was lying on my back with an arm thrown out; Vivek was scattered beside me, his leg touching mine and his hair drowning my arm, the silver chain and pendant gleaming against his collarbone. I could almost see the lines that marked Ganesh. Vivek sighed and his eyes opened into slits.
“Sorry, bhai,” he whispered, and drifted back to sleep. There was a tendril of hair lying on his cheek that I wanted to move aside, but I was too afraid to touch him. I lay still and looked at the ceiling until sleep collected me again.
Eight
Kavita thought it was a phase—that Vivek was just going through something and it would pass. So she prayed and said countless rosaries, rubbing the color off the beads with hundreds and hundreds of Hail Marys until she thought her hands were actually full of grace. She took him to the cathedral to see Father Obinna, the priest who had baptized him and fed him his First Communion. When Vivek came out from their conversation, his forehead was wet with holy water. “Pray some more,” the priest told them, and Kavita believed him, trusted him. If there was something more, something spiritual, wouldn’t the father have seen it? She wasn’t sure. “The Catholic Church can’t do anything,” Mary told her over the phone. “You should allow him to come to Owerri, so I can take him to my own church. They fight these things with holy fire.”
“I don’t know,” Kavita said. “He’s been doing a little better since we got back from the village, you know? He’s eating again, sleeping in his own bed.”
“Has he cut that hair?”
“I don’t think that’s important—”
“Ahn! Kavita. You know how things are here. It’s not safe for him to be walking around Ngwa looking that . . . feminine. If someone misunderstands, if they think he’s a homosexual, what do you think is going to happen to him?”
Kavita’s stomach dropped. The thought had worried her, too, but it was different—more terrifying—to hear it put into words. Vivek couldn’t end up like those lynched bodies at the junction, blackened by fire and stiffened, large gashes from machetes showing old red flesh underneath. Most of them were thieves, or said to be thieves, but mobs don’t listen, and they’d say anything afterward.
“He’s going to be fine,” she told Mary. “He was born here, raised here. People know who he is.”
Mary laughed bitterly. “You think it matters? You don’t know Nigeria. People have killed their neighbors and burned down their houses. He’s not safe, I’m telling you.”
Kavita started to get upset. “Why are you putting that into the world? Vivek isn’t doing anything to anyone.”
“I know it’s hard to hear,” Mary said, softening her voice. “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 a 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. Ekene doesn’t want Chika to cut the boy’s hair out of wickedness, you know. We’re trying to look out for him. Just because he’s half-caste doesn’t mean he’s going to get special treatment forever, not the way he’s behaving. You’re his mother. It’s your job to protect him. I’m telling you, bring him to Owerri. We can help him at the church here.”
“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. They said good-bye, got off the phone, and Kavita went into the parlor, where Chika was reading a newspaper. “Your sister-in-law is getting on my nerves,” she said, sitting in an armchair and crossing her legs, pushing her braid over her shoulder, the black of her hair now silvered with age. “She keeps trying to get me to bring Vivek to her church.”
Chika didn’t look up from his paper. “Mary means well,” he said, his gold-rimmed glasses balancing on his nose.
“She said Vivek’s not safe, that he looks—” She paused. “That people might try to hurt him.” Her voice warped hesitant, unwilling to say out loud the possibility of worse.
Her husband sighed and dropped the newspaper into his lap before turning