Her narrative arc and its conclusion demonstrate how little a mother can know about her own child and how a mother’s love can affirm a child’s identity even after death. It marked him, you see, it cut him down like a tree.” While the reader watches Vivek’s life grow, we wait to see what will befall them, and the answer makes our heart break even more for Vivek and their cousin Osita, who loves Vivek so fiercely he does not know how to manage the feeling.īeyond the pain we watch Vivek endure, perhaps the second most heartbreaking storyline is Kavita’s, as we watch her try to find answers as to why her child’s dead, naked body ends up rolled in cloth on her front porch, missing the Ganesh necklace that was otherwise never removed. The sorrow into which Vivek was born never leaves their short life, for “this is how Vivek was born, after death and into grief. Through a chorus of family and friends’ voices trying to make sense of the death, the reader watches the compassion, confusion, and contradiction surrounding one person’s quest to affirm their identity.īorn on the day of their grandmother, Ahunna’s, death, Vivek becomes her incarnation, solidified by the starfish-shaped scar on Vivek’s body that resembles Kavita’s, Vivek’s mother.
The why of their death (pronoun carefully chosen based on the development of the title character) feels obvious from the start-but one should not be so foolhardy as to predict anything in this novel.
Knowing Vivek dies before one even opens the book, the reader’s tension mounts over the how. THE DEATH OF VIVEK OJI breaks the reader’s heart at every turn.
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