In the Land of Invisible Women (19 page)

Randa had a different explanation, however, “They are impressed with you, Qanta, because you are a doctor. Until they found out about last night, they thought you were just a Pakistani maid.” She went on, even more bluntly. “They look at your dark skin, Qanta, dark as an Indian, and they noticed your friendliness to Rashida and Haneefa, the Hijazi maids, and assumed like those black girls, you were also a servant. They probably think you serve a family in Riyadh. They looked down on you because of your Pakistani blood and the fact that as a servant they didn't think you belonged in this tent. Don't worry, Sherief, my husband, gets this all the time too. He is dark-skinned and he is constantly mistaken for a Pakistani or Indian too. When they find out he is Egyptian, it's not much better, though.

“You know the Saudis hate the Egyptians the most and vice versa. It's to do with the economic inequality in our countries. Most Egyptians come to work in the Gulf countries like the Kingdom for economic reasons so Saudis regard them as poor. And on the other hand, the Saudis like to vacation in Egypt, where they unfairly get a reputation of womanizing and drinking, so the Egyptians look down on them, very unhealthy.
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But in your case, you being with Qudsia doesn't help much either. Because she's black, I mean. I think most women here don't know that she is a nurse, and anyway she is very difficult to talk to.”

Randa went on. “Last night when they heard about your trip to the other tent they were quite shocked to discover you are a doctor. But they are pleased about that now! Now you will find they will all want to talk with you! They don't care about your race!” She laughed, returning to apply more unscented lotion to her drying limbs.

I was shocked. I had indeed noticed that while I felt terrible about Rashida and her helpers waiting on us in the tent, like maids, retrieving cutlery, serving food, tidying up, serving drinks, preparing our beds, no one else expressed the same concern. I tried to be as helpful as possible, unused to being waited upon. After eating I always returned my plate and utensils to the bucket in which everything was collected and taken away for washing, and would just get up to retrieve my own cold drink from the refrigerator cabinet in the corner of the tent, rather than ask a maid to fetch me one. I had noticed the Saudis dropping half-empty, crumpled cans on the floor of the tent, leaving their litter for the maids to remove. Or worse, signaling to the maids to bring them another soda with a contemptuous and dismissive wave, not even articulating the words, let alone pleasantries like “please” and “thank you.”

This arrogant behavior made me feel uncomfortable and seemed unnecessarily unkind, especially by pilgrims at Hajj towards fellow Muslims who were trying to ease their Hajj. I had wondered why no one else in my tent seemed eager to help the overworked maids to clear away each meal; and now I understood: it was beneath my fellow pilgrims, who had paid top dollar for this “VIP Hajj.”

To me “VIP Hajj” meant I was able to travel in buses between the holy sites and stay in air-conditioned comfort in Mina, but to these other Saudi women it meant being waited on hand and foot and enjoying a sense of superiority over these dark-skinned maids from Mecca, poor women who had to work for a living and chose to make a few extra riyals in Hajj season. I felt disgusted. The entire point of Hajj was to remind Muslims of our equal status in the eyes of God and that only God determines if one Muslim is superior to another in matters of the purity of His believers' hearts. Hajj was not an exercise in dominating the weak because of some form of economic power which, unlike each maid attending us, few other women in this tent actually earned for themselves. Worse than this, these women in my tent were feeling racially superior, to the maids and perhaps even to me.

I shouldn't have been stunned. I had already uncovered some racism during my time in the Kingdom. I knew Randa was probably right. Skin color, previously something I had never considered in my years of living in the United States or England, had somehow invited discomfort to me in Riyadh already. It was while I worked among the Wahabis that I first noticed how some Saudis discriminated, first among themselves and then among the expatriates. Discrimination in fact is how many of the Saudis define themselves. Saudi Arabia is about separation of gender, race, tribe, fiefdoms. I had developed a theory based on my crude observations, which explained the Wahabi Saudi ecosystem surrounding me in Riyadh. Perhaps it reached here too, in a tent full of Saudi orthodox Wahabi women from Riyadh.

The highest position in the Kingdom's racial food chain was occupied by the “pure” Saudi who was from the Najd, the central region, the province of which Riyadh was the first city (and therefore the nation's capital). The Najd was also the historical, geographical, and political node to the current powerbase: the rabidly orthodox Wahabi clergy. I use the word pure as they, the pure Saudis did. I had never heard anyone describe themselves as Pure English, Pure French, Pure Nigerian, Pure Indian, or any such. “Pure American” of course was an oxymoron, an impossibility which endeared America so much to me. “Pure Saudi,” however, I heard repeatedly; first when I stumbled across a gorgeous Saudi woman, settling a check at my beauty salon and “undercover” luxury gym in Riyadh, al-Multaqa.

Ahead of me in line, I had watched the extraordinarily beautiful Saudi woman at the counter. Her creamy skin, enormous eyes, regal stature, and slim, muscular figure were a breath-taking combination, even for another woman to behold. I surmised her to be of Palestinian origin. By now in Riyadh, I was learning Palestinians are a physically beautiful race. I couldn't wait to tell her this and triumphantly expose her origin, a testament to my growing sophistication and insight in this unusual world.

She signed her bill with an elegant twist of her slim wrist, weighed down by the obligatory Chopard “Happy Diamonds” watch,
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for the cultivated Saudi lady. She placed her gleaming red cell phone, shiny like nail polish, into an oversized Fendi handbag, and started to fasten her elegant, tailor-made abbayah. She covered her eyes with Dolce and Gabbana shades. Her languid, lean, perfectly manicured, unpolished fingers quickly fastened the jeweled cords to her costly abbayah. Elegant heels, probably Balenciaga, completed the ensemble. I was bewitched by this beautiful creature. I had never seen anything more elegant.

“Are you Palestinian?” I remembered blurting out to her. “You are so beautiful,” I told her, simply. She smiled a self-possessed smile, which slowly curved open, revealing a mouthful of pristine teeth, made perfect with expensive West London orthodontics. It was a dazzling smile. Compliments on her beauty were evidently commonplace, even here in a veiled Kingdom. She responded coolly, “No, I am Pure Saudi. I am not a Palestinian.”

Brushing past me, she exited, leaving me puzzled.

At the time I barely gave it a thought, watching the rich woman leaving in a cloud of fragrance. This was hardly so very different than many Western societies, I thought, recalling frosty, pooch-carrying, anorexic cadavers scuttling up and down Madison Avenue. So Saudi Arabia had a similar culture of frosty exclusion, a claim to superiority based on economics and tribal origins. The purity that the mysterious woman mentioned was actually an expression of Saudi aristocracy.

Later I realized this was my introduction to the Saudi self-perception of purity. Purity (and the froideur that usually accompanied it) was, in a few short months, already a powerful, recurrent theme in my time in the Kingdom: either one had it or one didn't. I even learned this was a problem for Saudi men, who were forever seen as hybrid races, doomed forever to be migrants because of grandmothers from elsewhere in the Arab world where three generations in the country was “off the boat.” This hybrid breeding would actually limit their ascent in organizations. Men, while Saudi nationals by birth, were of “impure” blood, their races were mixed, and they were excluded from the highest positions of power. “Oh yes, but he is an Iraqi Saudi,” would be a common lament.

I would discover my observations were not unusual. Ziauddin Sardar observed something similar about racial hierarchy in the Saudi philanthropic culture when he wrote about the “Saudi Sandwich” in 2006.
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He had noted deep seated preferences based on race as well. I realized the algorithm of racism I had encountered in Riyadh had intruded even the Hajj.

Here at Hajj, I was experiencing a taste of the same poison. While the women in my tent weren't nearly as wealthy or polished as the bewitching woman at al-Multaqa, they subscribed to the same view, deciding (based on skin color and ethnicity) that I surely must be a handmaid or at best nanny to a poor Saudi family who couldn't afford the much better Filipina maids, having instead to resort to Pakistani or worse, Bengali help. In fact I did remember one Saudi woman in the tent asking me if I was Bengali.

Yet I couldn't connect this racial purity with the warmth of the toothless, lined Bedouin women who showed me such affection in the hospital. I thought about the Bedouin patients I had attended in Riyadh and what they had taught me of acceptance. Surely these Bedouin were the purest Saudis of all, Daughters of Arabia, borne of tribal forebears who had roamed Arabia before the slick of oil wealth suffocated their culture, washing them up like half-dead seagulls into the new urban metropolis of modern Saudi Arabia. I decided it had to be wealth which made the stark difference. All I had to do was think back to the “real” Saudis I had met in Riyadh, so different than the women sharing this tent with me.

DAUGHTERS OF THE DESERT

I
T WAS THE EXCEPTIONAL WARMTH that I had encountered in the Bedouin women which so drew me to them. Even in my first few weeks in the Kingdom I quickly began to look forward to caring for them.

Saudi Arabia is the most urbanized country in the entire Arab world and only seven percent of the population of the Kingdom remains nomadic. Nonetheless, we had many Bedouin patients at the King Fahad hospital. I knew I wanted to know more patients like my first, Mrs. al-Otaibi. Their relatives fascinated me too. Few of them were Bedouins in the real sense, wandering and nomadic, most recently settled to Riyadh within a single generation. But when these elders became ill, their sons or grandsons would bring them in for treatment, often the whole family keeping vigil. Occasionally families would pitch tents outside the compound as they waited for the health of their loved one to be restored. And while doing so they cast a cozy umbra of reverence and affection for all those who cared for their kin.

I quickly discovered the Bedouin families were invariably grateful and compliant. No family, indeed no Saudi patient, male or female, ever objected to me, a woman, examining. They did not express even this fundamental discrimination that elsewhere seemed intrinsic to Kingdom life. Bedouin families welcomed women doctors. When I cared for their sons or fathers or husbands or brothers or grandfathers, the very patriarchs of these noble ancient families, even the most orthodox families never objected. In two years not a single Bedouin family ever asked for a male doctor to replace me. Not a single Bedouin objected to my unveiled status.

To the contrary, unlike the wealthy women who surrounded me at Hajj, they accepted me. I was constantly surprised and always gratified when the many families whose relative I did attend expressed open admiration that I was a woman, sentiments they transmitted with intense smiles, with deep, kohl-ringed gazes of emotion, or simply with a clumsy brush of fragrant attar (Arabic essential oil) smeared on the back of my snatched hand, clasped between the roughened, sun-blasted fingers of their senior sons. I blushed deeply when this happened the first time, amazed that a Saudi Bedouin man dared to reach for my unmarried hand and do so publicly. Their warmth was unmistakable and immediately transported me to the Arabia that had so bewitched Lawrence.

Families generally kept vigil either at the ICU bedside of their relative or, during times of intense treatment activity, outside in the hallways, in the visitors' prayer area of the ICU. Any women (if allowed by their male relatives to visit) usually gathered in one corner of the room and squatted tirelessly for hours, a line of black bundles along one wall. In a fiercely protective role of their womenfolk, most families would not permit their female family members to visit during the critical illness of their relative, even a son or husband. They feared overwhelming the women (should they be allowed to see the extent of illness), preferring them to visit once the stormy course of the illness had settled. Of course sometimes this meant that women would enter only as the patient was at the verge of irretrievable death, leading to a sudden heap of fainting bundles at the bedside, but this was clearly a cultural gesture to protect the weaker, frailer womenfolk. I always viewed this as a manifestation of the menfolk's love for their women relatives and not an oppressive behavior.

Meanwhile, the menfolk could never stop in one place, pacing through the ICU and greeting other family members in courtly succession. Once, feeling bad for one family of women whose patriarch was deathly ill, I started collecting chairs from the nurses' station to at least relieve some of them from sitting on the floor where they had been settled for hours. A Saudi colleague asked me what I was doing, and I explained.

“Please don't worry, Qanta. They are Bedouins. Really, they prefer the floor, truly.”

I doubted it, but when I handed them the chairs, I looked on, growing even more alarmed to see the bundles mounting the chairs, suddenly precarious on wheels. Distinctly ill at ease in the revolving chairs, these women really did prefer the floor after all. How I wished I could really talk with them and understand them more.

Returned to terra firma, they followed me with kohl-lined eyes, silently locking their sights on me, so many tracking devices. I wondered what they could be thinking as they assessed me. What did my white coat, my Western clothing, my short, unveiled hair, my bright red lipstick, and my Muslim name emblazed across my chest communicate to them? Then I remembered they couldn't read English, so perhaps they didn't know I bore a Muslim name.

Eventually, they began to speak to me. Ultimately, it was the Bedouins who took the initiative. The Bedouins were even more curious than I was!

The conversations usually went something like this. Shyly, they always began by asking me from where I had come, most often making their surreptitious inquiries as I finished off some notes or stored away X rays. This furtive inquiry while I was occupied obviated the need for us to make eye contact, which many Bedouins, even women, did not wish to do. Caught unaware, I would explain, America; after all that was where I had moved from. (It would prove far too convoluted to explain my precise origins as a British-born Muslim woman of Pakistani origin derived of parents transplanted there from a post-Partition India who had herself migrated in adulthood to the United States.)

“America,” I would say, bracing for their reaction.

“Amreeka!” they would exclaim, inexplicably delighted. They repeated “Amreeka!” to one another, in affirmation, as if they had guessed as much. For a time, the bundles would babble among themselves:

“Amreeka?”

“Na-am, Amreeka.” (Yes, America.) I would confirm.

“Umma, wa Bu-ey?” (And Mom and Dad?) They would inevitably inquire, emboldened. They would ask because tribal genealogy was so important for a woman, especially an unchaperoned female in a foreign country. They wanted to know of my stock.

“Pakistan,” I would say.

“Bakistan,” they would repeat, smiling widely, being unable to pronounce P (there is no P in Arabic). Thrilled, they would then gather courage to ask finally if I was indeed a Muslim. This, of course, had been the whole point of the interrogation. I would confirm and their veiled faces beamed.

“Mashallah!” (Praise God!) they would cry and let me go about my work, clearly delighted.

“Mashallah, Mashallah, Mashallah!” resonated throughout the bundles. “Musalmaan, Musalmaan,” (Muslim) they would say to each other, delighted they had found me to be a fellow believer.

Their curiosity was sated. They asked me nothing further and would always stop at this point, satisfied, pleased, possibly even relieved. Their dark eyes followed me with renewed interest and a genuine sense of pride, because they knew that the woman doctor caring for their family member was a Muslim too. Their ailing relative was in good hands, they must have decided. Being a Muslim made them feel connected to me. They seemed to be able to put aside my alien qualities much more easily than I was feeling. I remembered how very warm these Bedouin were.

This extraordinary approval was repeated countless times; many of the women admiring me probably couldn't read or write and yet looked at me with untold genuine pride. The older women seemed most enthralled by the discovery that I was a Muslim. I was always touched but also so puzzled by how these Bedouin seemed to have so much affection for America. How could this be, when only few of them could have been there and most certainly none of them knew any Americans personally? What was it that infused their voices which such admiration for my origins from “Amreeka,” which they revered almost as much as my Muslim pedigree?