Love is deliberately blind. He takes no notice of identity, age, position or possession. He is also deliberately obtuse. Having nearly drowned you in its rivers in the recent past, it almost never allows you world enough and time before you are plunged in again. Some of us grow mad, some of us grow bald, Halima Fernandez is just more radiant post-plunge.
When Providence is kind, marriage is a tree planted by rivers of water. Halima Fernandez has plucked and eaten the fruits of this bounteous tree and is all the better for it. Her marriage to Rwandan businessman and investment boss, Zubair Rudasingwa, is proving to be a satisfying one as the couple appears to have grown remarkably younger, barely different from teenagers in the heat of newfound love.
If it is not obvious yet, Halima Fernandez is not your typical woman. What numerous tabloids have against her name is that she is the widow of the late Belgium-based international businessman, Ambassador Anthonio Oladeinde Fernandez. Before she became the sixth wife of this late mogul, she was a beauty queen of Kano, cultured, fierce, a wild olive shoot that grew stubbornly out of the sands of the windy North. And then came marriage.
While relatively little can be inferred about this marriage to the late Fernandez, it was quite obvious that she loved him deeply. And then came his unfortunate death which brought along more than separation. In short, a typical Nollywood clip: Billionaire meets Beauty; Billionaire marries Beauty; Billionaire dies and leaves Beauty; relatives of Billionaire want their portion of the Billionaire’s fortune.
A lesser woman might have cried her eyes puffy, wept her heart out, and taken her place in the long queue of the widows of the land. Maybe she might have made a few terrible decisions and inadvertently followed the train of despair to the grave. But death scars us all differently. For some, it leaves a long and ugly mark, not altogether different from the cautioning effect of the Scarlet Letter. This Beauty wore her widowhood with dignity, and when love came beckoning a second time – this time wearing the form of the dashing Zubair Rudasingwa – he met her ready to take the plunge again.
And now the Beauty is now Queen. But more than that, the past is a distant and foreign country. With her new marriage came new hope and radiance.
The words of John Keats could not have fitted her better: a thing of beauty is a joy forever, [whose] loveliness increases. With Zubair Rudasingwa, her loveliness and joy increase evermore.
