Girls of Riyadh (14 page)

To: [email protected]

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.

G
amrah’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.

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.

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: August 6, 2004

Subject: The Chatting World: A Whole New World

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!

L
amees’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.

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.