Love, lies and loneliness

The very first time I came across a description of this book, previously published under the title The Nigerwife (Atria Books, 2023), I was intrigued. It tells the story of a young black British woman who gets married to an international student she meets at university. A few years later, seduced by the idea of a more comfortable life with household staff and 24/7 childcare, she moves with her Nigerian husband to live in his parents' palatial compound in Lagos.

The idea of this woman moving to an alien culture as a result of her marriage had immediate resonance for me, because as a child growing up in Dhaka long before the internet era, I had often wondered about my parents' friends, and also some of our family members, who were married to foreigners. Didn't these bideshi wives feel lonely, I wondered, living so far away and so disconnected from their own countries and their natal families?

Most of them seemed happy enough to me, making annual pilgrimages to visit their countries of origin. Until they clearly weren't. And that's when one would hear about an auntie or a family friend who had, for example, "gone home to London for a bit."

Sometimes they did return. At other times, their husbands left to join them wherever they were (that turned out to be the case more than once in my own extended family). And in a minority of cases, their names would gradually be forgotten as time passed, because they were never mentioned again in front of us kids.

As I grew older, the complexities of such international, intercultural, and often interfaith marriages seemed to become ever more obvious, and I began considering the hardy souls who attempted love marriages across distant borders as brave hearts indeed.

These cross-cultural tensions, and sometimes profound loneliness, as well as the flamboyant lifestyles of rich Nigerians, are all themes that feature in the book. But a key element of the novel centres around how tracing a missing person in a city like Lagos is a very different prospect from dealing with, say, the UK police.

Originally of West Indian descent and a British citizen, "the Lagos wife" of the title is Nicole Oruwari, the young and beautiful wife of a wealthy businessman, Tonye, and the mother of their two little boys. Nicole has spent the last several years living in the lap of luxury with her well-heeled in-laws.

So, you would think that when she suddenly goes missing, no stone would be left unturned in the hunt for her. But as her visiting aunt Claudine, who has her own fraught past with Nicole to contend with, finds out—after she comes from London to Lagos to check on how the search for Nicole is progressing—the situation is far from the fast-moving investigation that Claudine has been imagining. On the contrary, both Nicole's in-laws and her husband seem less than invested in the search. For reasons that will be clear to any South Asian, they appear more worried about the potential of scandals involved.

The Lagos police are also remarkably non-committal regarding Nicole's possible whereabouts. But there are reasons for that too, as Claudine begins to discover to her dismay. Because aside from her suspicions about possible infidelity on Tonye's part—based on the unwelcome discovery of an item hidden in his suitcase—Nicole has been keeping secrets of her own. And her biggest mistake might just be miscalculating what a Nigerian man considers desirable conduct in a woman, compared to what is deemed acceptable in the more permissive western culture in which Nicole grew up.

"Nigerwife" is a (non-derogatory) term used to describe the foreign wives of Nigerian men, and it is also the title of an association of women set up to look after these expat wives' interests, and to help them adapt to Nigerian society. What some of the Nigerwives eventually  come to realise is just how little power they have in a society where their standing is based on the regard (or lack thereof) in which they are held by their husbands and in-law families.

What really happened to Nicole emerges slowly, and in somewhat ambiguous terms. In the meantime, what the reader learns is a great deal about the culture and values of Nigerian society and what it means to be a Nigerwife, which I found fascinating. This story is more than a conventional domestic drama, and it comes with a breathtaking plot twist involving Nicole's relationship with Claudine, that is revealed late in the game (hint: it's probably not what you think). Hence, for a variety of reasons, The Lagos Wife is an interesting read—and something of a cautionary tale as well.

Farah Ghuznavi is a writer, translator and development worker. Her work has been published in 11 countries across Asia, Africa, Europe and the USA. Writer in Residence with Commonwealth Writers, she published a short story collection titled Fragments of Riversong (Daily Star Books, 2013), and edited the Lifelines anthology (Zubaan Books, 2012). She is currently working on her new short story collection and is on Instagram @farahghuznavi.