had much of a choice after she tried to destroy the old one.
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.
I squatted next to the grave, my legs still tired from sleep, then gave up and sat down on the marker after looking around to make sure no one was there. I had brought a black-and-yellow polythene bag with me, knotted firmly. Sitting on my cousin’s grave, I started to work the knot loose. It was tight; I had wrenched it closed with shaking hands, planning to burn it, certainly never to open it again. Then it had stayed under my bed in my room for months. Sometimes I would bring it out and hold it to my chest, fighting the urge to rip it open. I always put it back. But today; today’s own was different.
It took me a few minutes and the application of my teeth for me to get it open, and then I parted the plastic mouth and folded the bag back. Lying inside was a dress, made of soft cotton, except for the parts that had stiffened with old blood. I had folded it carefully when I put it into the bag, and now I smoothed the square it made in my lap. It was a deep blue, like what I imagined falling into the sea would look like if you kept trying to find the bottom. There were red hibiscus flowers splashed all over it, yellow dots quivering at the stamens. They hadn’t been printed to scale; these hibiscus were smaller than real ones would be, so that more of them could fit into the blue. It had been Vivek’s favorite dress.
He was wearing it in one of the pictures Juju was going to show Aunty Kavita, but I had taken it from her room the morning after we all met at the sports club, so that one never made it to Aunty Kavita. Juju was still asleep when I left and I didn’t wake her up. Saying good-bye would have been too much, too somehow, given what had happened that night. So I had walked quietly across the bedroom floor to pick up my boxers and trousers, balancing carefully as I put them on, then wearing my crumpled shirt and singlet. Juju’s bag was lying on her dressing table and I reached inside it with a delicate hand, fishing out the photo envelope. I flicked through the pictures quickly, looking for the one I’d seen at the sports club. The girls had seen that particular picture, too, but they knew Vivek and they would have thought he was just playing around, as he often did with us. Maybe it was my guilt making me paranoid, but that photograph felt like exposure, and I couldn’t let my aunt see it. God forbid. If she told my parents about it, I couldn’t begin to imagine the consequences.
In the picture, Vivek was wearing the dress, a wraparound tied on the left of his waist. The neckline fell into a V, showing the bone of his sternum. His hair was down and falling around his face. Juju had combed and plaited it with gel into a hundred small plaits, then let them dry and released them into many small waves cascading down his body. He was sitting in my lap with his legs crossed, the dress riding high on his thighs, his torso