Nadira Naipaul

Nadira, Lady Naipaul (born Nadira Khannum Alvi; 1953), is a Kenyan-born British Pakistani journalist and the widow of novelist Sir V. S. Naipaul.

Biography She was born in Mombasa, Kenya. At the age of 16 she married an engineer, Agha Hashim, who was 26 years her senior. They had two daughters, Gul Zehra (aka Naeema Hashim) and Sumar Zahra, who lived with various relatives after the marriage ended. Nadira's second marriage was to Iqbal Shah, by whom she had a daughter Maleeha, whom her third husband V. S. Naipaul later adopted, and a son, Nadir Shah.

She worked as a journalist for The Nation, a Pakistani newspaper, for ten years before meeting V. S. Naipaul and moving to England after their marriage. They married in 1996, two months after the death of Naipaul's first wife, Patricia (formerly Patricia Hale).

Lady Naipaul's brother, Ameer Faisal Alavi, a former two-star general in the Pakistan Army, was assassinated in 2008.