By Tomi Obaro

In the photo they are eating something out of frame, pounded yam, perhaps, or maybe eba. They hadn’t bothered to take off their graduation robes; they were ravenous, tired from the heat; their bottoms sore from the plastic chairs they had sat in for hours; their feet swollen from the high-heeled shoes they had worn for the ceremony. Funmi sits on the left. She had pinned a yellow flower to her graduation cap so her loose, bouncy curls, courtesy of Mama Fatima’s hair rollers and not, as many people seemed to think, a biological gift from her late Lebanese mother, frame her face just so. Enitan sits in the middle, her hand hiding her laugh. She had gotten her hair relaxed as well, but the results were not as striking. She was glad that her graduation cap added volume to what was now chin-length, lackluster hair. She had worn powder to mute the impact of her shiny forehead and to cover the smattering of acne that dotted her cheeks. Zainab sits on Enitan’s right-hand side. She wears a tight black scarf that pulls back the hair around her face, and she has twisted the ends of the scarf into a low knot at the nape of her neck so it looks like a sophisticated chignon.

Zainab and Funmi were the striking beauties of the trio—“Coke and Fanta” people would joke when they would see the three of them walking together on campus. That Enitan never got a nickname was a slight she was used to. “You attract beauty,” a boy had told her once, but he had meant this quite literally; she attracted beauty only in the sense that she herself was not beautiful but her two best friends were.

Enitan had wanted to mark their graduation with some sort of pageantry; she was the unabashed sentimentalist of the group, prone to easy tears. She procured a candle used when there was no light and had stuck it in the swallow since they had no cake. Funmi had rolled her eyes at first, saying it was childish, but then Zainab lit the candle and they all erupted into peals of laughter, their shoulders juddering, their stomachs aching from the strain of giggling so hard. The photo hadn’t captured that moment, though, only the aftermath, when Zainab had taken the candle out and they were all eating greedily with their hands, slurping ogbono soup off their fingers.

Though well acquainted with unexpected sorrow, they were still so excitable that day, drunk with the potential they believe they have—at nineteen, twenty-one, and twenty-two, their lives stretch out before them, vast and expansive. They feel fortunate—they are fortunate.

One of them marries a good man and has four sons, four tall, dark sons with cheekbones sharp as cutlasses and milk-white teeth. She will be surrounded by so much steady and abiding affection, so unlike the love she coveted from the romance novels she read voraciously in school, with their dramatic declarations and epic back-and-forth. But then there’s tragedy—the usual, ordinary, ruthlessly unromantic kind. Three strokes and just like that she has an incapacitated husband, and the looming, imminent prospect of life without him. It is so hard to think of what she will be when he leaves her. She has been wife, then mother for so long.

Meanwhile, the one who brought the three of them together suddenly leaves the country, less than a year after this photo is taken, opting to marry the first man who ever really looks at her. She had never known what it felt like to be gazed upon with rapt admiration, to say something and know that she will be listened to. It’s an intoxicating feeling—this attention. For a long time, she will think it is enough to sustain her. She is wrong.

And one of them will become quite rich, as in she-has-an-apartment-in-London, shops-at-Harrods rich, as in she-also-has-a-house-in-Lekki-and-a-sprawling-compound-in-her-husband’s-village rich. As in tinted-black-SUV-windows rich and walk-in-closet-full-of-brand-name-shoes-she-seldom-wears rich, as in drivers-and-servants-and-what-her-husband-does-is-ill-defined-and-definitely-involves-bribery, but-she-prefers-not-to-think-about-it rich.

These three women are essentially sisters, though Funmi would chafe at the sickly sweetness of such a term. Their love has the makings of an ancient habit; it is automatic and unyielding. And though their unexpected separation so shortly after graduation tests their friendship, they remain steadfastly in each others’ lives. And now they are going to be reunited, for the first time since this photo was printed and handed out to each of them, a few days after their college graduation ceremony in Zaria, Kaduna.

Excerpt from “Dele Weds Destiny” copyright © 2022 by Tomi Obaro.

About the book: Zainab, Funmi and Enitan first meet at University in northern Nigeria, all learning how to become themselves. It’s an experience that binds the three very different women together. When Enitan moves to New York to elope with a white man, Zainab and Funmi are left behind, with drastically different fortunes. Over the course of thirty years, their lives and friendships diverge and change. Enitan is separating from her husband, trying to understand her daughter Remi. Zainab finds herself the sole breadwinner for her husband and their four sons. And Funmi is living a life of confined luxury, as the wife of a successful, shady businessman. But theirs is a friendship that can endure decades of distance. And in 2015, they are reunited for the first time for the wedding of Funmi’s daughter, Destiny. Here they will reflect on their pasts, the things they loved and lost – but the present brings unexpected surprises too, because their daughters, Remi and Destiny, might just be as rebellious and open-hearted as they once were.

Tomi Obaro (@TomiObaro) is an editor at BuzzFeed News. She lives in Brooklyn. Dele Weds Destiny is her debut novel.

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