Purple Hibiscus

bedroom door and covered with a wrapper. I listened to him and marveled at the wonder in his voice, at how much lighter the brown of his pupils was. I offered to carry the next container, but Amaka laughed and said I had soft bones and could not carry it.
    When we finished, we said morning prayers in the living room, a string of short prayers punctuated by songs. Aunty Ifeoma prayed for the university, for the lecturers and administration, for Nigeria, and finally, she prayed that we might findpeace and laughter today. As we made the sign of the cross, I looked up to seek out Jaja’s face, to see if he, too, was bewildered that Aunty Ifeoma and her family prayed for, of all things,
laughter
.
    We took turns bathing in the narrow bathroom, with half-full buckets of water, warmed for a while with a heating coil plunged into them. The spotless tub had a triangular hole at one corner, and the water groaned like a man in pain as it drained. I lathered over with my own sponge and soap—Mama had carefully packed my toiletries—and although I scooped the water with a shallow cup and poured it slowly over my body, I still felt slippery as I stepped on the old towel placed on the floor.
    Aunty Ifeoma was at the dining table when I came out, dissolving a few spoonfuls of dried milk in a jug of cold water. “If I let these children take the milk themselves, it will not last a week,” she said, before taking the tin of Carnation dried milk back to the safety of her room. I hoped that Amaka would not ask me if my mother did that, too, because I would stutter if I had to tell her that we took as much creamy Peak milk as we wanted back home. Breakfast was okpa that Obiora had dashed out to buy from somewhere nearby. I had never had okpa for a meal, only for a snack when we sometimes bought the steam-cooked cowpea-and-palm-oil cakes on the drive to Abba. I watched Amaka and Aunty Ifeoma cut up the moist yellow cake and did the same. Aunty Ifeoma asked us to hurry up. She wanted to show Jaja and me the campus and get back in time to cook. She had invited Father Amadi to dinner.
    “Are you sure there’s enough fuel in the car, Mom?” Obiora asked.
    “Enough to take us around campus, at least. I really hope fuel comes in the next week, otherwise when we resume, I will have to walk to my lectures.”
    “Or take
okada
,” Amaka said, laughing.
    “I will try that soon at this rate.”
    “What are
okada
?” Jaja asked. I turned to stare at him, surprised. I did not think he would ask that question or any other question.
    “Motorcycles,” Obiora said. “They have become more popular than taxis.”
    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 unusualflowers. 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