Girls of Riyadh (12 page)
Authors: Rajaa Alsanea
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: June 25, 2004
Subject: Return to Um Nuwayyir
One reader who says she has followed my e-mails from the beginning was extremely thrilled by the ending of my previous e-mail and sent me the following message: YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!! Finally! What we’ve been longing for! We were running out of patience waiting for this Firas to make a move!
Alf mabrook,
many congratulations to Sadeem!
How enchanting this give-and-take is! It compels me to forge ahead with this series of mine, this scandal-mongering, highly committed and seriously reform-minded series. Aren’t messages like this a thousand times nicer than the others I get every day telling me how liberal and how decadent I am?
Some say I speak of the faults of others but claim to be faultless myself by simply removing myself from the events told. No, I’m not making any such claim. I’m not pretending to be some kind of paragon of perfection, because I don’t consider the actions of my friends to be wrong or sinful in the first place!
I am every one of my friends, and my story is their story. And if I have refrained from revealing my identity at present for my own private reasons, I will reveal it someday when those reasons no longer exist. Then I will tell you my whole story, just as you want to hear it, with complete sincerity and transparency. As for now, let’s return to our darling Gammoorah.
A
ll this time Gamrah had been anxiously pondering her unknown future. As Sadeem had done with Waleed, for many weeks Gamrah went on dreaming that Rashid would return to her or at least would make some attempt to contact her after coming to regret how awful he had been, and how terribly he had wronged her. But when that didn’t happen she began to worry about her future. Would she remain parked in her father’s house like an old piece of furniture in the back storeroom? Would she return to the university to finish her studies? Would the university administration even allow that, now that she was a whole year behind her classmates? Or should she sign up for one of the courses offered by private institutes and women’s associations to fill her free time and obtain some kind of certificate? It didn’t really matter what it was.
“Mama, I want some more limes with salt.”
“Too much lime isn’t good for you, my dear. You’ll get a tummy ache.”
“Ufff! I’m just asking for some lime and salt, for God’s sake! What if I was craving something
really
hard to get? Then what would you have done?”
“I seek God’s refuge from your tongue!” Gamrah’s mother turned to her housemaid. “Bring her this lime, may she get acid tummy for it, then maybe she’ll know how to control her temper!”
Gamrah’s younger brothers, Nayif and Nawwaf, were delighted that she had come home. They were always trying to divert her and cheer her up, inviting her to come and play Nintendo or PlayStation with them. But the severe mood swings that Gamrah suffered—brought on by Rashid and by Rashid’s child, who had begun to rule her life even before he was born—made her tense and ready to argue at the drop of a hat.
“Is this the way I’m going to be for God knows how long? God give you no rest, Rashid! May the Lord not absolve you, wherever you go and whatever you do! May what you have done to me be done to your sisters and daughters! O Lord, make my heart cool down and make his burn and take away the pain from me and put it all on him and his cheap mistress.”
S
ADEEM GOT
in touch with her friends the minute she arrived in Riyadh, and the four girls agreed to meet the next day at Um Nuwayyir’s house. They hadn’t all gotten together for a long time—after all, each of them had been caught up fully in her own circumstances.
Um Nuwayyir offered them cups of chai tea with milk and cardamom sweetened with lots of sugar in the Indian-Kuwaiti style, as she scolded them for neglecting to visit her. Sadeem was the only one who had remembered Um Nuwayyir during her travels: she brought her a luxurious cashmere shawl that absolutely delighted Um Nuwayyir, and she congratulated her on the return of her son Nuri from America, where she had enrolled him two years before in a special boarding school for troubled teens.
When the counselors informed Um Nuwayyir that Nuri’s condition was psychological rather than physiological, and that it was a temporary phase any adolescent might go through—especially one who was experiencing family problems—Um Nuwayyir breathed an enormous sigh of relief. She was well aware that even if showing signs of being homosexual might not be considered an illness in America, in Saudi Arabia it was an utter calamity, an illness worse than cancer. She had almost fainted when the doctors told her, at the start of it all, that her son was “defining his sexual identity.” Over time, they said, he would choose between masculinity and femininity. And when Um Nuwayyir asked what would happen if his choice rested on femininity, she was aghast to hear them say that at that point it was possible to intervene medically to help him with a surgical operation and hormone treatment along with psychological counseling.
Nuri stayed in that school for two years, before deciding on masculinity, at which point he was promptly returned to his mother’s embrace. Her spirits soared when she saw that her only child had grown into a man she was proud of, someone she could stick in the eyes of his father and everyone else who had slandered and despised her and her son. Especially all those female relatives and neighbors and coworkers!
Once the girls were reunited, Michelle could talk of nothing but the corruption of Saudi society, its backwardness, its benighted rigidity and overall reactionary nature. She was bursting with enthusiasm about traveling in two days’ time to begin a new life in a healthy place—somewhere other than “this rotten-to-the-core, toxic environment that would make anyone sick,” as she put it. Sadeem, meanwhile, cursed Waleed after every sentence she uttered. As for Gamrah, she kept up a steady stream of complaints about her mother’s constant harassment; she moaned that her mother forbade her to go out the way she used to, just because she was now a divorcée and, her mother claimed, all eyes were fixed on her, waiting for a single misstep and prepared to spread the most lurid rumors about her.
Gamrah believed her mother trusted her but was too concerned with what other people thought. Her mother had never learned the truth of the old adage that anyone who tries to watch all the people all the time will die of exhaustion. Dozens of times every day, Gamrah was told the same thing: “What? Did you forget you are a divorcée?” Of course she hadn’t forgotten it, not for a single second. But wasn’t that painful enough without having her freedom so horribly curtailed? And without spending so much time worrying about all the busybodies and their stupid chatter? Believe it or not, this was the first day that she had been allowed to leave the house since her return from America three weeks before, and she did not think her mother would let her repeat an outing like this anytime soon.
Late as usual, laid-back Lamees had pranced in balancing a platter of lasagna in one hand and a pan of crème brûlée in the other, and swearing they would love both. The three girls glared at her as Um Nuwayyir got up to help her carry her load to the kitchen. Lamees asked her why everyone was in such a bad mood.
“Honey, look, these girls—every one of them is up to her eyebrows in troubles, and then you come sailing in without a care in the world and bugging them with trying your macaronis and your sweets? You never quit, do you?”
“What harm can a little comfort food do? So, am I supposed to be like them and act suicidal, too? May God give them something better, sure, but this is no way to be! Look at them, every one of them sitting there with a scowl on her face. Reliving their stories only brings more grief!”
“Don’t say that. You don’t know how heartbroken each one of those girls is. Damn men! Bastards! They have always been such a pain and headache!”
But Lamees was determined to snatch her friends from the abyss of misery. She pulled from her handbag the latest hot-off-the-press, thin-as-toast book by Maggie Farah on the zodiac, which she had ordered from Lebanon. The girls immediately became more animated when they caught sight of their source book for love. They began their usual give-and-take.
SADEEM:
Lamees, please check out the traits of the Capricorn man for me.
LAMEES:
“The Capricorn man is emotional by nature, but he has very little ability to awaken feelings and emotions in the other partner. He is a rational creature who does not react quickly, but when he does react he loses his senses completely and he can’t control his behavior. The Capricorn man is exacting; he holds fast to customs and traditions and doesn’t go in for adventure and risk. He is never led by sentiment and rarely influenced by his feelings. Family attachments are important. Among his flaws are pride, egotism, and careerism.”
MICHELLE:
What’s the success rate for a Leo woman and a Cancer man relationship?
LAMEES:
Eighty percent.
SADEEM:
Is Virgo a better match with Aries or with Capricorn?
LAMEES:
With Capricorn,
of course!
I don’t even have to go to the book to know that! Look—see what’s written here. “The degree of harmony for the Virgo woman with the Aries man doesn’t get any higher than sixty percent. Between the Virgo woman and the Capricorn man it won’t go lower than ninety-five percent.” Way to go, girl! Obviously, you are getting over Waleed in no time! C’mon, spell it out,
Yalla,
who’s this Capricorn you’re interested in?
GAMRAH:
Listen to a little advice from me, girls! Just stop dreaming. Forget all this and leave it to God. Don’t get your hopes up when it comes to men, because you’ll get the exact opposite of what you were hoping for! Believe me.
LAMEES:
So if he’s the opposite of what I hope for, what’s going to force me to take him?
GAMRAH:
Fate, I guess.
MICHELLE:
Let’s be honest with each other here. If Rashid hadn’t appealed to you, you wouldn’t have accepted him. You had the right to say no, but you didn’t. So you better drop all this “fate” theory, all this stuff about us not having any hand in any of our life paths. We always act the role of the helpless females, completely overcome by circumstances, and as if we don’t have a say in anything or opinions of our own! Utterly passive! How long are we going to keep on being such cowards, and not have even the courage to see our choices through, whether they’re right or wrong?
The atmosphere immediately turned electric, as it always did when Michelle jumped in with her sharp views. Um Nuwayyir, as usual, intervened to try to calm them down with her jokes and comments. This was the last evening the three of them would be with Michelle before she left to study in America, and so everyone was managing to overlook her biting candor. But Gamrah found herself shrinking, secretly and silently, from the painful remarks Michelle always directed at her whenever the two of them were with the rest of the clique.
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: July 2, 2004
Subject: Fatimah the Shiite
I am dedicating this e-mail to two Shiite readers, Jaafar and Hussein, who both wrote in to inform me that even the Shiite community is devoutly following my story every week. It got me thinking how hard it must be to be different in a unicultural, uniethnic, unireligious country like Saudi. I feel sorry sometimes for those of us who are in some way…different.
L
amees’s move to the College of Medicine in Malaz put a serious strain on her friendship with Michelle. Each tried to ignore the new tension, but some pervasive, negative thing had begun to seep into their relationship. It all came to a head over Lamees’s new friend: Fatimah.
“Fatimah the Shiite”
*
—that’s what the
shillah
called her. But Lamees was completely confident that deep down none of her friends really cared whether Fatimah was Shiite or Sunni or a Sufi Muslim mystic or Christian or even Jewish; what bothered them was that she was just different from all of them, the first Shiite they had ever met, a stranger in their midst, an intruder in their close-knit Sunni circle. The long and short of it was that for people in their society, hanging out together went way beyond the simple matter of friendship; it was a big deal, a deep commitment that aroused all kinds of sensitivities, a social step more akin to engagement and marriage.
Lamees recalled her childhood friend Fadwa Al-Hasudi. Lamees did not usually gravitate toward people like Fadwa; she tended to befriend girls like herself who were lively and spirited. But one morning Fadwa surprised her with a question.
“Lamees, will you be my best friend?”
The proposal came just like that, without any preliminaries, like a marriage proposal in a Western country. And just as quickly Lamees agreed. She couldn’t have imagined that Fadwa would become the most jealous girl around.
Lamees “went with” Fadwa for several years and then she met Michelle. At first her relationship with Michelle was based on little more than sympathy for a new student who knew no one, but then they grew close. Fadwa became maliciously jealous and began to launch attacks on Lamees denouncing her around the school. The reports quickly reached her: “Fadwa says you talk to boys!” “Fadwa says your sister Tamadur is smarter than you are and you cheat off your sister to get better grades.” What really embittered Lamees was that Fadwa was two-faced; she kept proclaiming her innocence to Lamees’s face. There was nothing that Lamees could do except be cold to her until finally they graduated from high school and went their separate ways.
Lamees’s relationship with Fatimah was altogether different. It was founded on mutual attraction. Lamees marveled at Fatimah’s strength and sparkle, while Fatimah loved Lamees’s boldness and quick mind. All it took was a short while until, somewhat to their surprise, each had become the other’s closest friend.
After screwing up her courage, and then wondering how to phrase it, Lamees gently asked Fatimah about some things that baffled her when it came to Shiites. One day during Ramadan Lamees took her Fotoor
*
meal to Fatimah’s apartment so that they could break the fast together once the sun had gone down. On the way Lamees remembered (with a smile on her face) the days when she was afraid to eat any of the food offered to her by her Shiite classmates at the university. It was Gamrah and Sadeem who were always warning her to avoid the food; they insisted Shiites spit in their food if they knew a Sunni was going to eat it, even going so far as to poison it to obtain the blessing due to someone who slays a Sunni! So Lamees would accept the sweet pies and pastries from her Shiite classmates politely and then once out of sight toss them into the garbage can. She was even afraid that wrapped candy and pieces of gum had been doctored. Lamees never trusted any food from a Shiite until she met Fatimah.
Now Lamees put a small plate of dates in front of Fatimah to break the fast. But after the dusk call to prayer signaling the end of the fast, she noticed that Fatimah didn’t tear into the dates as she had expected. In fact, she was so busy preparing the Vimto
**
drink and the salad that she didn’t break her fast with so much as a single bite until twenty minutes later. Fatimah could see Lamees’s surprise. Sunnis break their fast as soon as the sound of the Athan
***
makes its way to their ears from the nearby mosque. But Fatimah told her friend that their custom was not to eat the moment they heard the call to prayer by a Sunni Imam,
§
but to wait awhile in order to be certain of nightfall, in a way of striving for accuracy.
Now Lamees’s curiosity about Shiite traditions was really roused. She plunged in, asking her friend about the decorations hung on the walls in her apartment. The elegant Arabic script suggested some religious meaning. Fatimah explained that the decorations were hung for some rites that the Shiites celebrated every year halfway through the Arabic month of Sha’ban, the month right before Ramadan.
Then Lamees asked Fatimah about some photographs she had seen in the wedding album of Fatimah’s older sister. At the time, she thought they were strange but refrained from asking about them. There were photos showing the bride and groom dipping their bare feet in a large silver basin, coins scattered around the bottom. Two grandmothers were pouring water over the couple’s feet. This was just one of their wedding traditions, Fatimah told her, akin to the practice of drawing patterns in henna on the bride’s hands or the elaborate unveiling ceremony. They would rub the bride’s and groom’s feet in water that had been blessed by having verses from the Qur’an and certain prayers recited over it. Coins were tossed in front of their feet as alms to bless their marriage.
Fatimah answered her friend’s questions simply and directly, laughing at the surprise and wonder on her face. When the conversation started to go too far, though, they both sensed the tension in the air. Either one of them could at any moment say something that would appear to disparage the other’s version of her faith. So they stopped the question-and-answer session and moved quietly into the living room to watch the popular sitcom
Tash ma Tash
the Saudi TV aired every Ramadan after Fotoor time. At least that was something that both Sunnis and Shiites in Saudi Arabia agreed on!
Tamadur was first to reject her sister’s relationship with this rejectionist. She made it very clear to Lamees that all of the girls she knew at college were making fun of the friendship.
“Lamees,
wallah,
I heard the girls saying things about her that are really bad! She lives by herself! Her family is in Qatif
*
so she can do whatever she wants while she’s in Riyadh for school. She goes out whenever she wants and comes home whenever she feels like it. She visits whoever she wants to, and whoever she wants visits her, too.”
“They’re lying. I went to her place and I saw how tough the security men were over there. They don’t let anyone in, and she can’t leave the place on her own, no way. Her brother has to be there for her to get out.”
“Lamees, whether it’s true or not, why do we need to be involved in this? If everyone is talking about her today, tomorrow they’ll talk about you, and they’ll say you’re a bad girl just like her! What is it with you? From Fadwa the psycho to Sarah the princess to Fatimah the Shiite? And the best friend you ever had is an American rebel that doesn’t worry about what people think!”
Lamees frowned at her sister’s mention of Sarah, the girl from the Saudi royal family who enrolled at their high school for senior year. Lamees had genuinely adored Sarah. The princess bewitched her with her modesty and her high principles—bewitched her in part because Lamees had never expected a princess to be anything but arrogant and pushy. She didn’t care in the least about what the girls said about her relationship with Sarah. They snickered about the fact that Lamees gave the princess wake-up calls every morning. But there was a perfectly good reason for it: Sarah was afraid that, with the huge palace she lived in and the large number of people in it, the servants would forget to wake her up on time. Lamees also used to finish some of Sarah’s homework for her—but not on a regular basis, as certain people claimed. And she only did it when she observed that Sarah was occupied with more important matters, official occasions and family rituals and social duties that Sarah would tell her about in advance. Lamees would invite Sarah to study in her own modest home on the days preceding the exams they had every month, so that Sarah could concentrate on her studying more than she could in the palace. As for the hurtful rumors going around among the girls at school which Tamadur would confront her with—that she was the princess’s servant and would do anything for her—they had no effect—if anything, they brought her closer to her new friend and made her even more anxious to prove her devotion.
With Fatimah, Lamees found herself for the first time friends with a girl so much like her that it was almost uncanny! The closer she got to Fatimah, the more she felt as though she were face to face with a soul mate. As usual, what others said about her didn’t bother her much, except that this time she did worry about how Michelle would feel. Michelle had forgiven her for her relationship with Sarah when she saw the way Sarah dropped her once they graduated. Sarah traveled to America, and she never again spoke to Lamees. At the time, Michelle had felt her own power, witnessing Lamees’s regret, hearing her plea for reconciliation and knowing how badly she wanted to regain the old friendship. But what would Michelle do now, if she felt Lamees had abandoned their friendship a second time? A better solution, as Lamees saw it, was just to hide the relationship from Michelle and the rest of the
shillah
. Her strategy backfired, though, when Tamadur, who had long been aggravated at what she thought of as her sister’s perverse ways, took it upon herself to inform the girls of everything.
So Michelle now knew the real reason for Lamees’s inexplicable disappearances. For weeks on end Lamees had been hiding behind a host of excuses: that studying medicine was so time-consuming, that the work was so difficult, that she had so much to learn! Now the hurtful truth was out—Lamees had been choosing her new friend’s company over that of her old
shillah
.
Lamees tried to justify her position to Sadeem, who was far ahead of everyone else in their clique when it came to being understanding, even indulgent, about such things.
“Try to see my side of things, Saddoomah! I love Michelle. All our lives we’ve been friends, and we’ll go on being friends, but she doesn’t have a right to keep me from getting to know other girls! Fatimah’s got a few things Michelle doesn’t have. You love Gamrah, but she has her faults, too, and if you found what she lacks in another girl, you’d get attached to that girl, right?”
“But Lammoosah, after all these years! It isn’t right to dump your lifelong friend just because you suddenly decide her personality is lacking some vital quality that you think you’ve just found in some other girl. That precious something didn’t matter to you before, though, because you lived years without it and you had
no problem.
Besides, the two of you are supposed to stick together through thick and thin. Suppose you were to get married and your husband turned out to be missing a certain something. Do you go and look for in other guys for what he’s lacking?”
“Yah, maybe! And if he doesn’t like it, then let him go find whatever he’s lacking and spare me the effort!”
“Wow, you’re one tough lady! Okay, look, I have a really serious question that’s bugging me so badly I’m about to burst. It’s about the Shiites.”
“What is it?”
With a twitch to her lips that gave away her mock-solemn expression, Sadeem asked: “Do Shiite men wear Sunni pants under their
thobes
?”
*
