was born and I died. I will come back. Somewhere, you see, in the river of time, I am already alive.

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. Live they were living in two separate worlds that happened to be under the same roof, pressed against each other, but never spilling, never overlapping.

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 from me, 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.

He was hiding in everyone else's house as if he didn't have a home.

I lay still and looked at the ceiling until sleep collected me again.

Later, much later, I wondered if I should have told his parents what was going on, if that would have helped him, or saved him a little.

They burned down the market on the day Vivek Oji died.

If Vivek had been alive, he would never have conceded her point, but when you’ve stood on ground and known your child’s bones are rotting beneath you, rage and ego fade like dust in a strong wind.

That morning, she was wearing an orange cotton dress; she looked like a burning sunset, and Chika knew immediately that his story would end with her, that he would drown in her large liquid eyes and it would be the perfect way to go.

Love and guilt sometimes taste the same, you know

I knew I was dancing with death every day, especially when I walked outside like that.

They sat like that, another picture, as the evening pulled across the veranda and sky.

I died at his mouth.

Life was like being dragged through concrete in circles, wet and setting concrete that dried with each rotation of my unwilling body.

I'm not sure my belief matters," he says. "If it is, it is, whether I believe it or not." page 161

This is how Vivek was born, after death and into grief. It marked him, you see, it cut him down like a tree. They brought him into a home filled with incapacitating sorrow; his whole life was a mourning.

She hoped he never found his way out of that bed. She hoped he would rot inside it. Eloise even had the nerve to be calling and checking on them. Kavita started hanging up the phone whenever she heard her voice. Let the woman figure out what she knew.

I opened my mouth to answer, then closed it again because I didn’t know how to explain it—the thing that the kiss had exhumed in me, the way it was loud, the way it wouldn’t be quiet. I had to do something, to give it room to unfurl, and Vivek was the only place I felt safe.

Kavita said nothing to him when she took them out of the drawer and arranged them in an album, which she hid under her side of the mattress. She pored over it for hours when Chika was out of the house, trying to find the child she’d lost, trying to commit to memory the child she’d found.

The air around me was damp, dew clinging to the grass and the leaves, and at the head of the grave the small star fruit tree, struggling out of being a seedling. I wasn’t sure why Aunty Kavita had picked a fruit tree that would feed on Vivek’s body. Uncle Chika probably would have selected something else, like a palm tree. Did she look forward to the day when it would actually have star fruits hanging from its branches? Would she pick them and eat them as if she was absorbing him, bringing him back inside where he’d come from? It would be something like Holy Communion, I imagined, body and blood turned into yellow flesh and pale green skin, bursting with juice. Or maybe she would never touch the fruit—maybe no one would—and they would fall back to the ground to rot, to sink back into the soil, until the roots of the tree took them back and it would just continue like that, around and around. Or birds would show up and eat the fruit, then carry Vivek around, giving life to things even after he’d run out of it himself.

The loss of him felt cumulative, as if he’d been slipping away so slowly that she’d missed the rift as it formed in his childhood. It was only once he’d become a man that she realized she couldn’t reach him anymore, that he was gone, so gone that breath had left his body. No one else could feel that lifetime of loss. No one else had lost him more than she had, yet they cried in front of her as if it meant something.

That morning, she was wearing an orange cotton dress; she looked like a burning sunset, and Chika knew immediately that his story would end with her, that he would drown in her large liquid eyes and it would be the perfect way to go. There was nothing boiling in him, just a loud and clear exhale, a weight of peace wrapping around his heart. Kavita looked up and smiled at him, and somehow Chika found the liver to ask her to lunch.

She and De Chika expected Vivek to go overseas for university, with a certainty they passed down to him—a knowledge that his time here at home was temporary and that a door was waiting as soon as he was done with his WAEC exams. Later I realized that it was the spilling gold of the dowry that funded this belief, but back then I thought they were just being optimistic, and it surprised me, because even my own mother who believed in thick prayers had never mentioned me going overseas.

Who could stay bright and bubbly after losing baby after baby? What do you do when you’re not allowed to be angry at God? I could see why she made everything so heavy, but I still ran from her, all the way to the boys’ quarters at De Chika’s house and to Elizabeth, who made me never want to go back to Owerri.

I’m worried about his mind. Kavita has stopped sleeping. She keeps checking his bed, but the boy doesn’t even sleep there anymore. He wanders around the house. He goes and lies down on the veranda with the dogs. Sometimes he climbs the tree in the backyard and just stays there.

Supernatural forces are feeding on him—on your child! Pastor said we must cut his hair because they are drawing their power from it, like the locks of Samson. This is one of the sources of their strength. But when one of the deacons approached him with scissors, the demon started to fight back!

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.

I’m disappointed, bhai. I didn’t think you’d be one of these closed-​minded people. Leave that for your mother.

He says I can’t blame him, that no one would blame him for taking another wife when his first one has failed to give him a son. The woman’s child is his namesake.

You know the kind of shame it will bring to your family if you don’t have a husband. It’s better you stay here and make it work, adapt to our customs. Welcome my second wife when she comes. Behave with some dignity and don’t embarrass me. It will be good for Juju to have a little brother in the house.

Osita wished, much later, that he'd told Vivek the truth then, that he was so beautifull he made the air around him dull

Osita wished, much later, that he'd told Vivek the truth then, that he was so beautiful he made the air around him dull

She must have prayed so much in those years. Maybe that's where the bright, high-spirited woman De Chika talked about went; maybe she'd been sanded down into dullness by grief and prayers that went unanswered.

She didn't know why she'd stopped talking, to be honest. It had just felt easier. People had kept asking he how she was, how she was holding up, if she was okay, but when they realized she wasn't going to answer, they eventually stopped.

Fresh starts were good; that separateness was where you could feel yourself, where you could learn who you were apart from everyone else. Picture:

maybe she’d been sanded down into dullness by grief and prayers that went unanswered

So: If nobody sees you, are you still there? Five After Vivek died, Osita went to Port Harcourt and drank until the days were sabotaged in his memory.

Beautyful. I had no idea why that spelling was chosen, but I liked it because it kept the beauty intact. It wasn’t swallowed, killed off with an i to make a whole new word. It was solid; it was still there, so much of it that it couldn’t fit into a new word, so much fullness. You got a better sense of exactly what was causing that fullness. Beauty. Beauty. I wanted to be as whole as that word.

I often wonder if I died in the best possible way — in the arms of the one who loved me the most, wearing a skin that was true.

[I]t felt like I’ve fallen into the orbit of a stranger, like I’d stumbled across worlds and now I was here, out of breath and off balance.

she looked like a burning sunset, and Chika knew immediately that his story would end with her, that he would drown in her large liquid eyes and it would be the perfect way to go. There was nothing boiling in him, just a loud and clear exhale, a weight of peace wrapping around his heart.

And everyday it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. So: if nobody sees you, are you still there?

The pain thickened until I was sobbing as well, trying to shove it in the space between her neck and shoulder, my arms wrapped around her as if to save myself, not just her. I lost time inside it, plagued by the memories of the three of us there, when he was alive and happy; even of Olunne and Somto and Elizabeth there with us, when we’d all played Monopoly and Vivek cheated; when he taught us how to play solitaire with real cards; when he danced and the girls danced with him and I thought, God forgive me, I really love him, I really do; when he was bright and brilliant and alive, my cousin, my brother, the love of my sinful life.

What are you doing?” he said, trying to step in front of her. But Kavita drove right past him, and then she was raising the hoe, slamming it into the headstone, the flat metal sparking against the stone. “Kavita, stop it!” She swung again and again, ignoring him, and Chika just stared, too shocked to try and restrain her. Kavita was grunting and crying—more in anger than grief, it felt like—and the gravestone chipped under her onslaught. She was aiming at the inscription now, and he cringed as he realized it. “We—can—at—least—get—one—thing—correct!” she snarled between swings. Tiny cracks blossomed across the surface of the gravestone; chips littered the grass.

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.

Be careful of women like that," one of Ebenezer's brothers had told him. "They start feeling like they're men, and before you know it they're trying to run the household themselves, as if you're their houseboy." Ebenezer had ignored them. He wanted a woman with some business sense, not someone who would be sitting in the house every day waiting for him to provide everything.

Look," she said, "eventually all secrets come out. It's just a matter of time. And the longer it takes, the worse it is in the end.

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 from me, 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.

I was drowning. Not quickly, not enough for panic, but a slow and inexorable sinking, when you know where you’re going to end up, so you stop fighting and you wait for it to all be over.

I felt 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 from me, 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.

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.

As if Vivek’s parents’ lives hadn’t stopped, at least in every way that was important, even as they had to wake up in the morning and watch the sun move across the sky. Maybe we were all pretending to be fine because the world gave us no other option.

Fresh starts were good; that separateness was where you could feel yourself, where you would learn who you were apart from everyone else.

Aunty Kavita had told me once that my mother had wanted more children, but that she'd stopped trying after several miscarriages. I couldn't imagine what she'd gone through—how much of my mother's life I missed because I was a child—but I wondered if that was what changed her.

But you know how these men are. The boy is slim, he has long hair—all it takes is one idiot thinking he's a woman from behind or something, then getting angry when he finds out that he's not. because, if he's ae boy, then what does it mean that the idiot was attracted to him? And those kinds of questions usually end up with someone getting hurt.

She'd always been religious, but this was something different, something that smelled like rotten meat or madness.

I felt heavy my whole life. I always thought that death Ould 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 fo 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 fought with almost everyone because I was slim and some suspicion of delicacy clung to me and it made boys aggressive, for whatever reason. Some people can't see softness without wanting to hurt it.

No one else had lost him more than she had, yet they cried in front of her as if it meant something. They're still children, Kavita tried to tell herself, not mature enough to do her the courtesy of keeping their tears in their bathrooms, among their own complete families. But still she thought of them as selfish brats without home training or compassion or empathy, and this in turn made her angry at these girls she knew she still loved, somewhere under the rage and pain and the grief that she felt belonged to her and only her.

We don't know anything about him. You just had this your idea of who your son was supposed to be, and you were so busy having your affair that you missed out on his last months on earth. We can't keep insisting he was who we thought he was, when he wanted to be someone else and he died being that person, Chika. We failed, don't you see? We didn't see him and we failed.

Alone is a feeling you can get used to, and it’s hard to believe in a better alternative.

maybe she’d been sanded down into dullness by grief and prayers that went unanswered.

I didn’t have the mouth to put it into words, to say what was wrong, to change the things I felt I needed to change. And every day it was difficult, walking around and knowing that people saw me one way, knowing that they were wrong, so completely wrong, that the real me was invisible to them. It didn’t even exist to them. So: If nobody sees you, are you still there?

Let me talk to Chika about it,” Kavita answered. It was an excuse she used when she wanted to end a discussion, pretending that she couldn’t make a decision without her husband’s input, and Mary, like everyone else, stopped bothering her as soon as she said it.