Girls of Riyadh (4 page)

Sadeem kept her secret from everyone. She licked her wounds in silence until the second shock arrived: in her first year at the university, she had failed more than half of her courses.

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: March 19, 2004

Subject: Lamees, the One and Only!

Many e-mails have come my way that ask me to reveal my true identity. Am I one of the four girls I am writing about in these e-mails? So far, most of the guesses have veered between Gamrah and Sadeem. Only one guy thinks I’m likely to be Michelle, but then he said he wasn’t sure since Michelle’s English is better than mine!

What really got me howling was an e-mail from Haitham, from
Al-Madina
, City of Light, in which he slams me for my extreme partiality toward the “Bedouin” girls of Riyadh and my neglect of Lamees, his heart’s darling. You people are starting to act as if you know my four friends better than I do! Don’t let it bother you, dear Haitham. My e-mail today will concern Lamees and only Lamees.

T
hough Lamees and Tamadur looked very much alike, enormous differences in character and in their thoughts and ideas separated the twin sisters. True, they had attended the same classes in elementary and middle school, and even as far as high school and university, where they both studied at the College of Medicine. But Tamadur alone drew the admiration of professors for her intense seriousness and hyperdisciplined personality. Lamees, on the other hand, was the cool A+ student who was also the favorite of her classmates because of her wit and her friendliness to everyone. At the same time, she also managed to maintain her good grades. Lamees had more courage—and also more sheer nerve—than Tamadur, who always described her sister as careless, dare-devilish, and rash, not to mention flighty and a bit flirtatious.

Their father, Dr. Asim Hijazi, was a former dean of the College of Pharmacology at the university and their mother, Dr. Fatin Khalil, had been a deputy administrator in the same department. Dr. Asim and Dr. Fatin were the keys to their daughters’ success and their distinctive academic superiority. Ever since the twins’ birth, the parents had been as careful as could be to parcel out their roles and attention so that the two little girls would get all the consideration and care they needed. As Tamadur and Lamees entered nursery, and then kindergarten, and then real school, the parents’ attentiveness grew rather than dwindled. So did their aspirations for their daughters’ ongoing—and accelerating—academic distinction.

The couple had only these twins, and moreover had had them only after enduring much suffering and medical attention over a span of fourteen years, after which they had been given, by God’s mercy, these two lovely baby girls. They did not try for any more children, since by then the mother’s age was somewhat advanced and any attempts to have another child might be bad for her health and that of the unborn baby.

One of the more infamous episodes of Lamees’s high school career occurred in her first year. She, Michelle and two of their other classmates executed a massive and perfectly planned video exchange. On the appointed day, each girl brought four films to school. The idea was that at the end of the school day, they would parcel out the sixteen films among themselves, but bad luck had it in for them. No sooner had they arrived at school than the girls heard about the administration’s intention to search all of the classrooms and everyone’s schoolbags that day, looking for prohibited items. The list of contraband items was long and included photo albums, diaries, perfume bottles, romantic novels, music cassettes and videotapes.

Lamees didn’t know whether someone had ratted on them or whether it was merely the bad luck that always seemed to chase her. When the news got around, the four girls were thrown into utter chaos, aghast at this unexpected development. And the true disaster was that this wasn’t a question of one or two tapes; it was a matter of
sixteen
!—found with four of the school’s leading students! What a total scandal—and the possibility hadn’t crossed anyone’s mind!

Lamees gathered up the videos from her classmates, stuck them inside a large paper bag, and asked them all to act normal. She assured them that everything would turn out just fine and that she would handle the whole mess and take care of everything.

During recess, she carried the bulging paper bag into the bathroom to search for a hiding place, but it was a
big
bag and she couldn’t find a good place to stash it. She worried that any school employee might stumble on it and steal it or take it to the authorities. If that happened, her problem wouldn’t just be a school scandal but—and maybe this was ten times worse—she would have a real issue on her hands with her classmates, none of whom would be particularly happy to have her own tapes seized!

Next, Lamees considered stuffing the bag into the classroom cupboard. But the spot was pretty open to view, not to mention being an obvious place to look. Lamees began to feel desperate. The whole thing was like a dangerous game of hide-and-seek played at a time and in a place that simply were not suitable for playing games at all.

But just then the perfect solution popped into her head. Brilliant! She knocked on the door to the teachers’ lounge and asked to see her favorite teacher, Ms. Hana, who taught chemistry. Ms. Hana appeared in the doorway, full of welcomes for this surprise visit, and boldly Lamees explained her difficult situation. The teacher’s welcoming expression disappeared.

“
Shu badik?
” Ms. Hana wailed. “So what do you want
me
to do, Lamees? I have my position to think of! It’s impossible! I can’t help you with this!”

“If the principal finds out, I’m
screwed
!” Lamees wailed back.

“Are you crazy? Bringing films to school. Sixteen of them at once? Shame on you.”

After a great deal more resistance, the teacher took the enormous bag from Lamees, who had not stopped begging for her salvation for a second. She promised Lamees that she would do whatever she could to snatch her good name from the jaws of disaster.

About halfway through the day, some administrators swooped down on Lamees’s class and began to search through all of the students’ schoolbags. They poked into the desk drawers and the cabinet, searching high and low for any prohibited items. Some students hid the music cassettes that they were carrying, or a bottle of perfume, a small photo album or pager (that was in 1996; cell phones weren’t popular yet) in the big pockets of their school uniforms, and stood with their backs plastered to the classroom wall. The eyes of Lamees’s friends followed the inspectresses in terror, in anticipation of their finding their films in Lamees’s bag.

In the last class hour, one of the office girls came into Lamees’s class to tell her that the principal was asking to see her. Lamees lowered her head.
So, Ms. Hana,
she thought,
is this what it has all come to? You go and inform on me, just like that? You chickened! A grown-up teacher is more afraid of the principal than I am!

Lamees strode into the principal’s office fearlessly. The damage was done and feeling afraid was not going to help her. But she did feel mortified. This was not the first time she had been summoned to the principal’s office for bad behavior.

“Sooo, Lamees, what are we going to do with you? It isn’t enough, what you did last week, when you wouldn’t tell me which girl it was who put the red ink on the teacher’s chair in the class?”

Lamees hung her head and smiled in spite of herself when she recalled how their classmate Awrad had dripped a few drops from her red fountain pen refill onto the teacher’s chair between classes. The teacher came in and immediately panicked when she caught sight of the red splotches on the leather seat of her chair. She froze in place for several seconds as the students tried to control their laughter. “Who had the class before this one, girls?” she finally ventured.

They answered in one voice. “Ms. Ni’mat, ma’am.”

She shot out of the room to go in search of her friend Ms. Ni’mat whom the girls all despised. The teacher ran to tell Ms. Ni’mat about the “blood” drops on her beige skirt. It must have been her “time of the month”! When she got back, proud of the favor she did to save her friend from walking around the school with that
embarrassing
stain on her skirt, the girls’ stomachs were aching from so much laughing.

That day, dragged before the principal, Lamees had responded to her angrily. “Ms. Elham, I told you, I can’t inform on my friends.”

“This is called a negative attitude, Lamees. You have to cooperate with us if you are going to keep up your grades. Why aren’t you like your sister Tamadur?”

After this cruel threat, and the usual provocative remark about her sister, Lamees had to tell her mother about the incident. Dr. Fatin came to school to meet with the principal. Lamees’s mother cautioned the principal in no uncertain terms against speaking to her daughter in such a way ever again. As long as Lamees herself had not been behind the prank, they had no right to make her divulge the secrets of her friends. It would be more appropriate for them to search for the real culprit on their own, instead of trying to force Lamees to be their spy, and lose her self-respect and her classmates’ great affection for her.

It was true that the teachers were always asking her why she was not more like her sister Tamadur, but, in compensation, her friends would ask her why Tamadur wasn’t more like her!

Lamees had been sure that the principal would be easier on her this time around, especially since it had only been a few days since her mother’s last visit. Dr. Fatin had some prestige and weight to throw around at that school, since for the past five years she had been president of the Mothers’ Association—a Saudi version of the PTA. She had worked hard to further the school’s charitable activities, in addition to the fact that her daughters were among the school’s top pupils and were very often selected to represent it in regional academic competitions.

“As you can see, a certain paper bag has reached me,” the principal said to Lamees, sitting in her office. “However, I promised Ms. Hana that I would not punish you, and I am sticking to my promise. All I will do is take the films with me today, and I’ll return them to you after I’ve watched all of them.”

“Watched all of them? Why?”

“To make sure there isn’t any of
that
sort of film among them.” She winked.

How rude of her! What sort of film was she insinuating? Each tape had the name of the movie written on it. They were the latest American movies and she was sure that Ms. Elham had heard about each one of them. There were
Braveheart, The Nutty Professor
and a few others that the girls’ brothers got from Dubai or Bahrain or from American compounds in Riyadh where they sell noncensored movies. She wasn’t carrying sex tapes! Maybe Ms. Elham just wanted to watch the movies for fun! But why didn’t she just ask to borrow them in a direct way instead? In any case, Lamees decided that this horrid principal was not going to get the pleasure of watching
her
films, after all of the misery she inflicted on Lamees every day.

“I’m so sorry. The films aren’t mine. If my friends knew the films had been taken they would skin me alive, as some of them belong to their brothers.”

“And just who are these friends of yours?”

My God,
Lamees thought.
Doesn’t this woman ever stop asking these kinds of questions?

“As you know, ma’am, I can’t tell you that.”

“Your problem, Lamees, is that you think you’re the godfather of your own little
mafia
, willing to take the blame for everything wrong they do. Either you tell me the names of the girls who are with you or I will confiscate the movies.”

Lamees considered the principal carefully. “If I tell you their names, can you guarantee that my friends won’t find out? They will never know that I told on them? And do you promise that you won’t punish them?”

“Yes, Lamees. I promise.”

Lamees divulged the names of her partners in crime, took back the films and after school distributed them to the four of them to watch over the weekend. Where was her hiding place, they wanted to know, and how had she managed to hide this enormous bag? But Lamees just replied with a confident smile and her usual line: “Hey, I’m Lamees! The one and only.”

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: March 26, 2004

Subject: The Legends of Street No. 5

Many people have accused me of imitating the way certain writers write, though they say I put all of them together in one big pot and end up writing in an eclectic and strange way. Frankly, this is a great honor as far as I’m concerned, as long as they truly believe I am imitating writers like those whom they mention! Even though, I swear, in truth I am too insignificant to imitate them.

O
ur Saudi society resembles a fruit cocktail of social classes in which no class mixes with another unless absolutely necessary, and then only with the help of a blender! The “velvet” Riyadh upper class was, to the four girls, the whole world, but it comprised only a tiny fraction of the university world’s enormous diversity.

When the girls entered the university, they got to know for the first time girls who had come from faraway areas about which they had heard very little. If you counted up all of the girls who came from beyond greater Riyadh, they would make up more than half of the entering class of sixty young women. The closer she got to those girls, the more admiration Lamees felt for them. They were energetic, independent and strong. Graduates of public government schools, these girls from the kingdom’s interior had not had a quarter of the resources and support she and her three friends had had in their posh private schools. Yet they had excelled and obtained the highest examination marks, and if it were not for the fact that most of them were weak in English, no one could have told them apart from her friends, except perhaps by the simplicity of their clothing. None of them had ever heard of the famous brands that everyone in the little four-person
shillah
exclusively bought.

Michelle was surprised and upset one time when she heard one of the students who was walking close behind her and Lamees vigorously start asking forgiveness from God when she happened to hear Lamees’s description of the sexy dress she was going to wear that evening to her cousin’s wedding! And Sadeem told her that one of their classmates was always saying that she was on the lookout for a bride for her husband, whom she had married just one year before, so that she could present him with the bride herself! The reason she gave was that she wanted to find some time in which she could clean the house and dye her highlighted hair roots and beautify her hands with henna designs and adorn herself for him, and care for their child and the children still to come. She’d be able to do all of that, she said, during the times her husband was with his other wife!

Among the four girls, Michelle was the only one who could not stand this type of girl. She wasn’t interested in entering into deep discussion and debate with any of them, and she wasn’t at all happy at Lamees’s obvious enthusiasm for associating with them. She privately accused Lamees of playing the Alicia Silverstone character in the movie
Clueless,
which had been everyone’s favorite film when they were teenagers. Lamees, she said, was taking the least sophisticated girls on a voyage of beautification and cultivation—giving them complete makeovers—only to make them aware of Lamees’s superiority.

What made Michelle more resentful was that Sadeem shared Lamees’s interest and easy rapport with those girls. With all of their simplicity, the girls were utterly polite and very delicate and, in a way, refined. Their innocent goodness attracted everyone to them, in addition to their sense of humor, a trait that had been all but obliterated in the refined circles of society.

Is there an inverse relationship between one’s social and economic status, on the one hand, and good humor and a merry personality, on the other? In the way that some people believe in the existence of an invariable relationship between being fat and being funny? Personally, I believe in such things. Being disagreeable, dull, constitutionally insufferable or truly odious—these are widespread diseases among the rich. Look at the degree of dullness among blond females, especially upper-class blondies, and you’ll know exactly what I mean!

Lamees began to sense Michelle’s instant jealousy whenever Lamees showed signs of getting close to any other girl at the university. In the first term of their first year, Lamees and Sadeem would meet daily on the sidewalk of Street No. 5, or “the Champs,” as they called it, after the Champs-Élysées in Paris, because it was the street that all girls in the university spent their free time between classes walking down. It had been the two girls’ dream to see the Champs of Olaisha, after all that they had heard about it. And now here it was, nothing more than a few old wooden benches placed in front of Gate No. 5. The Olaisha Campus, one of King Saud University campuses, consisted of just a few buildings on the point of collapse. It was initially built in 1957 and was strictly for male students at that time. Later on, the males were moved to a huge new campus, leaving Olaisha for females. Inside the Olaisha Campus, the streets were layered with the remnants of dried dates that had fallen from the palms that lined the streets. The place was so neglected that even the clusters of hanging dates had despaired of seeing anyone come to gather them. Even after dropping to the ground, they were ignored year after year; no one came to pick them up.

Michelle, who had come from her college in the Malaz Campus one morning expressly to explore the Champs of Olaisha, was so disappointed that she loudly bewailed the fate that had decreed she attend a university in Saudi rather than in America. It was all the fault of her aunts. Her father’s nosy sisters had really gone out of their way in this case to stuff her open-minded father’s head with retrograde ideas. They warned him of the likely consequences of letting her go abroad all by herself to study. Girls who traveled out of the kingdom to study, the aunties argued, found lots of unflattering talk swirling around them when they returned. And then they couldn’t find anyone who would marry them. The greatest tragedy of it all was that her highly civilized father was persuaded by these ridiculous, stupid arguments!

The sidewalk of Street No. 5 had its secrets, many of them having to do with legendary students. Many stories were told, some of them true and some of them highly embroidered.

One of the famous tales of the Street No. 5 sidewalk, transmitted like wildfire among university students within Olaisha Campus, was the story of Arwa. She was a student known for her lovely features and set apart by her extremely short hair and her masculine stride. Everyone sought Arwa out, mainly because everyone was so afraid of her. One of the girls swore that she had seen Arwa one day sitting on the Street No. 5 sidewalk with the white hem of a man’s long underpants showing from beneath her long black skirt. Another student was sure that a friend of hers had seen Arwa slipping her hand around the waist of another girl in a most dubious manner. Sadeem mentioned that she had nearly died of fright when Arwa happened to walk by her while she was gossiping about her. She had never met Arwa before, so she didn’t realize what a fix she’d gotten herself into until another girl mentioned that the girl leaning on the wall with her gaze fixed on Sadeem and a mysterious smile on her lips was none other than Arwa! “Do you think she heard me, girls? If she heard, what will she do to me now?” Sadeem asked her friends, sweat beading on her forehead. Her friends cautioned her against walking alone on the campus grounds from then on, for it was clear that she had been added—
seriously
added—to Arwa’s blacklist.

“May God protect you, Saddoomah, dear! Stay away from Building No. 4 which is the oldest and farthest away. They say that Arwa stalks the girls who go there—every one of them!—because the place is so out-of-the-way and deserted that even if a girl were to scream or smash everything to pieces out there, no one would ever hear or know.”

Arwa the lesbo! Good God! Could it be true that she really did graduate from Olaisha? I haven’t heard anything about her for quite a long time. Arwa has become a legend, like all the other myths of this ancient and venerable campus.

After that first term, Lamees and Tamadur moved to the Science Department at the women’s campus in Malaz, where Michelle was already studying computer science. That would last only one term, after which they would move to the College of Medicine for Women, also in Milaz, for two years; after which they would move—their final move—to the King Khalid University Hospital to complete their training. This end station on the road through the educational system was what made them the envy of the other girls. For studying in the very same hospital were the guys coming from their own College of Medicine, as well as the Colleges of Dentistry, Pharmacy and Applied Medical Sciences.

The thought of finally mixing with the the opposite sex was a grand dream for many, many students—guys and girls alike. Some joined these colleges primarily for that reason, even if the mixing that they anticipated so eagerly was heavily restricted. Male doctors taught female medical students and male students were allowed to examine female patients, but it was not allowed for male and female students to share a classroom or a lounge. Contact with the opposite sex would never go beyond some coincidental and transient encounter in the breaks between lectures or at prayer times (facilitated by the fact that the male students tended to pray in the prayer area close to where the female students habitually were), or quick glimpses and stolen glances while walking about the hospital or riding the elevators. Still, it was better than nothing.