Purple Hibiscus

go. He doesn’t wear pant oh! Head of State must go. He doesn’t wear pant oh! Where is running water? Where is light? Where is petrol?”
    “The singing is so loud I thought they were right outside,” Aunty Ifeoma said.
    “Will they come here?” I asked.
    Aunty Ifeoma put an arm around me and drew me close. She smelled of talcum powder. “No,
nne
, we are fine. The people who might worry are those that live near the vice chancellor. Last time, the students burned a senior professor’s car.”
    The singing was louder but not closer. The students were invigorated now. Smoke was rising in thick, blinding fumes that blended into the star-filled sky. Crashing sounds of breaking glass peppered the singing.
    “All we are saying, sole administrator must go! All we are saying, he must go! No be so? Na so!”
    Shouts and yells accompanied the singing. A solo voice rose, and the crowds cheered. The cool night wind, heavy with thesmell of burning, brought clear snatches of the resonating voice speaking pidgin English from a street away.
    “Great Lions and Lionesses! We wan people who dey wear clean underwear, no be so? Abi the Head of State dey wear common underwear, sef, talkless of clean one? No!”
    “Look,” Obiora said, lowering his voice as if the group of about forty students jogging past could possibly hear him. They looked like a fast-flowing dark stream, illuminated by the torches and burning sticks they held.
    “Maybe they are catching up with the rest from down campus,” Amaka said, after the students had passed.
    We stayed out to listen for a little while longer before Aunty Ifeoma said we had to go in and sleep.
    AUNTY IFEOMA CAME HOME that afternoon with the news of the riot. It was the worst one since they became commonplace some years ago. The students had set the sole administrator’s house on fire; even the guest house behind it had burned to the ground. Six university cars had been burned down, as well. “They say the sole administrator and his wife were smuggled out in the boot of an old Peugeot 404,
o di egwu
,” Aunty Ifeoma said, waving around a circular. When I read the circular, I felt a tight discomfort in my chest like the heartburn I got after eating greasy akara. It was signed by the registrar. The university was closed down until further notice as a result of the damage to university property and the atmosphere of unrest. I wondered what it meant, if it meant Aunty Ifeoma would leave soon, if it meant we would no longer come to Nsukka.
    During my fitful siesta, I dreamed that that the sole administrator was pouring hot water on Aunty Ifeoma’s feet in thebathtub of our home in Enugu. Then Aunty Ifeoma jumped out of the bathtub and, in the manner of dreams, jumped into America. She did not look back as I called to her to stop.
    I was still thinking about the dream that evening as we all sat in the living room, watching TV. I heard a car drive in and park in front of the flat, and I clasped my shaky hands together, certain it was Father Amadi. But the banging on the door was unlike him; it was loud, rude, intrusive.
    Aunty Ifeoma flew off her chair. “
Onyezi
? Who wants to break my door, eh?”
    She opened the door only a crack, but two wide hands reached in and forced the door ajar. The heads of the four men who spilled into the flat grazed the door frame. Suddenly, the flat seemed cramped, too small for the blue uniforms and matching caps they wore, for the smell of stale cigarette smoke and sweat that came in with them, for the raw bulge of muscle under their sleeves.
    “What is it? Who are you?” Aunty Ifeoma asked.
    “We are here to search your house. We’re looking for documents designed to sabotage the peace of the university. We have information that you have been in collaboration with the radical student groups that staged the riots…” The voice sounded mechanical, the voice of a person reciting something written. The man speaking had tribal marks all over his cheek; there seemed to be no area of skin free of the ingrained lines. The other three men walked briskly into the flat as he spoke. One opened the drawers of the sideboard, leaving each open. Two went into the bedrooms.
    “Who sent you here?” Aunt Ifeoma asked.
    “We are from the special security unit in Port Harcourt.”
    “Do you have any papers to show me? You cannot just walk into my house.”
    “Look at this
yeye
woman oh! I said we are from the special security unit!” The tribal marks curved