For every law student (who’s not already married), their Call to the Bar ceremony is the closest experience they’ll have to a wedding. There’s a lot of spending, preparation, photoshoots, souvenirs, and dressing up. There are also a lot of felicitations from family, friends, and even old-time acquaintances they might have lost contact with.
Deep into the chaos of these activities, *George reached out to *Grace, who had just passed her bar exams and was preparing for her Call to the Bar ceremony. She was in Abuja, at the headquarters of the Nigerian Law School, doing her clearance and scrolling through the congratulatory comments on her Facebook post about passing her bar exams when she saw his comment.
“Immediately I saw his name, I knew he was the one. The last time I heard from him was when he left for university in 2013. So I clicked his profile to check him out.”
There wasn’t much to see on his profile, except that he had an active story posted within the 24-hour time frame, and when Grace clicked the story, she found out that he was still enmeshed in the activity that formed her fondest memory of him: cooking. So she replied to that story, and just like that, two old neighbours were reconnected. This was in 2021.
A day before her call date, he asked her on a date at the Central Park restaurant in Maitama. Never the unadventurous eater, Grace asked for a simple dish of fries and chicken. George went for the prawn pesto melt and Long Island. The last time they spent together was 9 years ago at George’s family home, where he had just made ove, a traditional Ebira staple made from water yam pudding. She hadn’t eaten it before and quickly fell in love with it.
“Back then, I didn’t particularly like him in the way you like someone you’re emotionally attracted to. But there was something deeply fascinating about a guy who could cook virtually anything as good as anyone else, including traditional meals.”
As with every great food date between single people, the friendship quickly blossomed into late-night conversations and other dates. “While serving in Abuja in 2022, he would pop in during my breaks and take me to either Niger-Delta restaurant or Cilantro, where we would eat the food every Nigerian ate at Indian restaurants: Chicken Biryani. Not like I enjoyed these meals very much, but the conversations in between were the highlights.
While Grace didn’t consider George a physical specimen of masculine beauty, he was charming and sensitive, and these qualities were endearing enough for her to agree to let him come around to cook for her at her home.
“Knowing what I know now, maybe I should have let that date be the end of our meeting. I had no idea that inviting him over would be me getting into something I couldn’t get out of quickly enough.”
At that time, Grace was putting up in her modestly furnished one-bedroom apartment in Jahi, Abuja. The first time George came over, he brought along all the ingredients he had bought from the market himself. “That was the cutest thing ever,” Grace gushed.
George didn’t come all the way to cook jollof rice, vegetable soup, or anything else that made up any traditional Nigerian dish. He made nasi goreng, an Indonesian-style fried rice, and Grace watched as he transformed her tiny kitchen into an intercontinental restaurant backroom. It was the best meal she had ever eaten, even though she wouldn’t have chosen it from any menu if she had visited a fine dining restaurant alone.
Once he made that meal, she decided that as long as she and George were in contact, she wouldn’t eat out with him and would always make him prepare their meals.
“He never made regular meals like rice or stew. Even when he wanted to make something as mainstream as noodles, he didn’t make it the regular way. He would want to cook Indomie, but he would make it ‘garlic butter instant noodles.’”
In the middle of this gastronomic adventure with George and the conversations they had in between, she realised that her pressing urge to spend time with him wasn’t about just the food anymore. They shared a mutual likeness for themselves that wasn’t particularly existent when they grew up together as neighbours many years ago. Somewhere during the trips between the dining room and the kitchen, they had taken a detour into the bedroom and fallen into themselves, consuming themselves with as much relish as they consumed his meals.
They had fallen in love, and without a formal request, she had assumed a relationship between them. Until George told her about his upcoming wedding.
“I really don’t want to fully divulge all that I went through after that revelation. It was even the way he told me that shocked me most, as casually as possible as if I should just understand and shrug and just continue our thing with him.”
There was the expected reaction, of course. She was hurt, and she made that clear and let the hurt eat her out from the inside. “But then I let him come around for one last conversation where I wanted to end things with him formally. The mistake I made was to let him cook for me again, and by that time, I hadn’t realised how much good food meant to me.“
A few weeks later, George got married, and that should have ended the whole chapter with Grace, right? No.
Every other weekend, Grace, who has since moved to a much more spacious apartment, would clean and set up her kitchen and wait. George would hobble into her apartment clutching a bag of food supplies in his arms, and for the next few hours, they would fall back into his pre-wedding routine, where he made magic with his hands in the kitchen and elsewhere.
What did they do on special days such as her birthdays and Valentine’s Day? I asked her.
He comes around on my birthdays and takes me to any restaurant of my choosing. Of course, I believe he cooks better than most places we visit, but for now, that’s all I can ask for. On Valentine’s Day, he has to be with his wife, so there’s not much I can do other than just go about my day like nothing is happening.”
Grace has no active relationship outside of George, and that’s because she believes that she has an affection for him that goes beyond food, and that would be difficult to replicate with someone else. “For now, we are still very much in love, I’d like to think. I think his wife is incredibly lucky. Sometimes, I stalk her page on IG to see what he’s been cooking for her hahaha.”
Grace would not have imagined herself intertwined in an entanglement with a married man, but then she insists that her travails began when she let him start cooking for her before she realised he was in a serious commitment.
“I guess there’s something about the magic of food that we often take for granted, like its power to mess up with our emotions in a way that we didn’t see coming,” she said.
*George and Grace are not the actual names of the respondents.
