Purple Hibiscus

at Ninth Mile, and don’t forget to bring me the receipt.”
    “Yes, sir.”
    Papa asked us to get out of the car. He hugged us both again, smoothed the back of our necks, and asked us not to forget to say the full fifteen decades of the rosary during the drive. Mama hugged us one more time before we got back in the car.
    “Papa is still waving,” Jaja said, as Kevin nosed the car up the driveway. He was looking in the mirror above his head.
    “He’s crying,” I said.
    “The gardener is waving, too,” Jaja said, and I wondered if he had really not heard me. I pulled my rosary from my pocket, kissed the crucifix, and started the prayer.

    I looked out the window as we drove, counting the blackened hulks of cars on the roadside, some left for so long they were covered with reddish rust. I wondered about the people who had been inside, how they had felt just before the accident, before the smashing glass and crunched metal and leaping flames. I did not concentrate on any of the glorious Mysteries, and knew that Jaja did not, either, because he kept forgetting when it was his turn to start a decade of the rosary. About forty minutes into the drive, I saw a sign on the roadside that read UNIVERSITY OF NIGERIA , NSUKKA , and I asked Kevin if we were almost there.
    “No,” he said. “A little while longer.”
    Near the town of Opi—the dust-covered church and school signs read OPI —we came to a police checkpoint. Old tires and nail-studded logs were strewn across most of the road, leaving only a narrow space. A policeman flagged us down as we approached.Kevin groaned. Then as he slowed, he reached into the glove compartment and pulled out a ten-naira note and flung it out of the window, toward the policeman. The policeman gave a mock salute, smiled, and waved us through. Kevin would not have done that if Papa had been in the car. When policemen or soldiers stopped Papa, he spent so long showing them all his car papers, letting them search his car, anything but bribe them to let him pass. We cannot be part of what we fight, he often told us.
    “We’re entering the town of Nsukka,” Kevin said, a few minutes later. We were driving past the market. The crowded roadside stores with their sparse shelves of goods threatened to spill over onto a thin strip of road already full of doubleparked cars, hawkers with trays balanced on their heads, motorcyclists, boys pushing wheelbarrows full of yams, women holding baskets, beggars looking up from their mats and waving. Kevin drove slowly now; potholes suddenly materialized in the middle of the road, and he followed the swerving motion of the car ahead of us. When we came to a point just past the market where the road had narrowed, eaten away by erosion at the sides, he stopped for a while to let other cars go by.
    “We’re at the university,” he said, finally.
    A wide arch towered over us, bearing the words
University of Nigeria Nsukka
in black, cut-out metal. The gates underneath the arch were flung wide open and manned by security men in dark brown uniforms and matching berets. Kevin stopped and rolled down the windows.
    “Good afternoon. Please, how can we get to Marguerite Cartwright Avenue?” he asked.
    The security man closest to us, his facial skin creased like arumpled dress, asked, “How are you?” before he told Kevin that Marguerite Cartwright Avenue was very close; we had only to keep straight and then make a right at the first junction and an almost immediate left. Kevin thanked him and we drove off. A lawn the color of spinach splashed across the side of the road. I turned to stare at the statue in the middle of the lawn, a black lion standing on its hind legs, tail curved upward, chest puffed out. I didn’t realize Jaja was looking, too, until he read aloud the words inscribed on the pedestal: “‘To restore the dignity of man.’” Then, as though I could not tell, he added, “It’s the university’s motto.”
    Marguerite Cartwright Avenue was bordered by tall gmelina trees. I imagined the trees bending during a rainy-season thunderstorm, reaching across to touch each other and turning the avenue into a dark tunnel. The duplexes with gravelcovered driveways and BEWARE OF DOGS signs in the front yard soon gave way to bungalows with driveways the length of two cars and then blocks of flats with wide stretches of space in front of them instead of driveways. Kevin drove slowly, muttering Aunty Ifeoma’s house number as if that would make us