My mother opened the door and pulled me into a hug. I felt cold, disconnected from her.
I spoke my piece to her as I’d been instructed. She nodded and pulled away, grabbing her abaya and her keys. She was about to close the door when she realized I was with her on the outside.
“I’m coming,” I said.
She wouldn’t look at me, but she locked the door and didn’t argue. Her eyes were red from crying. We went down to the car and drove in a tense silence to Suleimaniya Park.
In the winter months, the desert wind was laced with fog and dust, cool and moist as a kiss. In the summer, the air conditioners in cars tried to mimic that but usually went overboard, blasting dust in your face until you coughed, and then sending out five thin streams of cold air that covered only one half of your body while the other half baked in sunlight coming through the windows.
Suleimaniya Park was to a real park what air-conditioning was to an Arab who had tasted the winter wind. White fluorescent lights shone too brightly at night, and now, during the day, hung their heavy heads in slumber every thirty feet. Candy wrappers were strewn about the clearings, and Bangladeshi men in green jumpsuits unobtrusively picked them up with metal pincers. There were very few trees. The vast majority of the park was formed by tall, shiny hedges that formed a labyrinth. The hedges were manicured flat at the top and stood in neat rows, creating semiprivate spaces for families to have picnics (fully veiled, of course), as if the greenery around us had been fashioned into the stalls of a special kind of public toilet.
We sat down in one of these stalls, which seemed less used than the others. Maryam Madam had led us there without hesitation.
“He won’t sign a divorce,” Maryam Madam said suddenly. “You know that, don’t you?”
My mother drew herself upright and glared at me.
“And you want me to play the martyr wife,” my mother said. “You want me to cry in front of news reporters and beg for his release, when all he ever had to do was sign a paper to come home?”
I realized from the anger in her voice that she hadn’t known about the taahud. So she’d been just as shocked and betrayed as I’d been. That was when things had started. When she cried at Hossein’s office. When the minister had confronted me in the hallway and said he won’t sign. That was when she’d started preparing for a divorce.
I couldn’t blame her.
“He can’t sign,” the minister said in a low voice from the clearing next to ours. “Not now. If he submits, nobody else will dare rise up again. That’s always been our problem before, low numbers. We need him.”
I bent my head to hide my bitterness. It was fine for him to secretly be one of the rebels, while he enjoyed all the benefits that came from siding with the authorities.
Still, he was right about the low numbers of the rebels. When Manal Al-Sharif organized her Facebook revolution, asking women to drive in protest of the law, to at least be able to drive to a hospital in case of an emergency, half a million people watched the video, but only a few dozen came out to support her. Even other women called her a pot-stirrer, a troublemaker, someone who was setting back the reformers’ negotiations with her impatience.
Why aren’t more of us out there? I’d asked Mishail once, when my frustration had found no outlet for weeks.
Manal can’t do what you can, she’d replied, as if that was any kind of an answer.
“How is that my problem?” my mother said. “I don’t care about your revolution or your conspiracies. I just want—”
She broke off and looked away, swallowing. “What do you want?” Maryam Madam asked, placing a hand on my mother’s cheek.
My mother shoved it away. “Don’t you dare offer your sympathy, you damned concubine!”
Maryam Madam nursed her hand as if it had been slashed with a knife. She said nothing. I wondered how she could stay so calm. My face was hot with shame that my mother had even used such an ugly word.
“You might as well know, Leena,” my mother said when the silence drew on, “unless you thought it was an easy matter for her son, Shoaib, to become your guardian. I wondered how you did that, Maryam, since I’d been struggling to make Faraz her wali, but they wouldn’t allow it. He wasn’t related in any way. But two weeks of paperwork from you and some random child gets to be my daughter’s guardian? You didn’t even have to tell me, never mind ask me first.”
“It’s not like that,” Maryam Madam said, her face now as red as mine felt. “We were just friends, but it’s not legal for a man and a woman to be friends in this country, so we wrote up a contract. That’s all.”
“Enough,” said the minister, sounding as if he couldn’t understand why any of this was even a problem for the women he couldn’t see. “This isn’t the time for this. I signed for Leena, saying I’d keep her out of trouble. Can you handle that, or do I need to do something?”
My mother looked at me, and her eyes took on a wild, calculating look, as if she couldn’t believe the bargain she was being offered.
“I need permission to get Leena married, so she can be independent,” she said quickly, and my jaw dropped. “It won’t be a real marriage, just a contract.” She sneered at Maryam Madam. “But she needs a real wali, a guardian who can actually represent her, not some child she hasn’t met.”
“She’s sixteen!” Maryam Madam begged. “Why can’t you just wait a little longer? We’re working on reforms. Even this debate at the Majlis is such a monumental change. Do you think it could’ve happened if we hadn’t been patient?”
“Your precious debate?” my mother said with a laugh. “Where you’ve got some reformers disguised as model citizens, so that maybe the muttaween will allow us to put designs and glitter on our abayas?”
“It doesn’t matter anyway,” the minister said. “She can’t get married without her father’s permission. You’re right about one thing. Shoaib’s guardianship is only for educational matters. He isn’t a real wali.”
“Adhl,” I said suddenly. My mother glared at me, as if amazed I’d had the temerity to interrupt the adults’ conversation. As if they hadn’t been talking about me all along. As if this wasn’t my life they were arguing about.
“What?”
“Adhl,” I repeated. “If a wali doesn’t permit the woman in his guardianship to marry according to her own choice, she can sue for adhl and find a new wali to support her.”
I sent up a prayer of gratitude to Hossein and Faraz for all those years of law lessons.
“Even for adhl—” the minister said.
“You needed a mahram’s support, yes,” I said, my heart racing. “But that law was changed three weeks ago. The state is guardian for women without a guardian. It’s the same form that’s used to give women permission to marry a non-Saudi, the permission from the king.”
There was silence. I didn’t really know why I was helping except that I knew my mother was right about one thing. I needed a wali, a guardian of my own choice, someone I could trust not just with my life but with my soul, someone who wasn’t going to rot away in prison, gamble away our fortunes, or value vengeance over our survival.
“I know which one you mean,” the minister said. “I’ll have it signed and sent to your mother.”
“To me, you mean,” I said quietly, my eyes fixed on my mother. I saw a strange mix of anger and amusement in her eyes, but she didn’t say anything.
“Fine,” the minister said. There was a rustling sound, and then silence, so I knew he’d left.
“Norah, this is ridiculous,” Maryam Madam said. “She’s so young. Don’t we agree at least that a girl shouldn’t be married until she’s eighteen? With a mind like hers, Leena ought to go to college. Won’t you let me at least put in a word to—”
“You can put in all the words you like,” my mother said, getting up and dusting off her black abaya. “After Leena has found herself a new wali. After that, you can take it up with him. I may be stuck with no say in my own affairs, but I’ll die before I let my da
ughter suffer my fate.”
The rest of the day passed in a blur. My mother said very little, but she made all my favorite dishes. Neither of us left the house. We turned on the TV and watched comedy shows together, drinking diluted laban filled with spices. The phone rang a lot, but my mother simply disconnected it when she realized it was Fatima Aunty calling. She had a strange look in her eyes, as if she was secretly happy about something.
“What?” I asked, retying my headscarf self-consciously. It kept sliding off, revealing the bald head I didn’t want to see.
My mother shook her head.
Eventually I went to bed. I took off the headscarf and stared at my reflection. Tears filled my eyes, and I fell into bed, sobbing into my pillow. My chest felt as if someone were pinching my heart from the inside.
I’d been crying so long and hard that I hadn’t heard the door open. My mother came to lie down beside me. I didn’t move, so she enveloped me, throwing her arms around my shoulders and nuzzling her head into my neck.
“Leena, would you like me to tell you a story?”
I shrugged. I didn’t care. As if any story were going to make me feel better. Tomorrow I’d have to go to school and face all my classmates. I wasn’t going to be able to play this off with pride the way Mishail had done. I hadn’t been caught for any glamorous crime, just for walking down the street dressed improperly. That was the worst part.
My mother said, “A long time ago there was a tribe that was passing through Wadi Al-Shafa by the Sarawat Mountains. To get through, the group had to climb long, hard days across the mountains with very little to eat. They had no shoes on their feet. There was a young girl among them, and she struggled to keep up with the others. The men kept telling her father, Abu Rihan, ‘You are of the age where your sons should be bearing you up, but instead, you are bearing up your daughter. Your daughter is holding you back, and she’ll be the death of us.’”
I made myself stop sobbing. It had been so long since I’d heard this version of my mother’s voice, soft and soothing, not hollering commands.
“Abu Rihan loved his daughter, and so he carried her as far as he could. But he was an old man, and he moved slowly with the weight on his back, until the girl Rihan felt sorry and said, ‘Leave me here. Insh’allah I’ll live.’ So the tribe left the girl behind. She smiled bravely and carried on as far as she could on her own, until one night, unable to see in the dark, she fell into a well. She didn’t know how to swim, so she cried for help. A man heard her. This man, Nabil, was a poet who would climb to the mountains at night to listen to the angels.”
There was an urgency in my mother’s voice now, a do you understand? that seeped through in her tone. I fell completely silent and tried to make sense of it. Nabil might just be a name, but it was also a rarely used word for a prophet, a herald.
“Nabil couldn’t pull Rihan out of the well himself, so he threw a log into it for her to hold on to. He said he would find help in the city, and he left her there. He went down to the city of Al-Shafa and wrote long and beautiful poems about how the men of the mountains were wicked, leaving their women to die in wells. He issued a fatwa that any man who left a woman to die when he could save her would burn in hell. But the people of Al-Shafa stoned him, and so he ran to Yathrib and never returned to save Rihan.”
I knew now that this was no ordinary story. Yathrib was the original name for Madinah Al-Munawwarah, the second-holiest city in our world. The prophet Muhammad used to climb the Sarawat Mountains around Mecca at night. It was where he heard the angel Jibrail. The verses of the Quran had come to him, and he’d spoken against the corruption in Mecca. He’d been chased out, and he ran to Yathrib in the hijra. My mother was telling me a religious story, but in the only way she could in our country, where heresy and apostasy could be punished by death.
She continued, “But the men of Al-Shafa who had turned out Nabil now burned with the desire for glory. They were moved by the story of this beautiful woman trapped in a well, who had so bravely given herself to Allah’s mercy, who waited to be rescued by one of them. Of all the young men, only Yasin dared climb the mountains that had killed so many. He had the skill of a mountain goat and the words of the poet Nabil to vouch for him. And he was beautiful, his falcon eyes spearing women and men with desire and envy.”
My mother laughed, a delicate and fond sound, and my heart lurched toward her. I knew who she meant. I’d seen those eyes—my father’s eyes—in the mirror.
“Yasin traveled the mountains in search of this courageous woman who had sacrificed herself so her father might live. He found her in the well, still holding on to the log, waiting for Nabil to return. He told her what had happened to Nabil and threw her a rope, but he wasn’t strong enough to pull her out. So he left her hanging there by her shoulders, her feet in the well, her body cold and shivering. He said he knew a friend in Al-Shafa who worked for the government, who could arrange for a crane. With the crane’s machinery, he wouldn’t be able to just pull her out, but any woman who ever found herself in a well. So saying, he left for Al-Shafa. But it was Friday, so the government wouldn’t let him borrow the crane, and he burned with fury over his impotence. He stood in the city center and cried out about the corrupt and lazy government that would let women hang in wells when there was no reason to abandon them there. The people got angry and threw him in prison.”
This last was hushed. I turned to my side so I could see her face. My mother smiled at me and thumbed a tear from my cheek.
“A chance traveler came upon the well,” she said. “He wondered why a woman hung half dead from a rope between earth and sky. Rihan had not eaten in days, her hair had turned the color of sand from being bleached by the sun, and her lips were so cracked she couldn’t even ask for help. The traveler, Hassan, had very little to eat himself and was on his way to Al-Shafa. But he knew he couldn’t leave her there. So he gave her all his food and water until Rihan could speak and move a little. He asked her to kick against the wall, to use her hands and feet to climb. He said he didn’t have the strength to pull her up himself, but if she helped him, maybe they could manage it together. Rihan cried and said, ‘I’m such a burden to everyone. Why don’t you just cut the rope and let me die?’ Hassan laughed and said, ‘You just drank all my water. If you don’t bring me some on your way up, we’ll both die.’ Knowing she was responsible for saving Hassan gave Rihan the strength and courage she had lost. She fought her way up, bringing him water to drink in her wet clothes. Together they stumbled to Al-Shafa. And what do you think Nabil and Yasin thought of this?”
I huffed a laugh into her neck.
“You know what I’ve learned, Leena?” she asked. Her voice sounded choked up, as if she were fighting back tears.
“Tell me.”
“Don’t marry the man who offers you a hand when you are drowning. Such men are always looking for more drowning women to save. Marry the one who teaches you to swim.”
21
KALAM EN-NAS
I thought about making up stories. Plausible enough that they would require no evidence, but not so scandalous that they would horrify any listeners and get me into even more trouble.
One story was that I had been caught for letting my abaya hang open below the waist and wearing jeans and high heels that sprang out of the trailing black cape. It was the fashion in Jeddah these days to wear this sort of outfit and go for long walks on the boardwalk, with the rose-and-gold city to one side and the Red Sea on the other.
Another story was that I had fought with the muttawa and kicked him between the legs, and so even though I hadn’t been doing anything terribly exciting I had at least put up a meaningful resistance.
This was the thing about life in Riyadh, this city of contradictions. As Mishail had once put it, you had to be totally modern and totally Islamic at the same time, open-minded, but not so much that your brains fell out. You had to turn into a creature as astute at politics as a royal princess while being so modest that nothing of it showe
d in your downcast eyes, someone who knew what was going on without being told, knew who did and did not matter, and above all knew how to manage kalam en-nas, what people would say.
It was the skill of Riyadh’s street cats and its women, a survival instinct that was currently on high alert as I entered the classroom.
None of my stories were necessary, though. Aisha caught me as soon as I arrived and guided me to a seat next to her own.
“Why didn’t you answer your phone yesterday?” she demanded. “I’ve been trying to reach you. I had to be the first to tell you what really happened before you heard any rumors.”
“Tell me what?”
“It wasn’t my fault. I mean it was, but it wasn’t, you know?”
“No! What are you even talking about?”
“They all know,” Aisha said, “about the driving.”
“How?” I asked, my heart sinking.
“I didn’t want to leave the photo you gave me at home. I have a very annoying younger brother who goes through all my stuff and shows what he finds to my parents. So I always kept your evidence in our law textbook and took it to school every day.”
“Aisha,” I groaned, knowing where this was headed.
“While I was in the bathroom, Bilquis and Daria found it in my bag. They wanted to know if I was using some secret way to prepare for the debate, and—”
“Wait, Bilquis and Daria?” I asked. How had that allegiance been formed, and so quickly? The most conservative and most liberal girls were friends now?
“They wanted to show Naseema Madam what was really going on in the school behind her back.”
“Why?”
“Daria’s just Daria; she’s not happy unless someone else is in trouble,” Aisha said, looking exasperated, as if all the questions I was asking her were about the introduction and she wanted to get on with telling the real story. “And I think Bilquis wants to replace me on the debate team now. She’s got some new fire behind her engine.”
Driving by Starlight Page 16
