Girls of Riyadh

by Rajaa Alsanea

  Lamees worried about Ali. At the headquarters, she had heard a policeman whispering into her father’s ear that they had found out the boy was “from the rejectionist sect.” He was a Shiite from Qatif and so his punishment would certainly be worse than hers.

  That day marked the rupture of Lamees’s relationship with Fatimah as well as Ali. From then on, every time their eyes met, Fatimah repudiated her with a burning stare, as if she blamed Lamees entirely for the whole thing. Poor Ali. He had been such a sweet guy, and frankly, if Lamees had been allowed to continue seeing him, and more important if he hadn’t been Shiite, she might actually have fallen in love with him.

  24.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: July 23, 2004

  Subject: Firas: The (Near) Perfect Man!

  I am so tired of getting these boring responses that try to dissect my personality after every e-mail. Is that really what matters most to you, after everything I have written? Whether I am Gamrah or Michelle or Sadeem or Lamees? Don’t you get that it doesn’t matter who I am?

  I didn’t know that shopping for the baby could be so much fun!” Sadeem said to Gamrah, her voice laced with enthusiasm. “These baby things are so adorable! If only you would agree to ask your doctor about the sex of the baby during your next ultrasound—then we would know what we are shopping for!”

  Because Gamrah’s two older sisters, Naflah and Hessah, were so busy with their husbands and because her little sister, Shahla, was so preoccupied with her high school studies, Sadeem offered to go with her pregnant friend to buy whatever would be needed for the newborn. And occasionally, when Gamrah’s mother’s arthritis was acting up, Sadeem would take her place and accompany Gamrah to the gynecologist for the periodic checkup.

  “It doesn’t matter to me if it is a boy or a girl. Let’s buy the basic stuff now and the rest can come after it’s born.”

  “Don’t you have any feelings about all of this, Gammoorah? You sound so cold. If I were in your place, I couldn’t wait to know what sex it’ll be!”

  “Sadeem, you just don’t understand. I’m not eager to have this baby! This little thing is going to change my whole life. And then who will be willing to marry me? Nobody wants a full package! So tell me—is this the way my future is supposed to be? I’m going to live out my life saddled with this kid whose father doesn’t want it and doesn’t want his mother, either? Rashid goes off to live his life free and without any ties. He can fall in love, he can get married, he can do whatever he wants, while I have to live with this aggravation and trouble the rest of my life! I don’t want this baby, Sadeem. I don’t want it!”

  They were in the car, on their way back to her house. Gamrah burst into tears of utter despair. Sadeem couldn’t find anything convincing to say that might comfort her. If only Gamrah would return to the university to study with her! But Gamrah had been insisting that she didn’t have the energy for it. Her body, which used to be so perfectly slender and sleek, was bursting at the seams from so much lying around. Of course, she suffered from boredom, imprisoned in the house as she was. Even her younger sister Shahla had more freedom than her! That’s because she was not a divorced woman. Meanwhile, Mudi, her cousin who came from the conservative city of Qasim to live with them while going to college in Riyadh, never ceased to annoy her with all her criticisms. She disapproved of Gamrah’s neatly tweezed eyebrows and the fact that she wore an over-the-shoulder abaya instead of the abaya that you drape over your head that covers your figure completely. As for her older brothers, Mohammed and Ahmad, they were completely engrossed in their friends and the adventures they had endlessly inundating girls with their phone numbers. There was no one left to entertain her but Nayif and Nawaf, who were only ten and twelve. Pitiful!

  What could Sadeem possibly have said to Gamrah? How could she have comforted and distracted her? After all, there was nothing worse than a person who claimed to be filled with sympathy, to be all there for someone drowning in grief, when streams of happiness were so obviously glistening in her own eyes! If only she could have faked a little misery, thought Sadeem. But how could she possibly have managed that when she had Firas?

  Yes, in Firas, God had answered her prayer. After she went through the breakup with Waleed, how often had she begged God to return him to her. But the fever of her prayers had cooled gradually, until finally, praying for Waleed’s return turned into praying for Firas’s presence. This Firas was no ordinary man! He was an extraordinary, marvelous and divinely made creature, and Sadeem felt she must offer her thanks to God for him night and day.

  What did he lack, after all? He must be missing something. There must be some hidden defect—something, anything, to detract from his total gorgeousness. No human being could be this perfect, for perfection belongs only to God! But Sadeem was unable to figure out just what that crucial defect could be.

  Dr. Firas Al-Sharqawi was a diplomat and a politician, widely connected and respected. A successful man with a fertile brain and a forceful personality, he was known to be someone who leads and is not led, who rules and is not ruled. Very soon after his return from London, Firas’s reputation spread. In his capacity as a counselor in the king’s cabinet, the royal diwan, his face often shone out from the pages of newspapers and magazines. Sadeem regularly bought two copies of every newspaper or magazine containing an interview or a news item about him. One copy she bought for herself and the other for him, since he was too endlessly busy to follow his own coverage in the press. Moreover, from what Sadeem could pick up, his parents weren’t particularly intent on reading newspaper stories about their son. His father was a very old man who suffered terribly from various physical ailments, and his mother was a housewife who didn’t read or write very well. As for his sisters, the last thing to interest them would be politics and its great men.

  In Sadeem’s eyes, such family circumstances only made Firas’s stature seem even higher. Here was the man who had risen by his own efforts, who had crafted so much from nothing! Here was an extraordinary individual who would one day ascend to the very highest positions. She made a point of reading to Firas every single word she could find that anyone had written about him. Secretly, she made a scrapbook of articles and photos of him. She had a plan: she would give him the scrapbook on their wedding day.

  It was not in the least bit unreasonable for Sadeem to be thinking of marriage. Even her friends did not think she was rushing ahead of herself. It seemed the inevitable, fated outcome. His allusions were crystal clear, weren’t they? Even though he didn’t ever say “marriage” right out loud, the idea had been circling around inside his head starting from that day he circled around the Kaaba in Mecca, performing Umrah.*

  From inside the sacred enclosure at Mecca he had called her. He was accompanying a small group of VIPs. He asked her what she wanted him to pray for on her behalf. “Pray that God gives me what is in my heart,” she said. And then, a moment later, “And you know who is in my heart.”

  A few days later, he told her that hearing this shy confession of hers had submerged his heart in an ocean of pure delight, a feeling he’d never experienced before. Her boldness led him to grow bolder in his own thoughts. From that day on, he began to float along in private fantasy, always moving closer to an attachment to her. A composed and steady man who considered every step a thousand times before taking it, he was unaccustomed to the emotion of being swept away. He began to show his solicitude, his desire to know every little thing happening in her life. He vowed to her that she was the only woman who had been able to slip into his life, manipulate his precise daily schedule and prod him (with barely any effort on her part) to stay up late, neglect his work and postpone his appointments, all for the sake of spending more time with her on the phone!

  What was a little odd about Firas was his utter devotion to religion in spite of having spent more than a decade abroad. He showed no signs of Western influence. He didn’t seem at all ill-dis
posed toward the way things were in the kingdom, unlike many others who spent a few years abroad and came home to despise everything they saw, no matter how fervent they had once been in their praise of their country’s customs and practices. Firas’s attempts to steer Sadeem this way or that on the path of righteousness didn’t annoy her. To the contrary! She found herself strongly inclined to accept all his ideas of making her a better Muslim and primed to embrace them, especially since he didn’t make a big deal of anything. That really pleased her. It was simply a matter of delaying a good-night phone conversation because the time for the dawn prayer had come, or maybe an innocent little hint about wearing the hijab and abaya, like the one he had come up with when they were sitting on the airplane, or an earnest observation about how annoying the young men who followed girls with uncovered faces in the malls must be, suggesting that the face cover protects a girl sometimes from such encounters. That was his way, and gradually Sadeem found herself trying to move closer toward religious perfection so that she would be worthy of Firas, who was so much closer to that perfection than she was.

  Firas never made her feel that she needed to work hard to keep him. He was the one always making the effort to remain in touch with her and be near her. He never traveled without telling her where he was going and when he would be back, and he always gave her addresses and telephone numbers to contact him. He begged her pardon for calling her so much to see that she was all right. For them, as for so many other lovers in the country, the telephone was the only outlet, practically, for them to express the love that brought them together. The telephone lines in Saudi Arabia are surely thicker and more abundant than elsewhere, since they must bear the heavy weight of all the whispered croonings lovers have to exchange and all their sighs and moans and kisses that they cannot, in the real world, enact—or that they do not want to enact due to the restrictions of custom and religion, that some of them truly respect and value.

  Only one thing disturbed Sadeem’s serenity, and that was the relationship she’d formerly had with Waleed.

  When they first got to know each other, Firas had asked her about her past and she had immediately poured out everything about Waleed, the only false step she had ever made, the injury whose wounds she hid from everyone. Her explanation seemed to satisfy him; he seemed very understanding and sympathetic. What bewildered her was his request that she never again talk to him about it. Did talking about her past upset him that much? She wished he could turn the pages in her heart with his own hands so he could see for himself that they were blank except when it came to him. She wished she was allowed to share absolutely everything inside of her, including her history with Waleed, but he was as determined and firm in this decision as in any other. That was the way he was.

  “So, what about you, Firas? Do you have a past?”

  She didn’t ask in order to uncover a wound in his heart that might match hers and put him on the same footing. Her love for Firas was too strong to be affected by a past, or a present, or a future—and anyway, she knew that of the two of them, she would always be the one furthest from perfection! Her question was merely a simple and perhaps naïve attempt to see if she could find some little scratch on Firas’s knee that would prove he was as human as she was.

  “Don’t ask me this question again if you really care about me.”

  Just drop it! she told herself. Who cares about his past? He is mine now. And to hell with curiosity!

  25.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: July 30, 2004

  Subject: It’s a Boy!

  Well! So it is I who calls for vice and dissolute behavior! What do you know? I am the one who promotes moral corruption and hopes to see fornication and abomination spread through our paragon of a society! Moreover, it’s I who has a mind to exploit pure, undefiled and noble sentiments, turning them away from their most honorable intentions! Me??

  May God be merciful with everyone, and may He remove from their eyesight the grim affliction that compels them to interpret everything I say as morally depraved and wanton. I have no recourse but to pray for these unfortunates, that God might enlighten their vision, so that they would truly see at least some of what is going on around them, as it really is, and guide them to the ways of respectful dialogue, without attacking others as unbelievers, without humiliating them, and without rubbing them in the dirt.

  Gamrah’s labor went on for five shifts, as the position at her bedside rotated among her mother, her three sisters and Sadeem. It was not really a difficult birth, but it was her first one. And the first one, as her mother was always saying, comes out with more difficulty than the second, or the third…

  Um Gamrah spent the last seven hours of labor in the birthing room with her daughter, working hard to calm her and make things easier for her. Gamrah screamed with every bout of pain.

  “O Lord, may Rashid suffer from whatever I am suffering from right this moment and more!”

  “I don’t want his son. I don’t want him! Just leave him inside of me! I don’t want to have a baby!”

  “Mama, call Rashid…Mama, tell him to come see me…Mama, shame on him, how could he do this to me?…Wallah, I didn’t do a thing to him…I’m tired, I’m so tired! Mama I can’t stand this!”

  And then Gamrah would burst into sobs, bitter sobs, her voice gradually fading as she got dizzier and the pain got worse.

  “I want to die! Then I’ll be rid of this! I don’t want to have a baby and why does this have to happen to me? Why, Mama? Why?”

  After thirty-six hours in labor, the cry of a newborn sounded from Gamrah’s room. Thrilled, Sadeem and Gamrah’s sister Shahla, who were sitting outside the room, jumped up. They were eager to know what sex the baby was. A few minutes later, the Indian nurse told them it was a healthy beautiful boy.

  Gamrah refused to pick up her baby when she first saw it, all splattered with blood, its head elongated and its skin wrinkled in a really scary way. Her mother laughed at her and held the baby after the nurse had cleaned him. She repeated the name of God over him. “Ma shaa Allah. He looks exactly like his darling little mother!”

  Hours later, as Sadeem gazed softly at that tiny person in her arms, that tiny face with eyes shut tightly, and as she searched for his soft fingers to get them to close around her finger, she asked her friend, “So what have you decided to name him?”

  “Saleh, after Rashid’s dad.”

  Rashid was still in America when Gamrah gave birth. His mother visited her at the hospital and then later at home, several times, and his father—Saleh—came by twice and was thrilled that the child was named after him. Still, Gamrah sensed that these visits from his family and the gifts and the money were the very most that Rashid was ever going to provide her and their child.

  By summer, Gamrah’s mother decided to do something to cheer up this daughter of hers who had grown old before her time. They traveled together—with the rest of the family—for a month to Lebanon, leaving the nursing child with his eldest aunt, Aunt Naflah.

  In Lebanon, Gamrah submitted to the makeover procedure called “tinsmithing.” It began with a nose job. It ended with sessions of facial chemical peeling. The regime also consisted of a strict diet and exercise program under the supervision of an extremely elegant specialist, and Gamrah topped it all off with a new hairstyle and coloring at the hands of the most famous and skilled hairdresser in all of Lebanon.

  Gamrah returned to Riyadh prettier than when she had left. To spare herself the disapproval of her conservative relatives, she told everyone who saw her before she managed to strip off the dressing on her nose that her nose had been broken in an accident while she was in Lebanon, which had resulted in reconstructive surgery. Not cosmetic surgery—since cosmetic surgery is against the laws of Islam.

  26.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: August 6, 2004

&n
bsp; Subject: The Chatting World: A Whole New World

  And to Allah belongs the unseen of the heavens and the earth, and to Him return all affairs (for decision). So worship Him and put your trust in Him. Your Lord is not unaware of what you do.—Qur’an, Surat Hud

  (chapter of the Prophet Hud), verse 123

  Everyone, everywhere, seems to be talking about ME, and I love to listen in. I often enter the discussion and offer up what I expect, what I predict, who I think it is, just as they do. At home, I print out the e-mail I send all of you weekly, and I read it out loud to everyone in the house. Mind you, no one at home knows that I am the one behind these e-mails! In other words, I do exactly what every other girl is doing at exactly the same time! In those moments, I feel such intense pleasure. It’s as good as the feeling you get when you are twirling the radio dial in a moment of boredom and suddenly you are surprised by your favorite song, soaring out of the radio, and you even get to hear it from the very first notes!

  Lamees’s relationship with the Internet began when she was fifteen years old, when her father began accessing the World Wide Web via Bahrain. When the Internet was introduced to Saudi Arabia two years later in 1999, her fascination with this seriously cool online world had to take a backseat to her high school studies and maintaining her GPA. But once she graduated, it wasn’t long before Lamees was spending no less than four hours every day on the Internet, 99 percent of it in random chat rooms, Yahoo, ICQ, mIRC and AOL.