Girls of Riyadh (5 page)

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: April 3, 2004

Subject: On Those Who Do Not Marvel at the Marvelous

First, I offer all of you my apologies for my unintended tardiness in sending out this e-mail. I had a nasty flu that prevented me from writing yesterday, which was Friday, so you are getting my e-mail on a Saturday instead. Easy on me, Abdullah, because I gave you back your grim Friday afternoon,
*
after you had grown used to my e-mails lightening Friday’s tedium for you. And, pardon me, Ghada (and by the way I thank you, for being the first girl to e-mail me since this scandal-sheet series began), for not providing you with any material you could talk about all day at the bank this Saturday. And forgive me, Ra’id, you funny guy you, for having messed up your weekly schedule, making you doubt what day it was and what date as well, so you almost didn’t go to work on Saturday morning and your life was a mess and it was ALL because of my late e-mail!

I have brushed on my bright red rouge, and there is a big plate of pickled cucumbers next to me. This time around, I really need some munchies with bite, to keep me reminded of the sharp flavor of what I am about to write in this e-mail.

G
amrah accustomed herself to her new life. It had become clear to her that Rashid’s behavior toward her was not just a matter of feeling shy or embarrassed with the wife who had suddenly assailed his life. It was something more. Gamrah did not have it in her to actually give a name to his doings—not, anyway, the name that echoed in her head, even if a certain string of words kept on seeping out from her mind in spite of herself, and then creeping into her troubled heart:
My husband, whom I love, hates me. He wants to throw me out.

Just a few weeks after their arrival in Chicago—and after Rashid’s grumbling about her laziness and how she never left the apartment had grown louder—Gamrah got used to going out by herself to shop for household goods at the end of every week. Rashid himself was not prepared to teach her to drive, but he had no confidence that she could understand and be understood by a foreign teacher with her poor, broken English. So he turned for help to the wife of one of his Arab friends who had offered to teach Gamrah how to drive, for a fee. After Gamrah failed the driving test three times in a row, however, Rashid put a stop to the driving lessons and ordered her to learn how to use public transportation to do what she had to do.

Whenever she went out, Gamrah wore a long overcoat with a
hijab.
*
Even her clothes became a source of irritation to her husband after a while: “Why don’t you wear ordinary clothes like the other women here? It’s as if you are trying to embarrass me in front of my friends with the things you wear! And then you wonder why I don’t take you out with me!”

Neither Gamrah nor her mother could really understand why he was so annoyed. What was the source of the constant irritation and tension that seemed to have overcome Rashid? Yet, in spite of her distress and misery, Gamrah was prepared to do anything to make the marriage work. Or at least to keep it going.

On one of the rare days when they were both at home, Gamrah kept after her husband to take her to a movie, and he finally relented. After they arrived at the theater and he found two seats for them, she surprised him by taking off her coat and
hijab
before sitting down. She gave him a shy smile, trying to read his thoughts at that crucial moment. He studied her with a sidelong stare, and after just a few seconds, he said, “Taking them off isn’t making you look any better. So just put them on again.”

Before the wedding, her delight about the engagement, and about the groom, who was such a good catch—so totally elegant—and all of the bridal finery from Lebanon with a dowry that no girl in the family had been able to top—all of this was too much to allow any doubts to creep up on Gamrah. But now there were plenty of doubts and even more questions.

So why would he marry me if he didn’t want me?
Gamrah asked herself time and time again. She asked her mother whether she had heard anything from Rashid’s family to suggest that he had been forced to marry her. But did it make sense that a
man
—and he was every inch a man, whatever else he turned out to be—would be forced to marry a woman he didn’t want, no matter how compelling the reasons?

Before the wedding, Gamrah had seen Rashid only once, and that was on the day of the
shoufa
, the day set for the bridegroom’s lawful viewing of the bride-to-be. The traditions of her family did not permit the man seeking the engagement to see the bride again before the contract signing. Moreover, in this case there was no more than a two-week gap between the signing and the marriage celebration itself, and Gamrah’s and Rashid’s mothers agreed between themselves that Rashid would not see his bride during that time, so that she would have no interruptions as she prepared for her wedding. It was all completely logical in Gamrah’s eyes, except she did find it a little odd that Rashid had not asked her father’s permission to talk to her on the phone so that he could get to know her better like all men do these days.

Gamrah had heard that most young men these days insisted on getting acquainted with their fiancées by telephone before the contract-signing, but her family’s particularly conservative practices didn’t allow for that. As far as they were concerned, marriage was—as they always said—like the watermelon on the knife, you never knew what you were going to get. Her older sister Naflah’s watermelon had turned out to be one of those extra-sweet ones, while her own watermelon and her sister Hessah’s were more like dried-out, empty gourds.

Gamrah kept cataloging instances of Rashid’s difficult personality and they began to grow and mass like a snowball rolling down a mountain, swelling to more and more gigantic proportions. Gamrah kept up her investigation, turning over in her mind every little detail, trying to unearth the real reason why he was hostile to her—even, it seemed clear, repulsed by her. What, Gamrah puzzled, was the truth behind his contempt? What was it that had driven him, through all of these months, to positively insist that she take birth-control pills, even though she was dying to have a baby with him?

Real, serious doubts began to sink into Gamrah’s heart and soul after she had been married for a few months. The way Rashid treated her was not a whole lot different from the way her father treated her mother. But it was different from the way Mohammed treated her sister Naflah, and even from the way Khalid was with Hessah, at least when they had first been married. And it was thoroughly unlike the way their Emirati neighbor behaved toward his wife, whom he had married just six months before Rashid and Gamrah’s wedding.

Although her husband was rough and rude to her sometimes, Gamrah loved him. She was even devoted to him, in spite of everything, for he was the first man she had ever spent time with outside of the company of her brothers, father and uncles. He was the first man who had come forward to ask for her hand, and by doing so he had made her feel as though there were someone in this world who knew—maybe even appreciated—that she was alive. Gamrah did not know if she had come to love Rashid because he was worthy of being loved, or if she simply felt it was her duty as his wife to love him. Now, though, the doubts that began to overtake her were troubling her sleep and darkening her days.

One day as she was shopping in the Al-Khayyam Arab Grocery on Kedzie Avenue, she heard the owner singing along with the famous Egyptian singer Um Kulthum. He was obviously enjoying himself and was completely immersed in a trance brought on by the music. Gamrah listened to the melancholy tune and the words that pressed hard against a wound that sat deep inside of her. Her eyes filled with tears as the idea hit her:
Can Rashid possibly be in love with someone else?

When Gamrah visited Riyadh during the New Year’s break, Rashid did not go with her. She spent nearly two months with her family, hoping that Rashid would ask her to come back once he had had enough of being alone. But he never did ask her to return. In fact, her feelings told her that he was hoping she would stay in Riyadh and never come back. How many hundreds of times each day he stabbed her to death with his icy coldness! She had tried everything to win him over, but it was no use. Rashid was the epitome of the Leo man, in his innate stubbornness and his elusiveness.

Lamees had always served as astrological consultant for their little
shillah
. From Beirut she would bring books on the signs of the zodiac. For each of the girls, Lamees would read out the personality traits for her sign and the degrees of compatibility between that sign and all the others. It was a given that the girls would consult with Lamees before launching into any relationship of any sort, and so during the engagement Gamrah had gotten in touch to ask her how much compatibility there was between her sign, Gemini, and Rashid’s, Leo. Sadeem, too, went to Lamees for advice when Waleed the Aries guy asked for her hand. Even Michelle, who had never shown much enthusiasm for such things, contacted Lamees as soon as she discovered that Faisal was a Cancer. She wanted to hear from the experts how successful their relationship would be.

Before Gamrah got married and went to Chicago, Lamees gave her a photocopy of one of her priceless zodiac manuals. Gamrah would reread it regularly, underlining whatever applied to her:

The worst sentence of all that Gamrah read before her marriage spelled out the degree of compatibility between a Gemini woman and a Leo man: “No more than fifteen percent!”

Before her marriage, reading these lines Gamrah would mutter, “These things are a bunch of lies, even if some of them turn out to be true.” But now she read the same lines with more conviction as she remembered their North African cook in Riyadh, who used to read the inside of the coffee cup for her, finding meaning in the patterns of the thick and black Turkish coffee grounds. The cook also read her palm and said it was as clear as day that her marriage to Rashid would be one of the most successful marriages the family had ever known and that she would be blessed with many children. She even described them to her as if she could see their features in the splotches of coffee across the hollow of the cup or inside the folds of her palms.

She thought about the Ouija board, which she had played as a teenager with her three friends after Michelle brought it back from one of her trips to America. The board told her that she would marry a young man whose name began with the letter
R,
and that she would travel abroad with him. She would have three sons and two daughters. The little glass piece, which she touched lightly with her fingers, moved over the letter-filled game board in the darkness of the room that night, guiding her to the names of her children, one by one.

Gamrah tried to rid herself of the wicked thoughts that were growing like a tumor inside her head. To calm herself, she called her mother in Riyadh and asked her how to prepare
jireesh,
a traditional Saudi dish. She stayed on the phone the whole time it took to cook, listening to the latest news of her relatives and her neighbors. There were a few new stories about Naflah’s clever naughty little boys, and the usual commentary about Hessah’s patience with her husband Khalid.

To: [email protected]

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: April 9, 2004

Subject: Treasure in a Poem

A lot of angry e-mails came my way last week. Some were angry at Rashid for his cruelty. Others were angry at Gamrah for being so passive. And the rest—and that was most of them—were angry at me for talking about the sun signs and the Ouija board and reading coffee cups which not so many believe in.

Okay. I accept your anger. And I also don’t. As you can see, and as you will see, I am an ordinary girl (Okay maybe a little nutty, just a little!). I don’t analyze every move I make, and I don’t worry about every act possibly being taboo and against social or religious laws. All I
can
say is that I do not claim to be perfect (as some people do).

My friends are standard examples, and they are pretty good ones, of who we all are. Some might purposely ignore what their stories show us about ourselves, while others are just blind to it. I am forever hearing people say to me: “You will not reform the world and you will not change people.” They have a point, a very good point, but what I WON’T do is to give up the attempt, like everyone else does.
There
is the difference between me and other people. As the hadith,
*
the words of Prophet Mohammed, peace be upon him, says, “Deeds are measured by the intentions behind them.” May God consider my writings as good deeds, as I only have good intentions. Let me say it again in case someone didn’t get it the first time around: “I do not claim perfection!” I confess to my ignorance and flaws, but “Every child of Adam commits errors, and the best of those who commit errors are those who repent.” I work hard to correct my errors and to cultivate myself. If only those who find fault with me would turn around and straighten themselves out before they start agitating to straighten me out.

May all repent for their sins after reading about them on the Internet. May all discover some hidden tumors and extract them after having been shown some ugly examples under a microscope. I see nothing wrong in setting down my friends’ problems in my e-mails so that others will benefit—others who have not had the opportunity to learn in the school of life, the school that my friends entered from the widest of gates—the gate of
Love
. The true and shameful wrong, the way I see things, would be for any of us to stand in each other’s way, disparaging each other, even though we all admit the unity of our goal, which is reforming our society and making every one of us a better person.

O
n Valentine’s Day, Michelle put on a red shirt and carried a matching handbag. A large number of the other female students did the same, enough of them so that the whole campus looked bright red, by means of clothes and flowers and stuffed animals. In those days, the holiday was still a really new fad and the guys liked it; they cruised the streets stopping every girl they saw to give her a red rose with their phone numbers wrapped around the stem. The girls liked it, too, since now they had finally found someone to give them red roses the way they always saw it done in films. That was before the Religious Police banned anything that might remotely suggest a celebration of the holiday of love, Saint Valentine’s Day, as in Islam there are only two holidays, or Eids: one is Eid Al-Fitr, the day following the month of Ramadan, and the other one is Eid Al-Adha, after the days of pilgrimage to Mecca. Saudis started celebrating Valentine’s Day in the late nineties after they heard about it through satellite TV channels broadcast from Lebanon and Egypt. It was before punishments and fines were instituted for owners of flower shops who gave out red roses to their VIP customers by the most intricate and convoluted ways as if they were smuggled goods. Although celebrating this holiday in Saudi Arabia was prohibited, the celebration of Mother’s or Father’s Day was not, even though the principle behind both ideas is one and the same. Love was treated like an unwelcome visitor in our region.

Faisal’s chauffeur was waiting for Michelle at the university entrance to give her Faisal’s Valentine’s Day gift. It was an enormous basket filled with dried red roses and red heart-shaped candles. Nestled in the middle sat a little black bear holding a crimson velvet heart. When you pressed on the heart, the tune of Barry Manilow’s song “Can’t Smile Without You” came floating out.

Michelle sauntered toward the lecture hall, feeling really special. She looked benevolently down at her girlfriends, whose hearts were slowly disintegrating from total jealousy as she read to them the poem Faisal had written on the card accompanying the gift. They were so jealous, in fact, that quite a few of them brought in dolls or stuffed bears and flowers the next day, just to prove that they had been surprised with gifts like hers after returning home from school.

On that day, many girls cried for a lost love or mourned for an old crush. Many gifts were confiscated and the girls who had worn red clothes or accessories had to make pledges that they not repeat their behavior next year. In the years that followed, clothes were subject to inspection even before the girls were inside the campus gates where they could take off their wraps. That way, the inspectresses could return the culprit to her chauffeur, who still would be waiting there, to be taken immediately home if there was the slightest sign of the
Crime of Red
on her person, even if it was a mere hair tie.

But Faisal’s gift to Michelle did not end with his romantic poem. On her way home, as she was tossing the soft black bear from hand to hand and breathing in Faisal’s elegant Bulgari scent, which he had sprinkled over the bear, she suddenly caught sight of a pair of heart-shaped diamond earrings that Faisal had hung in the bear’s cute little ears for his cute little Michelle to hang in hers.