Arranged Marriage and the Vanishing Roots

A poor barely educated village boy Eberechi works his way through life and makes a success of his retail clothing business. He decides to compensate for his lack of formal education by sending his teenage twin sons overseas to study in the United States. He spares no finances in the education of his sons. The latter do not take into consideration the enormous sacrifices being made by their father. They live luxuriously and squander their funds. They enter into marriages of convenience which are later to blossom into true love after the twins sons settle down to raise families. But the marriages are not in conformity with what the twins’ parents are familiar with and so fail to gain the necessary recognition and support of the twins ’parents. These latter connive with each other and secure a wife by arranged marriage for each of their twin sons. The twin sons lured home by the huge financial benefits which acceptance of the arranged marriages would bring, acquiesce to the arranged marriages, collect the benefits abandon their new brides and disappear back to America. Fame and fortune smile on the abandoned brides when two of the biggest economic pillars of the community fall in love with, and marry the abandoned brides bringing them over to America. Mischance and curiosity again bring one of the twins into an unplanned collision course with his abandoned former bride and the law. The law of retributive justice appears to take its toll on the estranged former bridegroom and his brother who had grossly alienated themselves from their roots and denied their children the opportunity of speaking even the language of their fathers. Time the healer of wounds is expected to bring about the healing even in the midst of the failed expectations of a distraught father, a garrulous society and a rapidly changing world. A compelling story plays out, with intrigues, deep cultural attachment, squander mania, manipulations, financial arm twisting, love, cheating and a mother’s unflinching devotion to his children. 3