Girls of Riyadh

by Rajaa Alsanea

  God pluck him from this earth! What brought him here anyway! So, even in this place I can’t relax and behave naturally? These Saudis are always after me! Always in my face! Almighty God. I bet he makes a scandal out of what he’s seen, and tomorrow every breath of mine will be broadcast in Riyadh! God not spare you, Tahir, you and your friend. What was it he said: Our sister here is an Arab? Ahh, what a line!

  Early the next week, Sadeem asked Tahir about Firas and scolded him for not telling her where he was from. Tahir vehemently denied that he had done it deliberately. Firas was not the type of guy that should worry her, he reassured her. He had known Firas, he said, for a long time—they had gone to the University of Westminster together. Firas had been studying for a doctorate in political science while Tahir was finishing his master’s thesis in accounting. They had shared a room in the university housing in Marylebone Hall for six months. What they liked best about the residence hall was its closeness to the major mosque in Regent’s Park, where they were regulars at Friday prayer service. After Tahir had gotten his degree he moved to his own flat in Maida Vale. A bit later, Firas also moved, to live in the rooms he still had in St. John’s Wood. Firas had remained a dear friend and Tahir felt lucky to have him.

  In the days to follow, Tahir did not volunteer any more information about Firas and Sadeem did not ask. She was apprehensive, though, that Tahir had told Firas of her discomfort at the birthday party. How mortifying that would be for her! In general, everyone understood that Saudi girls were more at ease mixing with men who were not Saudi. Firas would not be the first, or the last, to experience the shock of finding that a girl from his home country would much rather hang out with his Pakistani friend than with him.

  Though Sadeem was, relatively speaking, free of the kinds of constraints and worries of most Saudi girls because she had a somewhat liberal father and though normally she really couldn’t care less about what others said or thought, she did wish, this one time, that she could have the opportunity to meet this particular man again so she could get a sense of the impression she had made on him. It troubled her to think that perhaps he thought badly of her, for even though she didn’t know him, he was a Saudi, after all, and he might just stir up a storm of talk around her that could blow from London as far as Riyadh.

  Sadeem had gotten into the habit of spending every Saturday morning shopping in the stores on Oxford Street and then spending a few hours at Borders. She liked to browse through all the nooks and crannies of the enormous five-story bookstore, reading magazines and listening to the latest CDs, after getting a light breakfast at the Starbucks inside.

  That’s where she found him. For the third time in a row, fate had arranged a suitable and respectable chance meeting for her with this stranger. That must mean something, thought Sadeem, and one of Um Nuwayyir’s favorite expressions popped into her head: The third time’s a charm.

  Firas was absorbed in reading a newspaper, a cup of coffee in his right hand. Papers and a laptop lay in disarray on the table in front of him.

  Should I go over and say hi to him? What if he decides to be rude and pretends he doesn’t know me? Yallah, whatever. I haven’t got anything to lose, so… She turned toward him and greeted him nicely. He got up and shook her hand respectfully, and his “How are you, Sadeem? How nice to see you” erased whatever ill thoughts she had had of him. They stood beside his table chatting. After a few minutes, he helped her move her coffee and cheese croissant from her table to his so that she would not have to eat alone.

  Their conversation flowed easily and pleasantly. Somehow, over the course of the conversation, she forgot that this was the very guy, the very Saudi, whose tongue she had wanted to cut out before he could start spreading gossip about her. She asked him about his university and the topic of his dissertation, and he asked her about her studies and her summer job. When she asked what all the scattered papers in front of them were, he confessed that he had intended to read more than two hundred pages this morning, but, as usual for him, he had not been able to resist the temptation of a fresh, crackly newspaper. With childish naughtiness, he hid from her what was sitting on the chair next to his—another stack of newspapers. She laughed at him. He claimed that all he had bought this morning was Al-Hayat, Asharq Alawsat, and the Times, which he had read cover to cover instead of reading his mountain of academic papers.

  As their conversation continued, Sadeem was stunned by his sophisticated appreciation of and familiarity with music and art. When he made her promise to listen to the soprano Louisa Kennedy’s rendition of the “Queen of the Night” aria from Mozart’s The Magic Flute, she thought that he was one of the most cultivated men she had ever met.

  Their conversation shifted to the topic of the amount of Gulf tourists who flowed into London every year in that season. Sadeem let her biting, critical humor go unrestrained. Firas, it turned out, loved nothing more than a good joke. Together they filled the café air with their warm laughter.

  The chemistry between them became so thick that it hovered and swooped around their heads like cartoon sparrows. Sadeem noticed that a hard rain had started to pelt the sidewalks, even though the sun had been shining brightly just before. Firas offered to drive her to her flat—or anywhere else she wanted—and she refused politely, thanking him for the nice offer. She told him she would finish her shopping nearby and then take a taxi or bus home. He did not insist, but he asked her to wait a few minutes while he went to get something from his car.

  He came back carrying an umbrella and raincoat, and he handed them both to her. She tried to convince him to keep one of them, but he stood firm, so she accepted them with thanks and good wishes.

  Before they parted, Sadeem hoped he would be bold enough to ask for her telephone number so that they wouldn’t have to leave the next meeting to chance, especially since she only had a few days left in London before she had to return to Riyadh to resume her studies. He disappointed her, though, putting out his hand to say good-bye and thanking her pleasantly for her company. She went back to her flat, every step carrying her farther away from the happy ending to a story that had not even had a chance to begin.

  18.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: June 11, 2004

  Subject: A Society Riddled with Contradictions

  The noble Prophet, God’s blessings and peace be upon him, married Arab women and non-Arab women; women of his tribe, Quraish, and women who were not of Quraish; Muslims and non-Muslims; Christians and Jews who converted to Islam before he consummated the marriages; women who had been married before and virgins.—Amr Khaled*

  I’ve noticed that recently my e-mails have (finally!) begun to get approval from members of my own sex, although most of the encouraging letters I get are from males, bless them! I can just imagine the scenario: your average girl, week after week, sits hunched over her computer every Friday after prayers waiting for my e-mail to come up, and the minute it does she frantically scans it for any sign of resemblance to herself. When she doesn’t find any, she breathes a sigh of relief and then calls her friends to make sure they’re also in the clear, and they all congratulate each other for having safely avoided scandal for yet another week! But should she find anything that remotely resembles an incident she went through some years ago, or a street that one of my characters walked on sounded like the street near her uncle’s house in the suburbs, then all hell would break loose on me.

  I get a lot of e-mails that are threatening and scolding: Wallah, we will reveal you the same way you revealed us! We know who you are! You’re that girl, the daughter of my sister-in-law’s uncle’s niece! You’re just jealous because your cousin proposed to me and not you! Or, you’re the big-mouth daughter of our old neighbors in Manfooha, so jealous because we moved to Olayya and you’re still stuck in that awful place.*

  Faisal told Michelle half the truth. Sitting across from her in their favorite restaurant, he told her that his mot
her had not supported the idea of his marrying her, and he told her about the dramatic nature of the exchange, but he left it for Michelle to deduce the obvious reasons behind his mother’s anger. Michelle could not believe her ears. Was this the Faisal who had dazzled her with his open-mindedness? Was he seriously letting go of her as easily as this just because his mother wanted to marry him to a girl from their own social circles? A stupid naïve little girl who was no different from a million others? Was this how Faisal was going to end up? Was he really no different from the other trivial young men whom she despised?

  It came as a severe shock to Michelle. Faisal didn’t even try to make any excuses for himself because he knew that he wouldn’t be able to change anything no matter what he said, so his position seemed weak and his reaction cold. All he said was that he hoped Michelle would consider what the consequences would be if he were to challenge his family; there was no power on earth, he said, that could block or lessen the awful things they would do to hurt both him and her, if he insisted on marrying Michelle. She would never be accepted by his family, and their children would suffer for it. He had not even made an attempt to object to his mother because of the utter futility of it. It was not because he didn’t love her, he said. But they didn’t believe in love! They believed only in their inherited beliefs and their traditions from across the generations, and so how could one possibly hope to convince them otherwise?

  Michelle remained absolutely silent and still, staring across the table into the face which she seemed no longer to recognize. He held her hands to his face, moistening her palms with his tears before he said good-bye and stood up to leave. The last thing he said to her before he left was that she was lucky, because she was not from the kind of family he was from. Her life was simpler and clearer and her decisions were her own, not those of the “tribe.” She was better off without him and his family. Her wonderful free spirit would not be sullied by their rules; their poisonous thoughts and insidious ways would not destroy her goodness.

  Faisal distanced himself from his beloved Michelle. He put before her the ugly truth and then he fled even from his responsibility to deal with her reaction. He left her sitting in the restaurant silent and alone so he would not see the reflection of his own disfigured image in her eyes. Poor Faisal! It wasn’t his pride that made him abandon her. It was just that in spite of everything he wanted to preserve a beautiful memory of her love for him.

  With a great deal of patience and will and a sincere desire to surmount grief, and with the help of God, who knew how harsh her suffering was, Michelle began the process of peeling away the pain. Aided by her righteous scorn and her stubbornness, she decided to let the trailing hems of their beautiful past slip through her hands.

  She hoped that time would heal her and that her joy in simple things would return to her life. When this did not happen, she took the uncommon step of seeing a shrink. She went to an Egyptian psychiatrist referred to her by Um Nuwayyir, who had seen him during the first stages of her divorce.

  She found no chaise longue to stretch out on there; there would be no “free association” allowed. The shrink seemed quite conservative in the way he dealt with her, and he didn’t appear able to handle her grief-filled question whose answer would remain hidden from her for as long as she lived: What more could I have done or said to make him stay?

  After four visits, all Michelle discovered about herself was that she needed a more profound cure than anything she would find in the words she heard from this primitive physician. In discussing Faisal’s deception, the good doctor said it all boiled down to the story of the wolf enticing the ewe to his lair before devouring her. Well, she was no bleating sheep and her darling Faisal was certainly no wolf. Was this the most brilliant and cutting-edge insight that the discipline of psychology had produced among the Arabs? And how could a male Egyptian shrink understand the dimensions of a problem that afflicted her female Saudi self anyway, with the enormous gap in social background that their nationalities entailed, since Saudi Arabia has a unique social setting that makes its people unlike any others? In spite of the wound that Faisal had inflicted, Michelle was sure that Faisal had loved her truly and fiercely, and that he still loved her as she loved him. But he was weak and passive and submissive to the will of a society that paralyzed its members. It was a society riddled with hypocrisy, drugged by contradictions, and her only choice was to either accept those contradictions and bow to them, or leave her country to live in freedom.

  This time when she proposed the idea of studying abroad to her father, she did not face an immediate refusal as she had a year ago. It may be that the weight she had lost and the paleness that taken hold of her face in recent weeks had an effect on his decision. The atmosphere of their home had become very bleak with her depression and the departure of her brother Meshaal to Switzerland for his summer boarding school. Her parents agreed to let Michelle go to San Francisco, where her uncle lived. On that very day, she wrote to all of the colleges and universities in San Francisco; she was determined to not lose the opportunity to register before the beginning of the new school year.

  All Michelle wanted was to hear that she had been accepted in one of the schools there so that she could bundle up her belongings and turn her back on a country where people were governed—or herded—like animals, as she said to herself over and over. She would not allow anyone to tell her what she could and could not do! Otherwise, what was the point of life? It was her life, only hers, and she was going to live it the way she wanted, for herself and herself only.

  19.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: June 18, 2004

  Subject: Among the Stars…Above the Clouds

  My inbox is on fire with exploding e-mails. Some have warned me that I’m getting too close to the red line. Others tell me that I’ve already crossed it and that I will surely be punished for interfering in other people’s affairs, and (worse) for becoming a role model to others who might be tempted to challenge our society’s traditions with such audacity, brazen insolence, and self-assurance.

  Hey, don’t shoot the messenger!

  On the walkway into the airplane Sadeem wept, as if she were trying to rid herself of whatever tears remained inside before going back to Riyadh. She wanted to return to her old life there, her life before Waleed. She wanted to go back to her university and her studies and her hard work, to her intimate friends and the good times at Auntie Um Nuwayyir’s house.

  She took her seat in the first-class cabin, put the earphones to her Walkman on and closed her eyes, as the beautiful music of Abdulmajeed Abdullah, one of her favorite Saudi singers, washed over her.

  Among the stars up here,

  above the clouds serene

  I wash blues with hues of joy

  all the anguish I wash clean.

  To occupy her time as she flew toward her homeland, Sadeem had chosen a collection of songs that could not have been more different from those that took her to London. This time, she intended to say farewell to the sadness that overtook her when she broke with Waleed. She had decided to bury her grief in London’s dirt and return to Riyadh with the high spirits a young woman of her age ought to have.

  After the seatbelt light went out, Sadeem headed—as she always did on any international flight—to the WC to put on her abaya. She could not bear putting this task off until just before the plane landed in the kingdom, when the women were all lined up, and so were the men, down the aisle, waiting to get into the toilets to put on their official garb. The women would put on their long abayas, head coverings and face veils, while the men stripped off their suits and ties, including the belts that they always tightened under their bellies so that one could see how rippling-full of flesh and fat and curds and whey they were, to return to the white thobes that concealed their mealtime sins and the red shimaghs that covered their bald pates.

  As she made her way back to her seat, she caught sight o
f a man who, it seemed to her, was smiling at her from a distance. She squinted and frowned to make out his features more clearly. How much easier it would be if she were able to put in her corrective contact lenses herself instead of depending on the eye specialist at the shop to put them in for her! When she reached her seat, though, only four steps separated her from that young man’s row. She saw who it was! A gasp escaped her, louder than it should have been, loud enough to embarrass her. It revealed her enthusiasm, which of course would have been hard to explain in public.

  “Firas!”

  She went the rest of the way to him. He rose, welcoming her with obvious delight and then asking her to sit in the seat next to his, which fate had decreed would be empty.

  “How are you, Sadeem? What a wonderful coincidence!”

  “God sweeten your days! Wallah, seriously, a lovely coincidence. I never imagined I would see you after that day in the bookstore.”

  “And you know what? I was on the waiting list for this flight. I mean, I wasn’t sure that I would even be traveling tonight! A God-given grace! But then, thank goodness you got up to go put on your abaya, or I never would have seen you!”

  “It’s strange, isn’t it?! And look at you! You’ve got your thobe on before you even get on the airplane.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t like to change my clothes on the airplane. Makes me feel like I’m schizoid. As if I’m Dr. Jekyll about to change into Mr. Hyde.”

  “Ha ha! It’s pretty impressive that you recognized me even though I was in my abaya and hair cover.”

  “As a matter of fact, you happen to look terribly cute in your abaya.”

  Was this man serious? Was his taste really that appalling or did he think she was so hideous that he preferred it when she was covered and wrapped in her abaya to spare him the sight?