In the Land of Invisible Women

by Qanta Ahmed

  At the end of an especially straight stretch of the Damman Highway, Tahir saw the Suzuki pickup—in the back, a dozen long-eared goats. It was stalled halfway into the road. There was no time to prepare. Ye t he swerved, even at these speeds. A sound of screeching goats, roaring rubber, buckling steel, and it was all over.

  When the noise stopped, Tahir was crushed between the steering wheel and dashboard, his head through the windshield. Powder from the airbags mixed with goat fur and blood. From the Suzuki, a Bedouin mother cried for her child. Yaseer stopped talking, spiraling deep into the memory. Pulling out a cigarette, he wiped away new tears for long moments. Finally he crumpled the filter between his orthodontically perfected clench.

  “How long had Tahir been doing drugs? And how did he become an alcoholic?” I began. The brother was surprised I had exposed my patient's addictions, but after a long sigh, he began to tell me the sad elegy of his brother, an anthem to so many other privileged men in the Saudi Kingdom.

  The brothers were the youngest sons of a wealthy Saudi merchant, born to his fourth wife. The father was already seventy-two when Tahir was born. He was also a severe alcoholic, disappearing for weeks at a time to seek shelter with his other wives, away from the needs of his youngest children.

  Despite, or perhaps because of, his alcoholism, the father wanted Tahir to have the best education possible. At eleven, he was sent to boarding school, first in Switzerland and later, after expulsion for delinquency, to an English boarding school in Norfolk. Away from his mother, he became even lonelier.

  Before long he was playing truant. By thirteen he had started drinking. By fourteen he had been to the ER for intoxication. At sixteen he was expelled again, returning to the Kingdom. His family noticed a change. He was withdrawn, sleeping for long hours in the day.

  It was at this point that Tahir started using coke seriously. With his family money and connections, drugs and alcohol were easily accessible. Yaseer explained how Tahir started out doing lines of coke in private homes and some of the better hotels. Soon, he was hanging with a fast set from Bahrain and later an elite jet set from Dubai. His life for the last three years had been a series of drug and alcohol benders. Amman one weekend, Milan the next, returning to Dubai, then Paris for Fashion Week. And so he moved, constantly, partying everywhere, until he was trashed. He never felt at home anywhere, preferring instead to live in suites at the Lanesborough in London or the Hotel de Crillon in Paris.

  Tahir, a product of a broken polygamous family wracked by alcoholism and jealousies, couldn't sink any roots. He had even tried the conventional Saudi life expected of him, marrying endogamously several years earlier. But like so many privileged, sheltered Saudi women, his wife had been groomed only to be a bride, not to become a wife.

  Newly married, Tahir would return from a day at his father's office to find an empty married home, his wife bored, stationed instead at her parents' house. He discovered he had married a child still umbilically connected to her mother. The drinking soon returned. His brother looked on, powerless, and so ended the story in the carnage of tonight.

  I returned to the ICU waiting for the scanning to finish. Yaseer's tale of his tragic brother had filled me with sadness, yet it was already an all-too-familiar story.

  I called them the Lost Boys of Riyadh. They shambled around town in anti-establishment T-shirts, sporting low-slung, studded belts and black jeans, so many Riyadh Rappers. Now and again, an irreverent witticism on a T-shirt would catch my eye, sometimes reading “Made in England” on the back, causing me to smile. The slump in their shoulders, their heads bowed under the perpetual weight of shame and loss, pulled at something inside me. I felt sad. These men were broken.

  Often, I saw cohorts of them milling in the ER after a night of high carousing. Other times, like the prowling Testarossa coxswains issuing cat calls in Olleya, I watched them, intrigued by their behavior, at once threatening and cowardly. Always, a defiant jaw line belied bravado rather than courage. Manicured beards revealed a peacock's vanity, reddened, always runny nostrils, gave away a voracious appetite for blow.

  The glossy accessories and costly playgrounds only defined the void these men carried within them. They felt abandoned, lost, and unvalued. These were men raised without fathers, sired by those old enough to be grandfathers. They were sons spawned of men who had lost interest in children, even a male. The Lost Boys grew into men without direction or future. For all their privilege, which torpedoed them into the echelons of Western societies and appetites, they lacked the substantial anchors of a place and an identity in their own families, culture, and religion. Outcasts in their own families, unable to bridge the generation abyss between aging polygamist fathers and modern bachelorhood, they failed to find belonging anywhere else. These were the New Nomads. Unlike their forebears, however, there was no purpose to their painful and very isolating wanderings. They roamed in search of an escape from self, often finding it in drug-induced oblivion. The Kingdom was losing whole generations of Lost Boys in this way. They became strangers in the very Kingdom that had birthed them.

  A FATHER'S GRIEVING

  SEVERAL DAYS OF PROPER SLEEP had invigorated me. I was ready for anything on duty. As I sipped the first of many coffees, I spoke to the charge nurse running the ICU.

  “Don't tell me, Floriana, bed 16 still hasn't gone to surgery?” Floriana nodded in placid agreement.

  A pleasant enough Saudi, Hesham was a rather timid surgeon. I suspected he recognized the fear of operating within himself. Floriana and I took a long look at the patient.

  “His spleen has been oozing for a while now, Floriana. Hopefully that sack of boggy clot will hold. This spleen could rupture at any time.” We exchanged a pained look.

  “Maybe I should call him to take a second look? What do you think Floriana?”

  “Oh Doctora, you didn't hear the news?” Floriana looked at me, puzzled. “The news about Hesham's son?” I looked at her blankly, absorbing her concerned tone.

  “Hesham's son was killed on Thursday. He was only six. We don't know the details, but there was an announcement in the staff meeting. An accident. He died shortly after arriving at the hospital.”

  Floriana fell into a silence, thinking about her own children who were living thousands of miles away in Manila. As the only breadwinner in her family, she sent them money every month. As a mother she was wounded by the death of another's child. Years later we would all be broken when Floriana herself was killed in a motor accident weeks before repatriating to Manila for good. Riyadh was notorious for motor vehicle accidents.

  Instantly I regretted my contempt for poor Hesham. I separated from Floriana and went for a walk outside on the ICU lawn. It was past dusk. The sparrows were twittering their final birdsong before moonrise. I felt acutely sad for the bumbling surgeon, remembering how eager he had seemed to be friendly to me.

  “And if you need anything at all, Doctora Qanta, anything in Riyadh, please let me know,” Hesham had urged, leaning his tubby shoulders against the steel doors of the ICU late one night after I revived one of his patients. I remember looking up at the overweight Saudi who was beaming a surprisingly friendly smile. I wondered exactly what he could mean, “should I need anything.” I was so unaccustomed to casual friendliness with Saudi colleagues that now I regarded good will, especially from Saudi men, with intense suspicion. That night, I had dismissed him with the briefest of nods, my disdain for him secured behind my surgical mask.

  Recalling his friendliness now cut me to the quick. Though I knew him only from caring for our shared trauma patients, I knew him to be well-meaning. He was a man who did his best in spite of the fact he wasn't particularly able. That was a bravery and persistence in and of itself.

  In a moment of clarity, I knew at once I wanted to visit Hesham's home and express my condolences. It was the only way I could express penance for my disgraceful condescension in past months. Perhaps, now that I could see my own arrogance, I would finally learn some much-needed humi
lity. Riyadh was making me very hard. There was a sharp edge to me which wounded everyone around me. I didn't like the angry, aggressive woman I was becoming. I wanted to change. I would start by doing the right thing for Hesham.

  The next morning after signing out my caseload, I spoke to Faris (the ICU chairman) about Hesham. A Saudi Hijazi and a trained scholar in Islam before he ever practiced medicine (actually himself a Muttawa), Faris was well versed in the traditions both of Islam and the Saudi Kingdom. He would know how I could arrange a visit for such a delicate matter as the death of a child.

  “Dr. Faris, I know it is unconventional, but I wish to visit Hesham himself. This is just terrible news. I cannot believe this has happened. When is the funeral? I want to see him, give my condolences.”

  “Yesterday. And, Qanta, in our tradition only men can attend funerals. So you wouldn't have been able to go anyway. I was there with many of our other colleagues. It was terribly sad. After the funeral, Allah recommends three days of visiting for people to pay respects to the bereaved, but after then we really shouldn't intrude on them. The family is given forty days to grieve in privacy. Allah wants them to try and recover from this terrible loss. We should not make it more difficult for them by visiting outside this period.”

  “What about tomorrow, Dr. Faris? Could we please visit Hesham, perhaps as a group of colleagues from the ICU? You know I cannot visit alone. I have never met his wife. Maybe if several of us went as his ICU colleagues it could be possible for me to go there this way?”

  Faris burst into a wide smile. He was renowned for his appetite for community service whether visiting the sick, the bereaved, or others in need. He was a very social Hijazi. Recently divorced, I wondered perhaps if he was also lonely. An outing even of this nature was one he would certainly enjoy arranging, if nothing else other than to pass a solitary afternoon.

  “Qanta, that is an excellent idea. I think in the company of your colleagues there would be no impropriety.” I was taken back by his genuine praise. “Let me talk with Hesham and see what I can arrange. Perhaps we will ask Imran and Imtiaz to join us? I know they are friends.”

  “I will tell the others,” I agreed and rushed home to start making the calls. Faris retrieved his cell phone from a deep pocket in his thobe and was already dialing numbers before I had left the room.

  Imran and Mobeen (my fellow New York City-trained colleagues in the ICU) were at once supportive when I told them the plan. They agreed to come. They promised to invite Imtiaz too, our other Pakistani colleague who, like us, had trained in New York.

  The next afternoon we were to gather outside the ornate hospital VIP entrance. At the appointed time, I scurried through the brown-and-gold marble atrium which ushered influential and sometimes royal Saudis who came to be treated at our hospital. The mid-afternoon light was blinding, and my eyes smarted even from behind shades. On the portico, pacing up and down with a cell phone, Faris, our escort, awaited us. In his white thobe standing next to his white Cadillac, Faris cut a fine figure. Admiring his surprising elegance, I spied on him unseen for some time before stepping over toward him.

  Faris was probably six foot two in height. In recent years he had gained weight, conferring a prosperous yet warm countenance to the man. His face was almost round, lined with an unobtrusive but maintained beard. His eyes were always on the verge of sharing a joke and in fact he was renowned for his excellent sense of humor. Faris was a comedian and the antithesis of the forbidding stereotypes that powerful men in the Kingdom somehow bore.

  Today, in place of his clumsy white coat and ill-fitting scrubs, he had chosen to dress in traditional attire. His white headdress fluttered in the blustery afternoon breeze. As he took a phone call, pressing the black cell phone to an unveiled ear, the aerial slid upwards, cutting a startling contrast against his ancient headdress. His shaded eyes looked out pensively into the distance. From time to time the wind tugged at his white shemagh, pulling it away from him, revealing a shaven, scented neck and plump sides of a smooth, unlined face. His skin color was deep brown, almost Indian in coloration, adding contrast to the striking cream ensemble of his dress. I was struck by his panache and glamour, made even more beguiling because he was so obviously unaware of his own allure.

  He moved toward his white Cadillac, as immaculately spotless as its owner. Spying me, he signaled me to hurry. Imran and Imtiaz were already in the car, expecting me to take the front passenger seat as a means of providing me, the lone female, with personal space. Faris got into the car carefully so as not to disturb his headdress. Once settled in the driving seat, he glanced in the rearview mirror and adjusted the peak on his hat, exactly like a cattle rancher fixing his Stetson. He signaled to me to sit beside him. In response I froze, remaining outside the car.

  In my observation inside the Kingdom, the front seat was reserved only for wives. In the glare of the wide expanse of windshield, the Mutawaeen might easily spy me if I sat there and ask to see my papers. As an unmarried woman I wasn't sure that even Faris, the head of the National Guard Hospital's prestigious ICU, could protect me. Worse, I feared fueling the fantasy that I might take the place of Faris's partner. His recent divorce was common knowledge, one that was widely discussed in the hospital. I didn't want to encourage even a remote chance of inviting his attentions. My paranoia was paralyzing and completely disproportionate. What would never give me pause in the West somehow had monumental connotations in Riyadh.

  Despite protestations, one of the men finally moved from the back to sit next to Faris and I sat instead in the rear seat. The windows at the back were deeply tinted, a practice widely adopted in the Kingdom at the time to protect the female cargo from intrusive stares. These cultural shades on all motor vehicles have since been discontinued to make it easier to search for potential terrorists in the Kingdom. We were still pre-9/11 at that time. But today I was glad of the concealment. After months of living in the Kingdom, I couldn't tolerate the vulnerability, both physical and social, of sitting in the front seat.

  At last, Faris put the car in gear and began our journey to Hesham's house. As he pulled on the gear stick which, pathognomonic of truly American cars, was attached to the steering column, I couldn't help laughing at the thought of Seinfeld's dad. Faris was a Saudi version of the same. His car was pure Boca. I sank into the deep leathery seats. Semi-recumbent, we floated through the afternoon. Soon, thinking of the sad visit ahead, we fell into a silence. Riyadh was rather empty. It was a quiet Tuesday. Most were either at their workplaces or taking a customary afternoon nap, and pedestrians were almost never seen in the Kingdom. Most streets were devoid of sidewalks. In Riyadh, a city which had been constructed at warp speed, roads had been built without sidewalks for a population which had made the transition from camel to pickup, SUV, or sports car in one fell swoop. Here everyone traveled by car, Saudis and expats alike. Even the poorest of the poor, the foreign laborers, relied on rickety cycles, but few were in sight at that time of day. I watched the scenes as they fled past the window, lifeless and unpeopled.

  Just as we passed a shopping center I recognized, we turned off the main road and began weaving through a maze of half-finished streets. A couple of boys lurked around a corner shop, watching traffic and kicking a dusty ball. We turned off a busy two-lane road lined by small shops on either side.

  Faris squeezed the fat Cadillac along the narrow road, creeping ahead to find the house. No properties were numbered, but he had been to the house before. He finally identified Hesham's home by a palm tree that hung into the street from the front yard. Making an impossible turn, he pulled into the narrow driveway. The steel gates had been drawn back. We were expected.

  The silence after the engine stopped engulfed us. Only the ticking of the slowly contracting metal under the hood punctuated the vapors of grief emanating from the house. We were parked on a small drive, large enough for one car, covered in crazy paving. This was a lower-middle-class home. Like many Saudi employees at the hospital, Hesham chose to live in
a private dwelling in the city rather than in the generic Medical City accommodations where, segregated onto different compounds, many Saudi and non-Saudi employees lived, free of charge.

  Neatly weeded flower borders gave Hesham away as houseproud, though I imagined a poor Bengali gardener probably toiled over these beds for him. The breeze fluttered through a rose hedge. Distant sounds of boys playing tag magnified the sound of the loss at this house. Faris dropped his voice into a whisper and lead us towards the house. Before we could ascend the terrazzo steps, Hesham opened the door. He greeted us with a weak but genuine smile and with a heart-rending humility welcomed us into his home.

  “Innalillah e wa inna ilayhe rajioon,” (Surely we are from God and to Him we are all to return) echoed among us as we greeted him with salaams. We tried to soothe him with the mantra of the prayer for the deceased. Hesham responded with the same prayer. I could tell he was trying hard to believe his son had indeed returned to his Maker.

  Hesham was dressed like a man about house. His head was uncovered without the formal headdress that Faris wore, yet he wore a similar white thobe. The throat was undone, unlike the peaked collars of Faris's formal thobe, which were closely buttoned. Hesham's bald pate gleamed, a bluish bruise in the center of his forehead, a mark of his devotion to regular prayer. His moustache was tidy, the rest of his face clean shaven and freshly cologned. In the few days since I had last seen him, his customary cherubic glow had faded and his round, Reubenesque face had thinned under the burden of recent grief. He leaned against the doorway of his home, shoulders forever broken by sadness.

  “Salaam alaikum, Salaam alaikum!” (Peace be upon you! Peace be upon you!) He greeted each of us warmly. Each man took his hand and kissed the side of his face several times in the usual Saudi custom. Faris stopped longer, consoling him in Arabic, his hand pressed on top of Hesham's. With a quick swipe of his hand, Faris brushed his ready tears, which had already wet his face in empathic sorrow.