Girls of Riyadh (21 page)

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: November 26, 2004

Subject: Patience Is the Key to Marriage

Some of you were saddened that Sadeem and Firas broke up. Others were glad that Firas chose a suitable & righteous wife instead of Sadeem, who would not have been a suitable & righteous mother to his children. One message contained the platitude that love after marriage is the only love that lasts, while premarital love is only frivolous play. Do you all really believe that?

L
amees would not have believed that her strategy of playing hard to get to conquer Nizar would demand so much patience! At first, she was convinced that three months would be time enough to ensnare him. It became clear, though, that this was a business that would require a great deal of savvy and patience. And as her admiration for Nizar grew, she found those two qualities diminishing.

She never called him and on the rare occasions that he called her, she tried to not always answer. But with every ring of her cell phone she would feel her usually unshakable resolve weaken. Her eyes would stay fixed on his number, glowing on the cell phone screen, until she picked up or the phone stopped ringing and her heart stopped its accelerated beating.

At first, the results were definitely satisfying. He showed an interest in her that indulged and gratified her vanity. From the start, she made it clear that their friendship did not mean he had the right to interfere or intrude in her life, asking her for an hour-by-hour run down of her daily schedule. And so he was constantly apologizing to her, justifying his concern about knowing when she was free by saying he wanted to be certain of not bothering her while she was busy. She also never returned his text messages. She informed him that she didn’t like to write messages, as she found that a waste of time and effort she didn’t have to spare. (Of course, had her cell phone fallen into his hands he would have found it crammed with text messages, sent and received, from her girlfriends and relatives, but he didn’t really need to know that!)

Gradually his obvious interest in her began to lessen, alarming her. His calls decreased noticeably, and his conversation became more serious and formal, as if he were beginning to set new limits on their relationship. Perhaps the time had come, Lamees thought, to ditch her plan. But she was afraid that she might regret her hastiness later on. After all, she was the one who always criticized her girlfriends for their naïveté and lack of patience when it came to men. She comforted herself with the thought that Nazir wasn’t the easy type—one of the main reasons she was attracted to him. She would be filled with pride if she was the one who ultimately captured his heart.

She tried to maintain her optimism throughout the three-month period that she had set to get the relationship on track. She reminded herself how much Nizar had seemed to like her, thinking hard to recall every single moment or gesture indicating his admiration. It seemed so easy the first month that she was back in Riyadh, when everything that had transpired in Jeddah was still fresh in her mind. He seemed to enjoy anything she said and did even if it was really silly or trivial, like telling a dumb joke or having to brew two cups of coffee first thing every morning. Even their phone conversations during the first month after classes began to imply some lingering, hidden affection, for even though she was often standoffish and disagreed with him openly on many things, he was always the first to call, and to apologize if need be.

As the second month went by, she started thinking about the moments with him that she hadn’t much noticed at the time, but that on deep reflection seemed meaningful. For instance, there was the memory of her last day at the hospital in Jeddah, when they had lunch together in the cafeteria. He pulled out a chair for her, something he had never done. And then he sat in the chair closest to hers, rather than across the table as usual, as if the chair across the table were farther away than he could be on the day of their farewell. And there was the way he so often tried to lure her into saying certain words that he liked to hear from her because of her particular way of saying them, like the word
water,
since she pronounced the
t
like a
d,
sounding just like the Americans. And the way he imitated the way she pronounced the word
exactly
in her Americanized accent: egg-zak-lee!

As the third month rolled around, Lamees counted two entire weeks since the last time they had been in touch. Two weeks in which she had gotten totally fed up with optimism and strict tactics and strategies, which only someone completely without a heart would stick to, right? But she was still afraid of relenting. After all, looking back, she had covered pretty impressive ground, when you calculated the amount of time actually spent in carrying out her policy. She convinced herself that Nizar would be back on her radar one of these days. But only if he was really meant for her.

Fate didn’t disappoint her. In fact, the plan she was intending to cut short succeeded. He came to her father to officially ask for her hand. Three entire weeks before her absolute drop-dead deadline!

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: December 3, 2004

Subject: Pages from the Sky-Blue Scrapbook

My friend Bandar, from Riyadh, is totally exasperated. He is furious with me because my intent, as he sees it, is to portray men coming from Jeddah (the west coast) as angels who do no wrong, not to mention their being courteous, refined and witty. Meanwhile, rages Bandar, I am portraying Bedouins and men from the interior and east of the country as vulgar and savage in the way they treat women. I also depict the girls of Riyadh as being miserable head-cases while Jeddah girls are up to their ears in bliss which they procure with the flick of a finger!

Hey, Bandar. This has nothing to do with geography. This is a story I am telling just as it happened. And anyway, one can never generalize these things. All kinds of people exist everywhere: this variety is a natural feature of humankind and we can’t deny it.

O
n a page in her sky-blue scrapbook, where she used to paste the photos of Firas that she collected so carefully from newspapers and magazines, Sadeem wrote:

Sadeem had never been in the habit of writing down her thoughts. When she met Firas she was inspired to write a series of love letters, which she read to him from time to time (feeding his arrogance so much that he would strut around afterward like a peacock spreading his tail feathers). After Firas’s engagement, though, she found herself spilling out lines of poetry in the silence of the night, during those hours which for the last three and a half years had been devoted to speaking to him on the telephone.

The internal struggle Sadeem lived in that period—the way her emotions zinged back and forth between extremes of rage and forgiveness—made her life a nightmare. She was incapable of discerning her own true feelings: she would curse Firas and spit at every picture of him that she could find, only to leap back and plant a kiss tenderly on each photograph as she begged it for forgiveness. She would recall how, through all those years, he had seemed to stand by her, and it would make her cry, but then she would remember the day years ago when he had alluded to broaching with his parents the subject of his attaching himself to a divorcée, and their response, which had hurt her so deeply that she had intentionally “forgotten” it (exactly what Michelle and Lamees warned her not to do). And that would make her cry even more bitterly over the lost years of her life, and wish all kinds of horrible fates for Waleed, who was the true reason behind all of her troubles.

Gamrah, Lamees and Um Nuwayyir began to notice that Sadeem had started to become careless, even neglectful, about performing her prayers. They also observed that she was exposing some of her hair when she threw on her hair cover, which was supposed to leave only her face visible. Sadeem’s religiosity seemed to be in direct proportion to her relationship with Firas. Her anger at him made her angry at everything that reminded her of him, and that included religious duties.

Throughout Sadeem’s whole ordeal, her aunt Badriyyah had been traveling back and forth between Riyadh and Khobar, all the while keeping up her relentless campaign to convince Sadeem to move out east to live with her and her family permanently, or at least until her “fated share” would come to her.

When she saw the daughter of her only sister in such a severe state of depression and still firmly refusing to go to Khobar, Aunt Badriyyah decided to broach the subject of Sadeem’s getting married to her son—Sadeem’s cousin Tariq. Aunt Badriyyah had intended to instill in Sadeem a sense of security and the possibility of some future happiness for her, but she only succeeded in making Sadeem all the more upset and embittered.

So they wanted to marry her off to that adolescent dental student who was only a year older than she was? If they knew her Firas, they would never have dared to make such a proposition! They were exploiting the fact that she was now alone in this world and needed a home she could live in securely without having to face people’s scrutiny and their inevitable gossip about her living alone after her father’s death. Even Aunt Badriyyah wanted to ensure that Sadeem would remain under her supervision by marrying her to her own son. And who knew? Maybe Tariq was already thinking about the money and property she would inherit from her father and was planning how to get his hands on it. Maybe his mother—her own aunt!—was even encouraging him.

It was out of the question. She would not marry Tariq or anyone else. She would shut herself up like a monk in her father’s house. If Aunt Badriyyah didn’t let up in her insistence about not leaving her alone, and didn’t allow her to live in the family home in Riyadh, then she would consent reluctantly to live with them in Khobar. But she would dictate her own terms. She would not allow anyone ever again to take her for granted, as Firas had done.

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: December 10, 2004

Subject: Hamdan, the Cute Guy with the Pipe

Whenever I start thinking about the shape my life will take when I bring this story to a close, it stresses me out. What will I do then, having gotten so used to finding all of these messages from you folks out there, e-mails in my mailbox that fill the emptiness of my days? Who will call me every bad name in the book, and who will be there to pat me on the shoulder? Who will even remember me at all? Will I be capable of adjusting to life in the shadows after becoming so accustomed to the glare of publicity, to my role as the spark that sets off the arguments that flare up whenever people in this country get together now?

Even just thinking about what it will be like is upsetting. It’s true that I began with the simple intention of trying to reveal a few of life’s daily realities that pass so many of you unobservant people by. But I’ve become so invested in this story! And I also find myself waiting eagerly—impatiently!—for your readerly responses. I get irritated if I don’t get as many e-mails with feedback as I want; and I’m ecstatic whenever I read about ME in a newspaper or magazine or on a Web page. I’m going to miss all of this attention, there’s no doubt about that. In fact, I might find myself pining for it so fiercely that I don’t have any choice but to start writing again. In that case, what do you all want me to write? I’m standing by, readers, ready and willing: what should be the topic of my next exposé?

M
ichelle couldn’t believe that her friend Sadeem considered Saudi Arabia to be the sole Islamic country in the world! In Michelle’s opinion, United Arab Emirates was just as Islamic, even though its people were allowed a lot of latitude in their social behavior, and were even allowed to practice other religions. In Michelle’s opinion, UAE was going about it in a much better way. Sadeem tried to make it clear to her that just because a country was “Muslim” did not necessarily mean that it was also an “Islamic country.” Saudi Arabia was the only country ruled solely and completely by the law derived from the Qur’an and the way of the Prophet, peace be upon him, applying that law—the Shari’ah—in all spheres of life. Other Muslim nations might draw on the Islamic Shari’ah for their basic principles and outlook, but as society changed and new needs arose, they left specific rulings to human-made law. Michelle could see the gap between her and her friends widening to the point where at times she wondered how it was that she ever fit in their scene at all—their world didn’t accord in any way with her own ideas about life or the ambitions she had.

And what were those ambitions? Michelle felt she had found her calling working in the media, and she planned to make it to the top. She was going all the way. She dreamed of one day seeing her portrait on the cover of a magazine, standing next to Brad Pitt or Johnny Depp. She fantasized about magazines and radio channels and TV stations vying with each other to get her exclusive scoop interviews with celebrities. She imagined the invitations to attend the Oscars, Emmys and Grammys that would surely come her way, just as the invitations to the Arab awards ceremonies already had. Never mind that her father had not let her attend even one of them—she would convince him with time. It would be over Michelle’s dead body that she would be reduced to the circumstances her poor miserable friends found themselves in: a prisoner of the house (Gamrah), a prisoner of a man (Sadeem) or a prisoner of her vanity (Lamees).

The safest route, Michelle determined, was to stay away from entanglements with men altogether—if her experience with Faisal and her sort-of experience with Matti had taught her anything, it had taught her that. There would be no man at all, not even if that man was as sweet and cultivated as Hamdan, the young producer who was now directing her weekly program and who had studied media production at Tufts University in Boston…

Michelle had to admit to herself that she had been attracted to Hamdan from the start. He had a natural gift for making everyone gather around him as soon as he showed up at a shoot, making one of his usual loud appearances. And whenever he was around, the laughs and excitement level in the air seemed to climb up a notch.

Michelle and Jumana had watched Hamdan from a distance as he was smoking his
midwakh
*
pipe on one of their first days on the job, and Jumana had commented on how attractive he was. But Jumana was in love with one of her relatives whom she intended to marry as soon as he finished his MA in England and returned home, so she had been trying to set Hamdan up with her friend Michelle instead. But Hamdan beat her to it. When he made his interest in her obvious, Michelle wasn’t surprised. After all, out of everyone in the crew it was clear that she and Hamdan seemed to agree on things the most and to be the most in sync. They seemed to be a natural match.

Hamdan was twenty-eight. The most handsome thing about him was his nose, as sharp and fine as an unsheathed sword. He had a trim, light beard and a truly infectious laugh. He was as stylishly turned out as Michelle always was. Usually, he wore a nice pair of jeans and a name-brand T-shirt to work, but sometimes he showed up in his white
kandurah
*
and
isamah.
**
Even though he was relentless about keeping up his urbane appearance, he could never endure having his head wrapped up for more than an hour at the very most. So he would inevitably yank off the carefully wound turban, revealing his hair, which was longer than Michelle’s, since she had gotten her hair cut short like Halle Berry’s—a style Faisal forbade her to adopt because he didn’t want to lose her lovely long hair with its delicate soft curls which he loved to wrap around his fingers.

Hamdan and Michelle had long conversations about all kinds of things, not least the TV program and their goals at the station. Because their work demanded it, they began going out to various places together—restaurants, cafés, shops and local events. Hamdan often invited her to go out hunting with him or on fishing trips in his speedboat (the one thing he was even more infatuated with than his Hummer automobile). Though Michelle enjoyed these kinds of expeditions, she always declined his invitations, limiting herself to looking at his photographs and listening to him as he talked about his adventures.