Purple Hibiscus

Aunty Ifeoma stopped to pluck at some browned leaves in the garden as we walked to the car, muttering that the harmattan was killing her plants.

Amaka and Obiora groaned and said, “Not the garden now, Mom.”

“That’s a hibiscus, isn’t it, Aunty?” Jaja asked, staring at a plant close to the barbed wire fencing. “I didn’t know there were purple hibiscuses.”

Aunty Ifeoma laughed and touched the flower, colored a deep shade of purple that was almost blue. “Everybody has that reaction the first time. My good friend Phillipa is a lecturer in botany. She did a lot of experimental work while she was here. Look, here’s white ixora, but it doesn’t bloom as fully as the red.”

Jaja joined Aunty Ifeoma, while we stood watching them.

“O maka, so beautiful,” Jaja said. He was running a finger over a flower petal. Aunty Ifeoma’s laughter lengthened to a few more syllables.

“Yes, it is. I had to fence my garden because the neighborhood children came in and plucked many of the more unusual flowers. Now I only let in the altar girls from our church or the Protestant church.”

“Mom, o zugo. Let’s go,” Amaka said. But Aunty Ifeoma spent a little longer showing Jaja her flowers before we piled into the station wagon and she drove off. The street she turned into was steep and she switched the ignition off and let the car roll, loose bolts rattling. “To save fuel,” she said, turning briefly to Jaja and me.

The houses we drove past had sunflower hedges, and the palm-size flowers brightened the foliage in big yellow polka dots. The hedges had many gaping holes, so I could see the backyards of the houses—the metal water tanks balanced on unpainted cement blocks, the old tire swings hanging from guava trees, the clothes spread out on lines tied tree to tree. At the end of the street, Aunty Ifeoma turned the ignition on because the road had become level.

“That’s the university primary school,” she said. “That’s where Chima goes. It used to be so much better, but now look at all the missing louvers in the windows, look at the dirty buildings.”

The wide schoolyard, enclosed by a trimmed whistling pine hedge, was cluttered with long buildings as if they had all sprung up at will, unplanned. Aunty Ifeoma pointed at a building next to the school, the Institute of African Studies, where her office was and where she taught most of her classes. The building was old; I could tell from the color and from the windows, coated with the dust of so many harmattans that they would never shine again. Aunty Ifeoma drove through a roundabout planted with pink periwinkle flowers and lined with bricks painted alternating black and white. On the side of the road, a field stretched out like green bed linen, dotted by mango trees with faded leaves struggling to retain their color against the drying wind.

“That’s the field where we have our bazaars,” Aunty Ifeoma said. “And over there are female hostels. There’s Mary Slessor Hall. Over there is Okpara Hall, and this is Bello Hall, the most famous hostel, where Amaka has sworn she will live when she enters the university and launches her activist movements.”

Amaka laughed but did not dispute Aunty Ifeoma.

“Maybe you two will be together, Kambili.”

I nodded stiffly, although Aunty Ifeoma could not see me. I had never thought about the university, where I would go or what I would study. When the time came, Papa would decide.

Aunty Ifeoma horned and waved at two balding men in tie-dye shirts standing at a corner as she turned. She switched the ignition off again, and the car hurtled down the street. Gmelina and dogonyaro trees stood firmly on either side. The sharp, astringent scent of the dogonyaro leaves filled the car, and Amaka breathed deeply and said they cured malaria. We were in a residential area, driving past bungalows in wide

compounds with rose bushes and faded lawns and fruit trees. The street gradually lost its tarred smoothness and its cultivated hedges, and the houses became low and narrow, their front doors so close together that you could stand at one, stretch out, and touch the next door. There was no pretense at hedges here, no pretense at separation or privacy, just low buildings side by side amid a scattering of stunted shrubs and cashew trees. These were the junior-staff quarters, where the secretaries and drivers lived, Aunty Ifeoma explained, and Amaka added, “If they are lucky enough to get it.”

We had just driven past the buildings when Aunty Ifeoma pointed to the right and said, “There is Odim hill. The view from the top is breathtaking, when you stand there, you see just how God laid out the hills and valleys, ezi okwu.”

When she made a U-turn and went back the way we had come, I let my mind drift, imagining God laying out the hills of Nsukka with his wide white hands, crescent-moon shadows underneath his nails just like Father Benedict’s. We drove past the sturdy trees around the faculty of engineering, past the vast mango-filled fields around the female hostels. Aunty Ifeoma turned the opposite way when she got close to her street. She wanted to show us the other side of Marguerite Cartwright Avenue, where the seasoned professors lived, with the duplexes hemmed in by gravely driveways.

“I hear that when they first built these houses, some of the white professors—all the professors were white back then—wanted chimneys and fireplaces,” Aunty Ifeoma said, with the same kind of indulgent laugh that Mama let out when she talked about people who went to witch doctors. She then pointed to the vice chancellor’s lodge, to the high walls surrounding it, and said it used to have well-tended hedges of cherry and ixora until rioting students jumped over the hedges and burned a car in the compound.

“What was the riot about?” Jaja asked.

“Light and water,” Obiora said, and I looked at him.

“There was no light and no water for a month,” Aunty Ifeoma added. “The students said they could not study and asked if the exams could be rescheduled, but they were refused.”

“The walls are hideous,” Amaka said, in English, and I wondered what she would think of our compound walls back home, if she ever visited us. The V.C.’s walls were not very high; I could see the big duplex that nestled behind a canopy of trees with greenish-yellow leaves. “Putting up walls is a superficial fix, anyway,” she continued. “If I were the V.C., the students would not riot. They would have water and light.”

“If some Big Man in Abuja has stolen the money, is the V.C. supposed to vomit money for Nsukka?” Obiora asked. I turned to watch him, imagining myself at fourteen, imagining myself now.

“I wouldn’t mind somebody vomiting some money for me right now,” Aunty Ifeoma said, laughing in that proud-coachwatching-the-team way. “We’ll go into town to see if there is any decently priced ube in the market. I know Father Amadi likes ube, and we have some corn at home to go with it.”

“Will the fuel make it, Mom?” Obiora asked.

“Amarom, we can try.”

Aunty Ifeoma rolled the car down the road that led to the university entrance gates. Jaja turned to the statue of the preening lion as we drove past it, his lips moving soundlessly. To restore the dignity of man. Obiora was reading the plaque, too. He let out a short cackle and asked, “But when did man lose his dignity?”

Outside the gate, Aunty Ifeoma started the ignition again. When the car shuddered without starting, she muttered, “Blessed Mother, please not now,” and tried again. The car only whined. Somebody horned behind us, and I turned to look at the woman in the yellow Peugeot 504. She came out and walked toward us; she wore a pair of culottes that flapped around her calves, which were lumpy like sweet potatoes.