Purple Hibiscus Read Online Free PDF

while I wiped.
    MAMA DID NOT COME home that night, and Jaja and I had dinner alone. We did not talk about Mama. Instead, we talked about the three men who were publicly executed two days before, for drug trafficking. Jaja had heard some boys talking about it in school. It had been on television. The men were tied to poles, and their bodies kept shuddering even after the bullets were no longer being pumped into them. I told Jaja what a girl in my class had said: that her mother turned their TV off, asking why she should watch fellow human beings die, asking what was wrong with all those people who had gathered at the execution ground.
    After dinner, Jaja said grace, and at the end he added a short prayer for Mama. Papa came home when we were in our roomsstudying, according to our schedules. I was drawing pregnant stick images on the inner flap of my
Introductory Agriculture for Junior Secondary Schools
when he came into my room. His eyes were swollen and red, and somehow that made him look younger, more vulnerable.
    “Your mother will be back tomorrow, about the time you get back from school. She will be fine,” he said.
    “Yes, Papa.” I looked away from his face, back at my books.
    He held my shoulders, rubbing them in gentle circular motions.
    “Stand up,” he said. I stood up and he hugged me, pressed me close so that I felt the beat of his heart under his soft chest.
    MAMA CAME HOME the next afternoon. Kevin brought her in the Peugeot 505 with the factory name emblazoned on the passenger door, the one that often took us to and from school. Jaja and I stood waiting by the front door, close enough for our shoulders to touch, and we opened the door before she got to it.
    “
Umu m
,” she said, hugging us. “My children.” She wore the same white T-shirt with GOD IS LOVE written on the front. Her green wrapper hung lower than usual on her waist; it had been knotted with a lazy effort at the side. Her eyes were vacant, like the eyes of those mad people who wandered around the roadside garbage dumps in town, pulling grimy, torn canvas bags with their life fragments inside.
    “There was an accident, the baby is gone,” she said.
    I moved back a little, stared at her belly. It still looked big, still pushed at her wrapper in a gentle arc. Was Mama sure thebaby was gone? I was still staring at her belly when Sisi came in. Sisi’s cheekbones were so high they gave her an angular, eerily amused expression, as if she were mocking you, laughing at you, and you would never know why. “Good afternoon, Madam,
nno
,” she said. “Will you eat now or after you bathe?” “Eh?” For a moment Mama looked as though she did not know what Sisi had said. “Not now, Sisi, not now. Get me water and a towel.”
    Mama stood hugging herself in the center of the living room, near the glass table, until Sisi brought a plastic bowl of water and a kitchen towel. The étagère had three shelves of delicate glass, and each one held beige ballet-dancing figurines. Mama started at the lowest layer, polishing both the shelf and the figurines. I sat down on the leather sofa closest to her, close enough to reach out and straighten her wrapper.
    “
Nne
, this is your study time. Go upstairs,” she said.
    “I want to stay here.”
    She slowly ran the cloth over a figurine, one of its matchstick-size legs raised high in the air, before she spoke. “
Nne
, go.”
    I went upstairs then and sat staring at my textbook. The black type blurred, the letters swimming into one another, and then changed to a bright red, the red of fresh blood. The blood was watery, flowing from Mama, flowing from my eyes.
    Later, at dinner, Papa said we would recite sixteen different novenas. For Mama’s forgiveness. And on Sunday, the first Sunday of Trinity, we stayed back after Mass and started the novenas. Father Benedict sprinkled us with holy water. Someof the holy water landed on my lips, and I tasted the stale saltiness of it as we prayed. If Papa felt Jaja or