Girls of Riyadh

by Rajaa Alsanea

  The girls made their way toward the elegant Italian restaurant they had picked out for dinner. After eating, they headed for a tiny shop that sold water pipes, or what we call the shisha— otherwise known as the hookah or hubbly-bubbly. The girls bought enough shishas that they would not have to share, and each girl chose her favorite flavor of the water-pipe tobacco mixed with molasses and fragrant essences.

  They spent the rest of the evening at Lamees’s, inside a small tent in the house’s inner courtyard where her father and his friends retired to spend their evenings two or three times a week. The men would smoke shisha and hold conversations ranging from politics to their wives or from their wives to politics. As usual, though, the family had gone to Jeddah, their native city, for the summer holiday. Lamees and her twin sister Tamadur had stayed behind to attend Gamrah’s wedding.

  But the father’s shishas went with him wherever he traveled. Like many Hijazi men and women, he was addicted to it. So the girls set up the newly purchased shishas inside the tent and the maid got the coals going. The music blared and the girls danced and smoked and played cards. Even Gamrah tried smoking the shisha, though it’s considered inappropriate among Najdi females, after Sadeem convinced her that “a girl doesn’t get married every day.” She liked the grape-flavored tobacco the best.

  Lamees tightly fastened her spangle-edged, jingly scarf around her hips. As always, her dancing was exquisite: no one could possibly match her, especially as she shimmied to the strains of a recent version of Um Kulthum’s song “One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.” None of the other girls danced with her. For one thing, none of them could approach Lamees’s perfection when she danced, but more importantly, they all loved to watch her. Now and then, they would come up with a funny name for a move she made. There was the “blender” move, the “juicer” move and the “follow me” move. Lamees performed these sequences over and over to popular demand. As for the third reason why nobody joined her on the dance floor, Lamees, as they all knew well, would refuse to go on dancing unless she got a good dose of loud encouragement, whistles, clapping and cheers befitting her stature as Queen of the Dance Floor.

  Lamees joined Michelle that night in consuming a bottle of expensive champagne. Michelle had filched it from her father’s storage cellar, which held special drinks meant strictly for important occasions. After all, didn’t Gamrah’s wedding deserve a bottle of Dom Pérignon? Michelle knew a lot about brandy, vodka, wine and other such things. Her father had taught her how to pour him red wine with red meats and white wine with other dishes, but she didn’t drink with him except on very special and rare occasions. Since drinking alcohol is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, as it’s against Islamic law, Lamees had never before tasted any of these drinks, except once at Michelle’s, and then she did not find the taste of whatever it was particularly pleasant. But, hey! After all, tonight the two of them were celebrating Gamrah’s wedding! So she joined in with Michelle, since they wanted to make this evening special and unique in every way they could.

  When the volume of the music soared, there wasn’t a girl left in the tent who wasn’t on her feet dancing. It was the famous Saudi singer Abdul Majeed Abdullah’s song:

  Girls of Riyadh, O girls of Riyadh,

  O gems of the turbaned fathers of old!

  Have mercy on that victim, have mercy

  On that man who lies prone on the threshold.

  3.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: February 27, 2004

  Subject: Who Is Nuwayyir?

  To all of those who abandoned whatever they were doing in order to urgently ask the brand of my bright red lipstick: It is new on the market and it is called: Get your nose out of my business and get back to reading about things that actually matter.

  Two weeks after Gamrah’s wedding, Sadeem’s eldest aunt—Aunt Badriyyah—got a number of phone calls from matchmaker mothers asking for her pretty niece’s hand in marriage for their sons. Ever since Sadeem’s mother passed away when Sadeem was a baby, Aunt Badriyyah had tried to act as a stand-in mother figure. She had her own ways of checking out all marriage applicants thoroughly and she dropped those who, in her opinion, were unsuitable. She would only inform Sadeem’s father about the short list of key applicants, she decided. After all, if it didn’t work with them, the rest would still be there waiting anxiously in the wings. There was no need to tell Sadeem’s father—let alone Sadeem herself—about every single man at once. Aunt Badriyyah was anxious to protect the heads of her dear niece and her esteemed brother-in-law from the danger of swelling up larger than her own—no need to encourage them to feel superior to her and her daughters.

  Waleed Al-Shari, BA in communications engineering, level VII civil servant. He is the son of Abdallah Al-Shari, one of the truly big real estate magnates in the kingdom. His uncle, Abdul-elah Al-Shari, is a retired colonel and his aunt Munirah is headmistress of one of Riyadh’s biggest private girls’ schools.

  This is what Sadeem told Michelle, Lamees and Um Nuwayyir, her next-door neighbor, when she met up with them in Um Nuwayyir’s home. Um Nuwayyir is a Kuwaiti woman who works for the government as a school inspector of mathematics curricula. Her Saudi husband divorced her after fifteen years of marriage to marry another woman.

  Um Nuwayyir has only one child, a son called Nuri—and there’s an odd story attached to this Nuri of hers. Since the age of eleven or twelve, Nuri had been enthralled by girls’ clothes, enchanted by girls’ shoes, fascinated by makeup and infatuated with long hair. As things developed, Nuri’s mother became truly alarmed, especially as Nuri seemed to get more and more carried away with creating the persona of a sweet, soft, pretty boy rather than the tough masculine young man he was supposed to turn into. Um Nuwayyir tried fiercely to steer him in other directions. She found various means of discouraging him. She tried tender motherly persuasion and she tried firm motherly thrashings, but nothing worked.

  Meanwhile, Nuri’s father was much sterner with him. Nuri was careful not to exhibit his soft side in front of his father, of whom he was in dire awe. The father heard things by way of the neighbors, though, and what he heard put him into a fury. Bursting into Nuri’s room one day, he began to pummel and kick his son. The boy suffered fractures in the rib cage and a broken nose and arm. Following this incident, the father left the household to move in entirely with his second wife, permanently distancing himself from this house and this faggot boy who was such a freak of nature.

  After this confrontation, Um Nuwayyir surrendered to the will of God. It was a trial visited upon her by her Lord, she decreed in her own head, and she must bear it with patience. She and Nuri avoided mentioning the subject and stirring up fresh trouble. So it was that Nuri went on just as he had, and people began to call her, instead of “Mother of Nuri,” “Mother of Nuwayyir,” i.e., the girlie version of the name. That’s how she became Um Nuwayyir rather than Um Nuri, and she stayed Um Nuwayyir even after moving to the house next to Sadeem’s, four years before the date on which Waleed presented himself as a suitable match for Sadeem, and after Nuri rejected his mother’s suggestion that they move to Kuwait.

  In the beginning, Um Nuwayyir was truly shaken by society’s shallow view of her tragedy, but as time passed, she grew accustomed to the way things were and accepted her trying circumstances with such patience and acceptance that she even started introducing herself to new acquaintances deliberately as Um Nuwayyir. It was her way of affirming her strength and showing how little she thought of society’s unfair and oppressive attitudes toward her.

  Um Nuri—or Um Nuwayyir—was thirty-nine. Sadeem often visited her or arranged to meet her friends at Um Nuwayyir’s house. Despite, or perhaps because of, her grief, Um Nuwayyir was an eternal fount of jokes and, if she chose, she could use her humor and insight to cut a person to pieces. But she was one of the sweetest and most truly good women Sadeem had ever met in her life. Sadeem’s mother had died when Sadeem was
just three years old, and she was an only daughter, and all of this brought her closer to Um Nuwayyir, whom she came to consider as much more than a neighbor and older friend. Truth told, Sadeem really saw Um Nuwayyir as a mother.

  How very often Um Nuwayyir was the preserver of the girls’ secrets! She was always right there with them when they were thinking through some issue or other, and she was always generous about suggesting a solution when one of them set out a problem for the clique to ponder. For her, it was a comfort to have them around, not to mention a diversion and source of entertainment, and her home became the perfect setting for trying out the freedoms to which they had but little access in any of their own homes.

  Um Nuwayyir’s place was the safe haven par excellence for sweethearts. For example, the first time Michelle called Faisal after he “numbered” her at the mall, she told him to pick her up from Um Nuwayyir’s place after she gave him the directions. She said she had a couple of hours free and suggested that they go out for coffee or ice cream somewhere.

  Michelle did not want to give Faisal any advance notice of her plans. She called him only a few minutes before he had to pick her up. That way, she figured, he would not actually be able to prepare for the date and then she could see him as he really was. When she came out of the house to climb into his car, she was stunned to find how much more handsome he was in jeans and a T-shirt and an unruly, unshaven beard than he had looked in the mall in his classy long white thobe and the Valentino shimagh ringing his head. She couldn’t help noticing that his T-shirt showed off his broad chest muscles and biceps in a very flattering way.

  Faisal paid for two cups of iced coffee and cruised around the streets of Riyadh with her in his Porsche. He took her to his office at his father’s company and launched into an explanation of some of his responsibilities at the business. Then they dropped by the university, where he was studying English literature. He circled around the parking lot for a few minutes before a campus patrolman informed him that he was not allowed to drive around the university grounds at this hour of the night. After two hours or so, Faisal returned Michelle to Um Nuwayyir’s. Her head was spinning. He had simply, and surprisingly, swept her off her feet.

  4.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: March 5, 2004

  Subject: What Did That Jerk Do to Gamrah on That Night?

  This culture we claim—

  bursting bubbles of soap, of slime

  We live on, by the logic of key and lock

  We swathe our women in cotton shrouds

  We possess them like the carpets beneath us,

  like the cows in fenced fields,

  to flock home at night’s end,

  for our due, bulls and steeds unpenned.—Nizar Qabbani

  Sitting in my own silent room, I can practically hear the blasts of condemnation and profanity coming from Saudi and Arab men among my readers when they see this verse posted. I wish you men could understand it as I believe Nizar Qabbani intended it to be understood…Oh, Nizar, in love there’s been no one before you and there will never be anyone after you, even if your compassion toward women isn’t due to a mutation in one of your male chromosomes but rather to the suicidal end of your poor sister’s tragic love story. So it seems, I’m sorry to say, that no woman among us will find her own Nizar until after she has finished off one of his sisters, so that the tale of beautiful love will have to be titled “Gone to Prison” rather than “Gone with the Wind.”

  Heart of mine, don’t grieve.

  When the honeymoon was over, Gamrah and her husband headed for Chicago where he was working for his PhD in electrical engineering, after getting his BA in Los Angeles and his master’s in Indianapolis.

  Gamrah began her new life in absolute fear and trepidation. She felt like she died of terror every time she walked into the elevator that took her up to the apartment they shared on the fortieth floor of the Presidential Towers. She felt the pressure splitting her head open and blocking her ears as the elevator shot upward through the floors of the skyscraper. She got dizzy every time she tried to look out of a window in the apartment. So very far down, everything appeared tiny and fragile. She stared down at the city streets, which looked to her exactly like the streets in the Lego sets she played with when she was little, with their minuscule cars no larger than matchboxes. Indeed, from this height the cars looked like ants in rows: they were so very small and so neatly and quietly arranged in long and slow-moving lines.

  Gamrah was afraid of the drunken beggars who filled the streets and shook their paper cups in her face, demanding money. The stories of thefts and murders that she always seemed to be hearing terrified her. Every story she heard had something to do with this dangerous city! She was just as afraid of the huge black security guard at their building, who ignored her whenever she tried to get his attention with her poor English hoping he would help her commandeer a taxi.

  From the moment of his arrival, Rashid had been completely immersed in the university and his research. He left the apartment at seven o’clock in the morning, returning at eight or nine and sometimes as late as ten in the evening. On the weekends, he seemed determined to occupy himself with anything he could find to take him away from her; he would sit for hours staring at the computer or watching TV. He often fell asleep on the sofa while watching a boring baseball game or the news on CNN. If he did go in to their bedroom to sleep, he kept on the long white underwear that Saudi men always put on underneath their thobes—we call them “Sunni underpants” (I have no idea why)—and T-shirt. He would collapse onto the bed as if he were a very old man depleted of all his energy, not a brand-new husband.

  Gamrah had dreamed of much more; of caresses and love and tenderness and emotion like the feelings that stirred her heart when she read romance novels or watched romantic movies. And now here she was, facing a husband who clearly felt no attraction toward her and indeed had not touched her since that ill-fated night in Rome.

  At that time, after dinner in the elegant hotel restaurant, Gamrah had made an irrevocable decision that this would be her true wedding night, something for which she had waited too long. As long as her husband was so bashful, she would have to help him out, smooth the way for him just as her mother had advised her. They went up to their room and she began to flirt with him shyly. After a few moments of innocent seduction, he took things into his own hands. She gave herself up to it despite the enormous confusion and anxiety she felt. She closed her eyes, anticipating what was about to happen. And then he surprised her with an act that was never on her list of sexual expectations. Her response, which was shocking to both of them, was to slap him hard on the face then and there! Their eyes met in a stunned moment. Her eyes were filled with fear and bewilderment, while his were full of an anger the likes of which she had never seen. He moved away from her quickly, dressed hurriedly and left the room amid her tears and apologies.

  Gamrah did not so much as see her husband until the evening of the next day, when he sullenly accompanied her to the airport in time to catch the airplane to Washington, followed by another to Chicago.

  5.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: March 12, 2004

  Subject: Waleed and Sadeem: A Typical Love Story from Contemporary Saudi Life

  Men have written to me saying: Who authorized you to speak for the girls of Najd?! You are nothing but a malevolent and rancorous woman deliberately attempting to sully the image of women in Saudi society.

  And to them I say: We are only at the beginning, sweethearts. If you are mounting a war against me in the fifth e-mail, then imagine what you will be saying about me after you have read the many e-mails to come! You’re in for a ride. May goodness and prosperity come to you!

  Sadeem and her father walked into the elaborate formal reception room of their house to meet Waleed Al-Shari. It was the occasion of the shoufa,
that one lawful “viewing” of the potential bride according to Islamic law. Sadeem was so nervous that her legs nearly buckled underneath her as she walked. Gamrah had told her of her own mother’s warning to not under any circumstances offer to shake hands with the groom at this meeting, so Sadeem refrained from extending her hand.

  Waleed stood up respectfully to greet them, and sat down again after she and her father were seated. Her father immediately started asking questions on a seemingly random variety of topics and then, a few minutes later, left the room to allow the two of them to talk freely.

  Sadeem could tell right away that Waleed was taken with her pretty looks; the way he stared at her made that clear enough. Even though she had barely lifted her head to look at him when she first walked in, she had seen him studying her figure, which nearly made her trip over her own feet. But as they talked, Sadeem gradually gained control of her nervousness and, with his help, conquered her shyness. He asked her about her studies, her major at the university, her future plans and what she liked to do in her free time—all on his way to arriving at that one question every one of us girls fears and considers rude to be asked in a shoufa: Do you know how to cook?

  “What about you?” he said. “Don’t you want to ask me anything? Do you have anything that you want to tell me?”

  She thought for a few minutes, and finally she said, “Uh…I want to tell you that I have bad eyesight.”