Girls of Riyadh (3 page)

To: [email protected]

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.

T
wo 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.

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: March 5, 2004

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

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.

W
hen 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.

To: [email protected]

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!

S
adeem 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.”

He laughed at her confession and she laughed, too. After a moment, he said to her, a little provocatively, “By the way, Sadeem, you know, my job requires that I travel overseas a lot.”

This time she answered him without a pause, raising one of her eyebrows flirtatiously. “Not a problem. I love to travel!”

He told her that he found her mischievousness and quick wit delightful, and she lowered her head, blushing fiercely and cursing her inability to control her runaway mouth, which might turn out to be the cause of a runaway groom. Seconds later, her father unwittingly came to the rescue by walking through the doorway. She excused herself hurriedly and made straight for the door, giving Waleed a big smile, which he returned with an even bigger one. She left the room with butterflies in her stomach.

She had found Waleed handsome, even if he wasn’t really her favorite type. She preferred darker skin; his complexion was fair with a pinkish hue. His shadowy mustache and goatee and those glasses with the thin silver frames added a lot of charm to his face, though, she thought.

Once she was out of the room, Waleed asked her father’s permission to phone her so he could get to know her better before it was announced that they were officially engaged. Her father agreed and gave him Sadeem’s cell phone number.

Waleed called late that night, and after allowing the phone to ring a decently long time, she answered. He told her how much he liked her. He would speak a little and then go quiet, as if he expected her to comment on what he was saying. She told him that she had been happy to meet him, but said no more. He told her that he
really
liked her, that in fact he had been bewitched by her and that he found it unbearable to wait until Eid Al-Fitr, after which they could sign the marriage contract.

After that, Waleed called her dozens of times a day—he called the minute he woke up in the morning, before going to work, at work, after work and finally for a long conversation before going to sleep that would stretch on sometimes until the sun was peeping over the horizon. He even woke her up in the middle of the night to have her listen to a song he had dedicated to her on the radio. And every day he would ask that she pick out at the store a pair of glasses for him, or a watch, or cologne—he would immediately buy whatever she dictated, he said, so that everything he wore would be completely to her liking.

The other girls began to envy Sadeem, especially Gamrah, who would become overwhelmed with self-pity whenever Sadeem described to her on the telephone how fond she was of Waleed and how he adored her in return. Gamrah started making up stories about her blissful life with Rashid—how loving he was toward her, how many gifts he brought her.

Waleed and Sadeem signed the marriage contract in a small ceremony. Sadeem’s aunt wept uncontrollably as she thought of her sister—Sadeem’s mother—who had never gotten the chance to see her daughter married. She also cried secretly for her son, Tariq, whom she had always hoped would be the one to marry Sadeem.

During the official proceedings Sadeem pressed her fingerprint onto the page in the enormous registry book after her protest about not being allowed to sign her name was dismissed. “My girl,” said her aunt, “just stamp it with your fingerprint and call it a day. The sheikh says fingerprint, not signature. The men are the only ones who sign their names.”

After the signing ceremony, her father threw a huge banquet for the two families. On the evening of the next day, Waleed came over to see his bride, whom he had not met in person since that one legally permitted viewing. On this visit, Waleed presented her with the customary gift for the engagement period nowadays: a cell phone, one of the very latest models on the market.

In the months to follow, during the
milkah
period, the traditional time between the official signing of the documents and the actual wedding ceremony, Waleed’s visits to Sadeem grew more and more frequent. Most visits her father knew about, but there were a few little encounters that escaped his attention. During the week, Waleed usually dropped by after the evening prayers, and usually stayed until two o’clock in the morning. On weekends he rarely left before dawn.

Every few weeks Waleed took her out for dinner in a fancy restaurant, and on other evenings he would bring her food or sweets that she loved. They spent their time talking and laughing, watching a film that one of them had borrowed from a friend. Then things began to progress, and they developed far enough that she experienced her first kiss.

Waleed had been accustomed to kissing her cheeks when saying hello and good-bye to her. But one evening his parting kiss was decidedly hotter than usual. Maybe the tragic end of the movie they had watched together (
Armageddon
) played a role in creating the right mood for him to plant that long, needy kiss on her virgin lips.

Sadeem started preparing for the wedding, browsing around in the shops with Um Nuwayyir or Michelle or Lamees. Sometimes Waleed would go with her, especially if she was planning to buy nightgowns.

The wedding celebration was set to occur over the summer vacation, a week or two after Sadeem’s final exams, as Sadeem had requested. She was afraid to get married during Eid Al-Adha break, worried that it would interfere with her ability to study for her exams—Sadeem was always a top student, vigilant about getting good grades. But her decision upset and distressed Waleed, who was anxious to get married as soon as possible. Sadeem decided to make it up to him.

One evening she put on the black lace nightgown he had bought for her but which at the time she had refused to try on in his presence. She invited him to come over for the evening without informing her father, who was out camping with friends in the desert.

The red petals she strewed across the sofa, the candles placed here and there, the soft music wafting from the well-hidden music system—none of it impressed Waleed as much as the black nightgown that revealed more of her body than it concealed. Since Sadeem had vowed to make her beloved Waleed happy that night, and since she wanted to erase his disappointment over her insistence on delaying the wedding, she allowed him to go further with her than ever before. She did not try to stop him—as she had gotten used to doing—when he attempted to cross the line that she had drawn, for herself and for him, in the early days after the signing of the contract. She was convinced that he wouldn’t be satisfied unless she offered him a little more of her “femininity,” and she was willing to do anything to please him, the love of her life, even if it meant exceeding the limits she had spent her lifetime guarding.

As usual, Waleed left after the dawn call to prayer, but this time Sadeem thought he seemed distressed and troubled. She figured he must be feeling as nervous as she was after what had happened. She waited anxiously for his usual phone call once he got home, since she especially needed to hear his tender voice after such a night, but he didn’t call. Sadeem didn’t allow herself to call him and waited until the next day, but he didn’t call then, either. As difficult as it was for her, she decided to give him a few days to calm down before calling him to ask what was wrong.

Three days passed without a word from Waleed. Sadeem decided to drop her resolve and called, only to find that his cell phone was turned off. She kept calling through the entire week, at different times of the day and night, desperate to reach him. But his cell phone was always switched off and the private line in his room was always busy. What was going on? Had something awful happened to him? Or was he still angry at her,
this
angry even after all of her efforts to please him? What about everything she had given him on that night? Had he gone insane?

Had she been wrong to give herself to Waleed before the wedding celebration? Did it make any sense at all to believe that
that
was the cause of him avoiding her? Why, though? Wasn’t he her legal husband, and hadn’t he been her legal husband ever since they signed the contract? Or did getting married mean the ballroom, the guests, the live singer and the dinner? And what she had done—did it somehow deserve
punishment
from him? Hadn’t he been the one who initiated it? Why had he encouraged her to do the wrong thing and then afterward abandoned her? And anyway, was it wrong, was it a sin, in the first place? Had he been testing her? And if she had failed the test, did that mean that she was not worthy of him? He must have thought she was one of those girls who were easy! But what kind of stupidity was this? Wasn’t she his wife, his lawful partner? Hadn’t she on that day placed her mark in that big register next to his signature? Hadn’t there been acceptance, consent and commitment, witnesses and an announcement to the world? No one had ever cautioned her about this! Would Waleed make her pay for what she did not even know? If her mother had been alive, she would have warned her and directed her, and then none of this would have happened! And besides, she had heard a lot of stories about young women who had done what she did, and maybe more, after signing the contract and before the wedding party! She even knew of cases where the brides had given birth to full-term babies only seven months after the wedding. Among the people who were aware of such events, only a very few seemed to care. So where was the error? Where was the sin?

Who would draw for her the fine line between what was proper behavior and what wasn’t? And, she wondered, was that line that their religion defined the same as the one in the mind of a young man from conservative Najd? Waleed had criticized her every time she put a stop to anything, saying that she was his wife according to the religion of God and His prophet. Who was there to explain to her the psychological makeup of the young Saudi man so that she could understand what went on in his mind? Had Waleed now come to believe that she was a young woman of “experience”? Did he actually
prefer
it when she told him to stop? She hadn’t done anything more than go along with him, the way she saw things done on TV and heard from her married girlfriends. He had done the rest! So why was she at fault for following his lead and instinctively knowing how to conduct herself? It wasn’t something that required knowledge of chemistry and physics to figure out! What was it that had taken possession of Waleed, to make him so irrational?

She tried to call his mother but was told that she was sleeping. She left her name with the maid and asked her to inform her mistress that she had called, and then she waited expectantly for a call from Um Waleed that never came. Should she tell her father what had happened on that bitter night? How would she tell him? What would she say? If she said nothing, though, was she going to say nothing all the way to the wedding day? What would people say on that day? That the groom jilted her? No, no! Waleed couldn’t possibly be as horrible as this. He must be lying in a coma somewhere in some hospital. To think of him lying in a hospital bed was a thousand times more bearable than to think that he could be deserting her in this way!

Sadeem was afloat in a state of bewilderment, waiting for a call or visit from Waleed, dreaming that he would come to her on his knees begging for forgiveness. But he didn’t visit and he didn’t call. Her father asked her what was wrong, but she had no answer for him. An answer did come from Waleed three weeks later, though: divorce papers! Her father tried hard to find out from Sadeem what lay behind the horrible surprise, but she collapsed in his arms and exploded into tears without confessing. In anger, he went to Waleed’s father, who denied knowing anything and said he was as surprised as Sadeem’s father was. All Waleed had said to his father was that he had discovered he was not comfortable with his bride and he preferred to break the contract now before the wedding was consummated.