Girls of Riyadh

by Rajaa Alsanea

  With her sense of humor and her saucy mouth, Lamees gained quick fame among chat room regulars. Even though she was careful to change her nickname regularly, there were more than a few out there who were able to figure out that “The Caterpillar” was also “The Demongirl,” “Black Pearl” and “Daddy’s Sweetheart.”

  It gave Lamees a good laugh to hear the boys she chatted with sounding so skeptical. None of them believed she was really a girl.

  “Okay c’mon, stop it! U r NOT a girl!”

  “OK, fine, y are u saying that tho?”

  “Hey brother, girls r boring and they have NO sense of humor and u r clearly high on some good hash!”

  “So, what you’re saying is, I have to make myself a pain to listen to so you’ll believe I’m not a guy?”

  “Exactly! If u r really a girl, let’s hear your voice then!”

  “LOL! No Way Jose:-p!”

  “Gimme a break, just gimme a quick ring and say hi, OK? And if u don’t wanna use the phone just go with the mike, how abt it, just 2 prove 2 me you’re a girl ur not a guy.”

  “Forget it sweetheart. That is just a line u guys use 2 hear a girl’s voice.”

  “Ahhhhhh. You make my heart ache! OK. I believe u, I believe u’r a girl! That word sweetheart coming from ur mouth was as sweet as honey.”

  “Hehehe. No, forget it, just think of me as Mr. better than starting 2 flirt with me!”

  “I swear 2 God u r the most gorgeous Mr, I mean Ms, I mean…I’m CONFUSED!:–C”

  “Best thing:-p”

  “Okay, so now lemme ask u a question and then I’m really gonna know if u’r a girl or a guy.”

  “So ask.”

  “Are your knees dark or not?:-p”*

  “LoooOOooooL! That’s a good one! Okay I’ve got one for you too!:-D”

  “Ask away, baby.”

  “What about your toenails? Are they disgusting or not?:-p”

  “HAHAHAHA. OUCH! Good one! Actually, harsh but good! LOL!”

  “Look at that! Black knees you say, hah! Get outta here, baby, take care of your own gender’s screw-ups first and then you can make fun of our dark knees!”

  By this kind of chatting, Lamees got hold of an unbelievable number of telephone numbers from guys who wanted to continue the discussions on the telephone. By the hundreds, they raved about how totally cool they found her personality, and by the dozens, they professed their love. Lamees didn’t waver from her firm conviction, though, that chat was only for some silly laughs and light entertainment. It was a great way to meet guys and joke around with them, in a society that didn’t provide any other venue for clowning around, but it wasn’t anything to take seriously.

  With the help of Lamees, Gamrah got to know the world of chatting. In the beginning, Lamees would ask her if she wanted to accompany her into the chat room. That way, Lamees said, she could introduce Gamrah to her friends online. Little by little, Gamrah got addicted to it. Soon she was spending all hours of the day and night chatting away with some guy or other.

  From the start, Lamees was up front with Gamrah about the realities and hidden pitfalls of chatting. She made sure Gamrah was wise to the wiles and glaringly obvious pranks of savvy young men, which might trap a newcomer to the Net. Lamees even read out to her friend a few conversation histories with various Web buddies that had been automatically saved on the computer.

  “Look here, Gammoorah, dear. All these guys have the same style, but there are some simple variations they use. For example, guys from Riyadh are a little different than the eastern province boys, and they’re different from the western province and so it goes. Let’s start with the boys-of-Riyadh style, since they are your main interest.

  “The first thing he’ll say to you after Hi would be: May I please know your name? And of course you are not going to give him your real name, you just give him any name you like, or you say to him, sorry, I don’t want to give out my name. The way I handle it is, I dig down and I give him some name, whatever comes into my head. But you have to pay attention and remember which name you’ve given to which guy! My advice is to do what I always do—write them all down in a notebook so you don’t get fouled up. Or you just choose one name and stick with it. But I find that pretty tame.

  “So then, what happens next is, a few days after he gets this name of yours, he’ll say to you, I am really so into you and I have never seen anyone like you, so, can we talk on the phone? He’s going to pick on you and pester you and of course you are not going to agree, but he is going to give you his number anyway. And then a few more days go by, and he’s going to demand that you two exchange pictures, but in the end he’ll get impatient and he’ll send it along even though you never send yours.

  “And then you’ll see one of two: a guy sitting behind his desk in a nice office, with a Montblanc pen in his hand and a Saudi flag on a pole right behind him, a ‘classic picture!,’ or a guy who’s making himself out to be a big strutting Bedouin and sitting old-Arab-style on the floor with his head wrapped up in a shimagh—Bedouin-style—and he’ll have one knee lifted off the ground with his elbow resting on it. All he’s lacking is a falcon on his shoulder and he’ll be ready to go on one of those Bedouin TV series!

  “Next, he’s bound to tell you that he was really in love with this fabulous girl two years ago and then she got married. She was totally, totally in love with him, but a good man proposed to her family and she couldn’t say no to it. And he—apple of his mommy’s eye!—was still so young and fresh and couldn’t set up a household and so he didn’t have a choice and he stepped back for her own happiness. Anything just to show you what a great, trustworthy and noble man he is!

  “Then after all these confessions, he’ll start leaving offline messages for you whenever you’re not there—a nice song or poem or a URL of a romantic story or an article that talks about love and how wonderful it is, whatever, and then after just a week or so, it will all come out: He will confess that he is in love with you! He’ll say, I’ve been looking for a girl like you for so long and I want to get engaged, but we have to get to know each other better and talk on the phone. What’s really on his mind is arranging things so he can go out with you, but of course he doesn’t say that to you, all he’s trying to do at this point is to get your phone number. That’s enough to start with, and he doesn’t want to scare you.

  “Then it creeps up, slowly. The tiresome stuff starts. You get stuff on your screen like: Why are you avoiding me? Why do you take so long to answer my message? You’re not talking to some other guy, are you? I don’t want you talking to anyone but me. I warn you, I’m a very jealous man. If you don’t find me online, you don’t have to stay. Log off!—and other stuff like this that will make you so sick of him that you put him on block or ignore or even delete him from your buddy list altogether! That will teach him to never use that manly attitude with you ever again, ’cause you’d go off and find someone else who doesn’t cause you a headache.

  “The most important thing, Gammoorah, is that you don’t trust anyone and you don’t believe anyone. Just keep in mind that it is nothing more than a game and that all these Saudi guys are cheats and all they want to do is fool dumb girls.”

  Gamrah’s chat style didn’t have the finesse of Lamees’s. All the guys who were so gung ho when they found out she was Lamees’s friend disappeared pretty fast once they discovered she didn’t have her friend’s sense of humor and quick mind.

  Gamrah began to form new friendships on her own, though. Online, she met people from different countries and of various ages. Like Lamees, she didn’t want to talk to any females. “We can meet females anywhere!” they used to say. Everyone on their buddy lists was of the other sex.

  On one of those boring evenings at home, she met Sultan: a simple, direct, polite twenty-five-year-old guy who worked as a salesman in a men’s clothing boutique.

  Talking with Sultan on the Internet was a pleasure for Gamrah, and he seemed in turn to really be interested in what she wrote
to him. He laughed at her jokes and he sent her lots of colloquial poetry, which he had composed himself.

  As the days went by, Gamrah found that talking to Sultan was better than talking to any other online friends, and he felt the same. He called her by her online name: Pride.

  Sultan talked a lot about himself, and she thought he seemed perfectly up-front and sincere and legit. She couldn’t reveal anything about herself, though. So she made do with the name Pride and a little lie. She told him she was a student in one of the science departments on the Malaz Campus. She had always felt that Malaz girls were smarter than Olaisha girls, since they specialized in scientific fields.

  Meanwhile, Lamees had met on the Internet Ahmed from Riyadh—a medical student at her university. They were both in the third year. Ahmed started leaving the notes he took during class in one of the photocopying shops where she could pick them up later, and she would do the same for him. After an exam she sent him e-mails with the most significant points the doctor had focused on. Male doctors were always easier on female students and female doctors were easier on male students. Although their classes were separate, the reading materials, homework assignments, quizzes, midterms and finals were mostly the same. The best thing to do, medical and dental students quickly have realized, was to get the notes on what the male doctors were teaching from the female students, and vice versa.

  As exams were approaching fast, there were purely practical reasons to be able to get quick answers from each other. There were observations and comments to make about exam topics and the style of this or that professor in the oral examinations. And so despite Lamees’s strict rules for online behavior, the relationship between Ahmed and Lamees somehow took the momentous and forbidden leap from the computer screen to the cell phone.

  27.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: August 13, 2004

  Subject: Sultan Al-Internetti

  If you aren’t up to lovin’, don’t do it!—Mahmoud Al-Melegi*

  Not a week passes anymore without my reading some article about myself in a newspaper or magazine or Internet chat room. Standing in line at the supermarket, it really stunned me to see a popular magazine on the rack with bold letters across the cover that said: “What Do Celebrities Think of Today’s Hottest Talk in the Saudi Street?” I didn’t doubt for a minute, of course, that I was that hot subject. Very calmly, I bought the magazine. Once I was back in the car, I flipped through it quickly, flying through the roof out of happiness! Four entire pages crammed full of photos of writers and journalists and politicians and actors and singers and sports stars, each having their little say on the burning issue of the e-mails from an unknown source that have been the talk of the Saudi street for months!

  I was most interested in what the literary lions had to say. I didn’t understand a thing, naturally. One said I was a talented writer who belongs to the metaphysical surrealistic expressionist strain of the impressionists’ school, or something like that. The pundit observed that I am the first to be able to represent all these things. If only this big-mouth knew the truth! I don’t have the slightest idea what these words even MEAN, let alone know how to combine them in some meaningful way! But deserved or not, it is indeed gratifying to be the subject of such panegyric. (Hey, at least I can match their vocabulary now and then!) What do I think about impressionist metaphysical surrealism? It’s positively, absolutely PUFFSOULISTIC!

  Sadeem, do you think there is any hope Rashid will start aching for his son and come see him one of these days? You know, right, that Rashid’s dad brought Saleh a namesake gift because I named the baby after him, even though Rashid isn’t even anywhere around?”

  “Don’t waste your time even thinking about him. Didn’t he send money with his mother or father? That’s it—curtains! As far as everybody is concerned, he’s in the clear. What do you want with him anyway, after everything he’s done?”

  After her phone conversation with Sadeem, Gamrah started looking at the photo album of her wedding. In picture after picture, she noticed how glum Rashid’s expression was, while her face radiated happiness and delight.

  What brought her up short was a photo of herself surrounded by Rashid’s sisters: Layla, married and mother of two children; Ghadah, who was about Gamrah’s age; and Iman, who was fifteen years old. For a few minutes she concentrated on this picture, thinking. She reached a decision. She rushed over to the computer and slid the photo into the scanner. In seconds, the picture appeared on the screen. Using the right mouse click, she cut herself, Layla and Iman. Only Ghadah was left.

  In the evening, getting together with Sultan on instant messenger as she did every night, she convinced him that she had finally decided to send him her photo in exchange for the many photos of himself that he had sent her.

  She sent him Ghadah’s portrait through IM, trembling as she hit send. She had already told him that it was a photo of her with some friends taken at someone’s wedding. She edited out all the others, she explained, as a loyal and trusty friend who would never expose her friends’ pictures to strangers. As soon as the photo was transferred successfully, Sultan divulged how blown away he was by her good looks, telling her he could never have imagined that she was so gorgeous. Gamrah rounded out her little deception by telling him that her real name was Ghadah Saleh Al-Tanbal!

  GAMRAH’S SISTER HESSAH called her older sister Naflah to ask her advice about the never-ending problems Hessah was having with her husband, Khalid.

  “Sister, would you believe it, now he’s on my back all the time because of Gamrah! He started calling her names just because he heard that my brothers set up an Internet connection for her at home.”

  “He ought to be ashamed of himself, saying things like that! Did you tell Mama?”

  “I told her, but you know what she said to me? She said, ‘It’s none of your husband’s business what Gamrah’s doing and you can tell him to stop complaining! The poor girl doesn’t have anything to entertain her. It’s bad enough that she’s shut up in this house day and night. At least, spending time on the Internet is better—for all of us—than having your sister roaming the streets of Riyadh out of boredom!”

  “Mama is still so upset about poor Gamrah’s divorce.”

  “So, as long as Gamrah has gone and gotten a divorce, do you want me to follow her example and get myself a divorce, too? My Lord, if Khalid hears any gossip at all about Gamrah, anything bad she’s doing online with the guys she chats with every day, anything!, he’s going to throw me out and my children, too. Out in the street!”

  “He’d be the only loser! Anyway, don’t you have a family, a home you can go back to, after all?”

  “Oh, fine! Just great. Exactly what I want to do, sit around with Mama and Gamrah now! Wallah, the more I see the state Gamrah’s in and this life she’s living, the more I praise my Lord for this creep I have sitting at home. As the proverb says, hold on to whatever you’ve got, otherwise you will get a lot worse. Yallah. Alhamdu lillah and thank God for everything.”

  FROM THE MOMENT she sent him the photo of Rashid’s sister Ghadah (or, ahem, her photo), Sultan had hardly left the Net for a minute. He kept after her all the time to let him talk to her over the phone. She stood firm, though. She wasn’t “that sort” of girl, she said. The more she turned him down, the more attached to her Sultan became and the more he praised and glorified her moral rectitude.

  In truth, Gamrah had given a great deal of thought to this issue of telephone calls. She simply could not go there, she decided. She thought of two reasons. First, her cell phone was in her father’s name. That being the case, it was very possible that Sultan could and would find out who she really was. He would know that she lied to him and he might spread the news that he got to know one of Al-Qusmanji girls and the ex of Rashid Al-Tanbal through the Internet. And second, she had never really warmed up to the idea of talking on the phone to a strange guy, even if she did feel a kind of
closeness to Sultan and sensed that he was sincere and would stick to his word. Still, something inside of her would not relent. She, like the majority of well-raised Saudi girls, couldn’t help but resist the idea and find it improper.

  After some long nights of insomnia and many, many tears of contrition over her unforgivable act of exploiting innocent Ghadah’s photo to get revenge on Rashid, and after her mother described the problems Hessah was having with her husband on account of her sister’s addiction to the Internet, Gamrah made a very difficult decision. She would withdraw from the bewitching world of chat. She would take herself out of the range of the good, upstanding Sultan, who did not deserve to be treated in such a thoughtless and cavalier way. He especially didn’t deserve such horrid treatment after he had begun to talk about hoping to marry her.

  Without any warning, Gamrah disappeared. All news of her suddenly ceased. So did the messages to Sultan, who went on writing e-mails full of desire and love and entreaty and conciliation for months, even though Gamrah did not respond, not even once.

  28.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: August 20, 2004

  Subject: Had Matti Fallen for Her? And She for Him?

  My reader Ibrahim advised me to create a Web site for myself (or he will create it for me) where I will publish my e-mails, starting with the very first one and going all the way through. Ibrahim says that this will protect them from literary theft or loss, and I can increase the number of visitors with some advertisements and I can make money if I agree to put links to other Web sites on my Web page. Ibrahim explained everything to me in detail.

  I am most grateful to you, brother, for your kind offer and generous cooperation. But I don’t know any more about designing Web sites than I do about stewing okra! And I can’t possibly put such a burden on your shoulders, Ibrahim. So I will continue on in my own style, as outdated as it is, of sending weekly e-mails while waiting for a more tempting offer. A weekly newspaper column, maybe, or a radio or TV program all to myself, or any other proposition which your ingenious intellects can inundate me with, readers!