by M S James
We now had an alternative to the Hash and enjoyed whole days at Al Akariya as John and Becky’s guests. The compound was not unlike a Mediterranean resort, with sunshades and sun loungers, people larking about in the swimming pool and a general ambience of bonhomie. Sitting out on our hosts’ patio, waiting for the barbecue to be ready, with a glass of John’s homemade red in my hand, I was beginning to think that this was the life – I could get used to it. I usually sat in the same place and always enjoyed the distant view of Riyadh’s lights twinkling away.
‘That’s funny, I can’t see Riyadh’s lights tonight,’ I remarked on one occasion. No sooner had I spoken than we all leapt to our feet, grabbed the children and the food and rushed into the villa. As we slammed the door shut, a sandstorm slammed into the house. The reason I couldn’t see the lights was because an approaching sandstorm was blocking them out. The garden furniture was hurled into the air and the barbecue bowled across the lawn. Sand rained down the patio doors and shook them mightily. It was terrifying being inside the house. God knows what it was like for those who were caught out in it. Perhaps the locals were forewarned on a weather forecast but since we didn’t often watch normal Saudi television (mainly boring and always in Arabic) we had no idea that this sandstorm was approaching.
‘The pool’s going to be pretty filthy tomorrow,’ commented John. ‘You had better stay here tonight, this may last for hours. And the roads will be blocked with debris.’ The men and children settled down to watch a video whilst Becky and I prepared a meal from the rescued marinated chicken.
Once more, I realised that you had to keep your wits about you to survive in Saudi Arabia.
Entertainment
Except for the occasional rainy days and sandstorms, the sun always shone. Every day as we went out to the car, Anna would say, ‘Nice sunny day, today,’ and one of us would reply, ‘Yes, darling/sweetiepie/dumbo, it always is.’ As autumn progressed towards winter the temperature became bearable and, eventually, quite pleasant. This made expeditions out to the desert or down to the souk feasible. Entertainment as we know it in Europe was absent from the Kingdom. No cinemas, no theatre, no live music, no shows where men and women could mingle together. The Saudis loved picnics and could be seen en famille on patches of grass with their brass coffee pots and bottles of Nissah water. Some took their television set with them and wired it up to their car’s electrics. The main roads around town were several lanes wide with grassy central reservations planted with oleanders and palm trees. It was not uncommon to see families picnicking on these central reservations, though how they got to them I couldn’t imagine.
Everyone loved visiting the souk. It was in Bat’ha, in old Riyadh, where many buildings, like the Musmak Fortress, were built of adobe, which is, essentially, compressed mud and animal hair. The builders had come up with an ingenious way of preventing rain from washing away the walls. Protruding rain pipes from the flat roofs extended out into the street, well away from the walls of the buildings. Gargoyles serve the same function in many English churches. The souk was an open-air department store; there was the carpet souk, the gold souk, the spice souk and, quite revoltingly, the meat souk which stank of well-ripened mutton. Flies hummed around it, driven crazy by its intoxicating smell. I bought all my long, wraparound skirts at the clothing souk. They were cheap and did the job. Beautifully embroidered tablecloths and bedding imported from the Philippines adorned the household goods souk. In the antiques souk, you could buy old decorated doors from abandoned houses – the Saudis had little regard for their antiques but they were snapped up by the expats. And for an astronomical sum you could purchase a highly decorated and embossed Khanjar, the curved Arab dagger and sheath.
The gold souk was the most fabulous place on God’s earth. Stall after stall festooned with bangles and necklaces, rings and tiaras. It quite took my breath away. The Saudi women were great gold investors. One day, the wind blew aside a Saudi woman’s abaya and allowed me a glimpse of her gold-encrusted body. Gold was sold by weight so, however intricate the workmanship, each item was priced according to the scales. Prices varied every day, depending on the price on the international market. If you heard that ‘the price of gold has fallen’ you could expect that everyone would make a trip to the gold souk to snap up a bargain. I bought a necklace and matching bracelet and window-shopped presents for when I returned home. Anna was desperate for some earring studs but hadn’t as yet had her ears pierced. I thought that it was an operation best carried out in England. All Arab girls had their ears pierced when they were babies and all wore gold earrings. Nadia told me that her baby’s holes had been put in the wrong part of the earlobe so had to be done again. ‘She was already crying so two more holes wouldn’t make much difference,’ she explained.
The spice souk smelt heavenly. You could smell it some distance away as wafts of turmeric, paprika, cardamom and spices I had never heard of drifted towards you. Great mounds of orange, brown, green and yellow spices were displayed on the stalls with garlands of red or green chillies and garlic bulbs hanging from the canopy. It was impossible to leave without buying something.
But my favourite was the carpet souk. Oriental rugs from all parts of the Middle East and Turkey were piled high according to size. Qum, Kayseri, Heriz, Shirvan, Van – names redolent of the woven treasures of the Orient. The Queen of Carpets is generally acknowledged to be the Hereka from the village of that name in Turkey. They are usually made from the finest silk, dyed in the most delicate shades. They are vastly expensive and rarely touch a floor, the proud owner preferring to hang their Hereka in pride of place.
The sellers would spend ages extracting a particular rug from a mountain of others if you said, for instance, you wanted one with a red centre and animals around the border. If you demurred at the price (haggling was part of the fun and I found out how to do it quite by accident) the seller would say, ‘You take home. No money. Mafi falus. You look in your home. You like, you pay later.’ We never did take up the offer, the penalty for being accused of stealing was too awful to risk. Jake and Anna loved to climb up the stacks of carpets. At first we tried to stop them but the carpet sellers would say, ‘Please. They are the flowers of the desert. Let them.’ So, we did.
On one occasion I went to the carpet souk to buy a runner to place in front of our sofa. A cup of coffee had been spilt onto the carpet and we couldn’t get rid of the stain. A rug to cover the coffee patch was required. I found the very thing, a double rug, i.e. two pieces joined by the fringes, that would comfortably cover the problem.
‘How much, please?’ I didn’t want to spend much since it was likely to be spilt on before long.
‘Eighty riyal.’
I looked dubious. ‘Hmm. Forty?’
‘La. Seven five’. Eventually we agreed on sixty but instead of rolling it up for me to take away, he produced a large pair of scissors and was about to separate the rugs along the fringe.
‘What are you doing? I want it in one piece!’
‘That is two rugs. Sixty, sixty-one twenty riyal!’
I was furious. ‘Oh, forget it. Keep your poxy carpet,’ I told him and I stomped off complaining to the children. The carpet seller ran after me. ‘Madam, madam, you take,’ he said whilst shoving the contentious rug into my hands.
‘Sixty riyals?’
‘Na’am,’ he agreed. So that’s how you haggle. You have to be prepared to walk away.
The oriental carpets were often brought into Arabia by pilgrims on their way to Mecca. Selling them to a middleman would cover the cost of their travel and accommodation. Over the months we came to recognise designs from different parts of the Islamic world and their common motifs and to admire the skill and artistry of the women who made them. Men traded and sold them but it was mainly women in small out-of-the-way villages who sat before their looms to weave them.
We knowledgably examined the back of the carpets to count the knots per square in
ch to give the impression that we weren’t complete suckers. Eventually we picked up courage to buy a few.
Hard by the souk was the main central square bounded on one side by the Jamia Friday Mosque. This area attracted large crowds at the weekend. They were mainly Yemeni, Pakistani, Baluchi, or Afghan guest workers who were glad to have some respite from their labouring jobs. They all wore their traditional baggy trousers with long shirts in varying pastel hues. It was an unnerving experience walking through the throng. Although they parted to let you through, they fixed their gaze on your face and stared and stared. They were probably from remote villages where they didn’t see their own women’s faces and never European ones at such close quarters. I would station the children either side of me and Philip behind so no straying hand could touch me. A pair of reflective sunglasses helped me to look at them without being seen to be looking. The main square, known by the expats as Chop Square, had a dreadful reputation. It was here, after Friday prayers, that people were executed. Rumour had it (and the expat rumour mill was always fully operational) that if European expats were seen in Chop Square when an execution was to take place, they would be corralled by the police up to the front. Condemned men were beheaded and women were stoned to death by the expedient use of a truckload of rocks dumped on the poor unfortunate creatures.
To avoid ever being caught up in this situation we never went to Bat’ha on a Friday.
Once a year it was National Drive Carefully Week. This was a source of wonder and hilarity for the expats. Large platforms were erected at busy intersections, precariously decorated with wrecked cars which made you wonder how the accidents happened. Beneath, by way of explanation, would be a sign saying, ‘Do not think whilst driving’. Of course, there were massive jams around each display as drivers would marvel at the wrecks on show. We saw an amazing wreck on the way to school one morning. A lamppost was bent over at ninety degrees at the midpoint. Skewered onto it was a saloon car with the lamppost going in through the front windscreen and out of the back window. How it had happened was unfathomable. Saudis were often crazy drivers; they would show their irritation at traffic lights by making their cars bounce up and down by some clever manipulation of the drive and brake pedals whilst simultaneously honking their horns. It was comical to see a row of bouncing cars as if on the grid of a racetrack. Quite often when making a 180-degree change of direction at an intersection, they didn’t use the lane nearest to the central reservation but the one furthest away. When the lights went ‘green’ they would scream across three or four lanes in front of the others on the grid, missing being crashed into by microns. Then there were the Bedouin on the desert dual carriageways resolutely driving towards you on your side of the road. Often as not they had a camel in the back of their pickup seated with the blacked-over women of the family. The men in the front, the women with the camel.
The most frightening aspect of this chaotic driving was the absence of car insurance. Being insured was deemed ‘anti-Islamic’ since, if Allah willed that you crashed and maybe died, then it was not permitted that you should thwart Him. If Allah willed it, you paid for it.
Philip came home one day with news of the King’s Camel Race at al Rumahiya, some ninety minutes from Riyadh. Did we want to go? Philip would be on a site visit that day but perhaps Angelo could drive us there. ‘Yes!’ we all chorused. It sounded fun.
After collecting Jake from the SAIS, we hit the al Rumahiya Road and followed the cars streaming out of Riyadh. The racetrack could be seen miles away, the disturbed sand billowing up into the sky.
There seemed to be an unofficial car park snaking along the perimeter of the racecourse with the owners perched on top of their cars to get a good view. However, there were two large grandstands within the racecourse so we threaded our way between the hundreds of Saudis, Filipinos, Asian and European expats who were shoving their way in through the narrow entrance, which was little more than a gap in the perimeter wire fencing. All was barely controlled frenzy inside. There were animated groups of Saudi men cheering and laughing, all heading for the main grandstand. The desert wind blew red flags advertising Coca Cola which bedecked the area in front of the viewing area. Rows of plush armchairs took centre stage at the front of the stand for, presumably, the honoured guests. Rather plump older men enjoyed this privilege whilst the younger men stood in the stand or wandered about hand in hand until the race was to begin. It was oddly charming to see men holding hands but startling to see them welcome each other with a kiss on the mouth. The King would be arriving to view the races, although not from the stand but from a coach. This was not the horse-drawn version that the Queen uses at Ascot but a tourist-type motor coach which would race around the track after the camels.
The Saudi women, together with expats from all nations, men and women, viewed the races from the other grandstand. This seemed inexplicable. Were the Saudi women deemed to be safer in the company of expat unbelievers rather than with their own menfolk? If so, it was a damning indictment of Islam and the behaviour of its male adherents.
To get a good view, Angelo, the children and I insinuated ourselves into the front of the mob and took stock of what was going on. There was a large number of military chaps nominally keeping order. I think that they may have been members of the mostly Bedouin National Guard since their marching was distinctly erratic. They all wore desert boots (of course), brown fatigues and the obligatory red-and-white headdresses. Their guns were at the ready but I’m not sure whether they were. They were as eager as the rest of us to see what was going on, so several at any one time were looking behind them at the track where the camels were assembling. Another posse of soldiers marched onto the track, each man with a number (written in Arabic) on a card pennant which eventually was to be given to one of the jockeys as they rode to the finishing line. Various members of the military marched up and down in front of us. I was particularly struck by several senior commanders walking along hand in hand. It seemed so incongruous. I was photographing them when, through my viewfinder, I noticed a Bedouin soldier staring directly at me much as though he were an eagle spying a small animal ready to be devoured. He had a hooked nose and penetrating black eyes, his mouth in a disdainful downward slant. I took the camera down and waited for him to come and snatch it out of my hand and grind it into the dust. He continued to watch me until I was distracted by the children. When I glanced back his gaze was focused elsewhere. Phew.
The camel jockeys were young teenagers, dressed in tracksuits or in grubby thobes tucked up into their tracksuit pants. None of the camels were saddled so the jockeys stayed on by gripping the camels’ humps and firmly holding the reins. There were thirty or so camels in each race so the men with the numbers, eventually, had their work cut out finding the right jockey for the right position at the finishing line. The race was off! A charging stream of camels thundered past. In quick pursuit was His Majesty the King of Saudi Arabia with the Emir of Kuwait riding shotgun. The track was a mile-long circuit. We could see their progress by the distant clouds of desert sand that were thrown up by the camels and the King’s coach. As they entered the home straight the roar from the crowd drowned out the loudspeakers of the race commentary. Somehow, the winner was identified and given the number 1 pennant. He was feted and congratulated by all around him and awarded a sumptuously valuable prize by the King.
When the races were over we made our way back to our car. Waiting for Jake and Angelo to catch up, I was overtaken by a group of young Saudi women, completely blacked over. They excitedly chattered with each other – in English.
‘Where are you studying?’ said one.
‘I’m at Berkeley, majoring in Math. Where are you?’
‘I’m at USC studying Economics,’ replied the other.
‘Hey! We’re neighbours! We must meet up when we go back.’
I lifted my slackened jaw off my chest and digested what I had just witnessed. These young, intelligent, educated women cheerfull
y obliterated themselves in their own country but probably wore considerably less in the Land of the Unbeliever. I could only conclude that the punishment from their families for rebelling would be harsh. Surely, they would make a stand sooner or later? Otherwise, the Kingdom would lose a sizeable number of its educated women. They would vote with their feet.
Mahmud, a young Saudi colleague of Philip’s, had announced his engagement to a Saudi doctor, shortly after I arrived in Riyadh. I met him once or twice in the office but not socially. No one had seen his fiancée but, apparently, she was tall, glamorous and a bit of a catch. Much to my surprise, Jenny and I were invited to the wedding celebration. There would be two nuptial feasts, one for the male friends and relations of the groom and one for the bride’s party. Neither Philip nor Archie were invited to the men’s bash that was to take place the evening before the bride’s festivities so Jenny and I were puzzled by our invitation. However, there was no doubt that it would be an exceptional experience, so we readily accepted.
The bride’s event was to take place on the following Saturday at ten o’clock.
‘Oh dear, that’s a shame,’ I said. ‘I shall be at work.’
‘It’s at ten o’clock in the evening,’ Philip replied.
‘A wedding at ten o’clock at night!’ I exclaimed. ‘What a strange time to have a wedding.’
Jenny and I dressed up in our party gear and arranged with Archie that we would be collected soon after midnight. Sunday would be a work day for both of us so we couldn’t stay any later. We were dropped off at the Hyatt Hotel and made our way to the ballroom, a vast room ornately decorated with sparkling chandeliers. At the far end was a raised dais with two thrones surrounded by banks of flowers. On one side, on another raised dais, was a band of musicians, all female, who loudly performed a medley of Arab music and sang lustily with frequent bouts of ululation. Drums play a significant part in Saudi music so the racket from the band made it difficult to hear people speak. There were hardly any other Europeans so we were easily identified as being the wives of Mahmud’s colleagues. ‘Ahlan! Welcome to the wedding feast!’ said an attractive young woman who turned out to be Mahmud’s sister, Yasmin.