So I didn’t dream of leaving. And I didn’t dream of love. But I did hope that one day I could change things, make our lives more bearable.
There was a sound in the hallway. Footsteps. The headmistress was on her way back. My finger hovered over the message. I had to know. If there was a way, even if it was just the glimmer of light underneath a locked door, I had to know.
I scanned the message swiftly, feeling the skin on the back of my neck prickle. My stomach felt both heavy and cold, as if I’d swallowed a block of ice.
Each school had to submit the names of two participants, who would debate the sharia law in a national competition. The winning team would receive full tuition and room and board at Princess Nora University and spend their summers working at the Majlis. The winning school would receive a grant that had so many zeros my eyes glazed over.
I marked the message as unread and pulled the photos back up to cover the screen. I went to the printer to hide my face as the headmistress returned. I didn’t have Mishail’s ability to completely mask my thoughts.
“They kept their mouths shut,” Maryam Madam said. “I pretty much had to ask point-blank, Did any of you bring a camera? And even then, only Bilquis said anything.”
The headmistress glanced at the colored printouts.
“Why do you children have a death wish?” she muttered, sitting at her desk. “Do you have any idea what the minister would do if he knew what the girls at his daughter’s school were up to?”
I caught the headmistress’s eye. There was no anger there, just exhaustion.
“You take great care of her,” Maryam Madam said. “Better than any sister. I’ve deleted the photos. Here.” She handed back the camera. “You did the right thing telling me, Leena.”
I frowned in confusion, and then realized I must look conflicted. I was, but not about this. Protecting Mishail came first, no question. The last five years had taught me that to survive, you had to work with the authorities, not against them, bear the scorpion sting if you had to, and I was going to make absolutely sure Mishail survived.
“God forbid any of you start messing around with boys,” the headmistress said with a laugh. “This stuff, I can protect you from. If I ever find out any of you girls have betrayed my trust, have gone there…” She shook her head.
“We’ll save that for when we’re in university,” I said, trying to jokingly guide the conversation back to where I wanted it. “I was thinking Princess Nora for law? Unless you have some other guidance?”
The headmistress fell silent. Her pensive face made me nervous. If I was being considered for the internship, wouldn’t Maryam Madam be more excited?
“It’ll be tough with your situation,” the headmistress said, and my knees trembled. “Even if you’re accepted into a university, you need his permission to go. I’ll see what I can do. No promises.”
I swallowed, trying not to let my disappointment show. I should’ve expected it. It didn’t matter that I was at the top of my class. Merit didn’t matter, not in this country. All that mattered was that my father had disobeyed the government, protested against it, and so I would be punished for his sins.
I didn’t want to ask any more questions, didn’t want to think about what I would do with my life if I wasn’t even allowed to study after high school.
The bell rang, signaling the end of the school day.
“Thank you,” I said, and walked out. I had no memory of walking back to class. I didn’t realize I was clutching the photos so hard I was leaving creases. Most of the girls were hurrying out to the school buses, but Aisha and Mishail were waiting in a corner.
“How’d you manage to do that?” Aisha said. “When Bilquis told her about the camera, we were sure you were in for a full strip search. We were expecting you to come back traumatized.”
“I knew she would find out about the camera,” I said. My voice felt dull and distant, as if I were reciting from a script. “While she was talking to you, I printed out the photos and hid the pages. She deleted everything from the camera, but printouts are better than nothing, right?”
A weight descended on my shoulders.
If I hadn’t said anything, we’d have digital photos that would make us giddy with joy but could ruin our lives at any minute.
If I hadn’t said anything, I could have had one more day hoping for a future that I knew now would never be mine.
“You’re such a genius,” Mishail said, swooping in for a hug. I lifted her off her feet and swept her in a circle, burying my face in her neck and exhaling a hot, heavy breath there. Worth it, I told myself. Just for this moment, it was all worth it.
4
BOYAT
When I walked with my mother on the street like this, I thought we must look like husband and wife to everyone else. Just another man and woman, nothing to see.
In the simple white thobe that all Saudi men wore, I was tall and thin, a sharp contrast to my mother, whose curves weren’t concealed even by the shapeless black abaya. The checkered scarf and ghutra covered my hair, and I’d learned a few tricks over the last few years that made the disguise really work. Other girls had tried this, of course. So many that there was even a word for it: boyat. And men desperate for female contact had tried hiding in a black abaya and a face-covering niqab to get into the Ladies Kingdom at Mamlaka mall or the women-only zones of Riyadh. But the security guards always caught them, just as the muttaween of Al-Hai’a usually caught the boyat.
But those women hadn’t had to do this practically every day for years. It had usually been a one-time thing, a protest against the rules or an escapade. When it became a daily necessity, you learned quickly not to make mistakes.
I knew how to stand up straight, keeping my shoulders wide to take up more space. Hands had to be kept in pockets, not awkwardly squirming as if hunting for a phantom purse. The real challenge was in what you did with your eyes. Women were used to averting their gaze from other people and the surveillance cameras on the street corners, heads bent toward the ground. Men looked directly at other men, and if you were shifty, nervous, or didn’t meet people’s eyes, you were not murwa, not a man at all.
I had now spent years perfecting the Arab handshake. One long clasp, none of the sweaty firmness with which young, hairless boys tried to prove their manhood, none of the cold and brisk formality with which foreigners were greeted. This was a slow pull, a dance that took you cheek to rough cheek with another man for three quickly exchanged kisses. The first time I did it, with the grocery clerk, I felt dirty and terrified, and I cried all night. It was the first time I’d been touched by a non-mahram man, and I was convinced I had polluted my body in the eyes of God. Maybe the grocery clerk had seen through the disguise the minute his lips touched my hairless cheeks.
All this drama just to run errands.
It was no wonder Mishail loved the challenge of undoing all that training to make me look girlie.
“Did you like it?” Mishail had wanted to know. “When he kissed you. Is he good-looking? Your first real kiss should be with someone good-looking, or it doesn’t count.”
At the thought of Mishail, I smiled, and the black cloud that had followed me since I found out about the internships cleared a little. Mishail was right. Our future was here, not in dreamed-up adventures we could never have. True, my entire world consisted of my mother and Mishail, and the two of them were spinning away from me with widening and haphazard orbits, as if without my father there wasn’t enough gravity to hold our solar system together.
But it was still more than others had, so I told myself to be grateful.
Except that my mother was pinching my elbow.
“Hurry up.”
I sped up, remembering that since it was traditional for women to walk a step behind men, when you were the “man,” you couldn’t get distracted by your thoughts and slow down to a leisurely stroll. Especially if the woman in question needed to get things done.
We stopped at the butcher first, and I played the tiresome g
ame of telephone between my mother and the supertraditional butcher, who thought that speaking directly to a woman would send him straight to hell.
“She says it’s sickly. He says it’s just athletic. She says that a healthy chicken should have a—what?”
Another pinch. A signal to move in closer to hear the whispered, “Don’t tell him this, because you shouldn’t be talking to a man about body parts. But a healthy chicken, or horse, or any other animal, should have large buttocks. The hind legs of this chicken are too small. Not enough exercise.”
I sighed and pushed past the butcher, ignoring the indignant squawks from my mother and the sickly chicken, and searched the cages for a chicken with a fat behind.
“That one,” I said, and the butcher yanked it out and held it up for inspection. When my mother nodded, I stepped aside so the butcher could weigh it while alive. He held it by its wings and turned it upside down. Too surprised to put up a fight, the chicken fell silent as the butcher slit its throat and allowed the blood to drain.
“Next?” I asked, pretending that carrying the plastic bag full of dead chicken and blood didn’t bother me at all.
“Hossein. You remember the house?”
I frowned. There was something odd about the way my mother had mentioned my father’s partner in their law practice. Nervous, as if the last time we’d seen Hossein hadn’t been just last month.
“What do we need there?”
“I just need some papers signed. None of your business. Do you remember it or not?”
“Of course,” I said, “but it’s a thirty-minute walk.”
We headed there in silence until my mother said quietly, “I can’t set up a bank account without your father’s permission. I have to write a letter.”
I nodded, teeth clenched. I had a hundred questions—What have we been doing for money so far? Where do you put the money from your catering business? Why do you want a separate bank account? Does that mean he’s never coming home?—but I didn’t dare ask any of them.
I kicked the pebbles as we made our way out of the busy marketplace and into the residential area of Suleimaniya. Here, spacious white villas ornamented with bougainvillea alternated with ramshackle redbrick buildings with forbidding metal doors. The houses of Riyadh were usually, as the name said, riads, vast and ornate marble and mosaic, all windows facing the interior atrium, no windows facing the outside world. Which meant thousands of narrow, dirty alleyways filled with cats, cockroaches, green Dumpsters, and black garbage bags, but these might lead to large mansions concealed entirely from the outside world.
Like the women, hiding a kilo of gold jewelry and Prada heels under their abayas, I thought, eyeing my mother in her opaque black silks. Full of secrets.
“How do you do it, anyway?” my mother asked, breaking the silence. “Remember the way. Your father could do it, but I would get lost in my mother’s house.”
“I remember landmarks,” I said, hoping I wouldn’t have to explain further. I didn’t want to share my memories. That’s the toy shop where he taught me how to change a battery. This road with slightly fewer potholes is where he taught me how to ride a bicycle. That’s where we stopped to see the gray cat eat one of its kittens after giving birth.
We arrived at the villa. It looked just like all the others, but I knew the one brick that was not like its neighbors. Hossein’s son, Faraz, and I had once found a drill and decided to make a peephole at eye level to shoot enemies from. The replacement was smooth, painted wood, not brick, and I felt for it with my fingers.
I rang the bell before my mother could annoy me by asking if I was sure.
Faraz opened the door, and I felt another pinch at my elbow that meant, Watch how you act around him. My mother seemed to be under the popular impression that men, and boys in particular, were basically animals, unable to control themselves around women.
“I just don’t want him getting any ideas,” she’d said once. “You never know. And we have enough problems.”
Faraz wasn’t related to us, and so he wasn’t mahram in the strict sense. But we’d grown up together since we were in diapers, and after years of pillow fights and video games and shared lessons in law from his father, how was I going to see him as anything other than a brother?
“Salaam aleikum,” I said. “So can we come in or not? My mother has some work with your father.”
“Sorry, come in. He’s on the phone. Will you sit down?”
I watched Faraz carefully as he brought us tea. Mishail was always teasing me about him. Our families were from compatible tribes, so a marriage wouldn’t be illegal. Faraz knew about our situation. He wasn’t so rich that he could afford to marry anybody he liked. He wasn’t at the top of his class, but he wasn’t an idiot, either. But he was so young-looking, his cartoon eyes turning into pitying, soupy puddles any time he saw me. I also hated his beard. Mishail was delusional. Just because Faraz was the only boy I’d ever met, it didn’t mean I was going to marry him.
We sat quietly. In the background, the television played Fatullah’s Facts. Imam Fatullah jumped out from behind a green velvet curtain, clapped his hands together, and tossed his long, curly brown hair. Fatullah was the latest in a long line of self-proclaimed “hip” imams who had been caught for a street crime and then got out of jail quickly by turning into an imam as a demonstration of his commitment to Islam. The trend started with Abu Zekem, who stole and raced cars before being arrested and converting into a muttawa, helping the police arrest his former friends.
“Bismillah-ur-Rahman-ur-Rahim, and welcome, my young Muslims,” Fatullah said. “We have prepared a tremendous show for you today, addressing the matters of aqeedah that weigh most heavily on your mind. Now, let me begin by reminding you that I am but His humble servant, and I do not offer my own opinions, despite what my opponents say. All truth comes from the usul al-fiqh, the Quran, the Hadith, and the ijma, and that, my friends, is one of—”
“FATULLAH’S FACTS!” chorused the audience, breaking into loud applause. I rolled my eyes.
“Is there nothing else on?” my mother asked Faraz, sounding pained. Faraz switched to the grainy, illegal foreign channels and settled on Al Jazeera. The host was discussing an incident at KAUST. The prestigious university, the only coed one in the country, was temporarily closed, and students were protesting the closure while the imams and muttaween were celebrating their victory.
“It looks like things are heating up,” Faraz said. “The tension can’t—”
“Change the channel,” my mother said, an edge to her voice. Faraz flinched but obeyed immediately. I tried to apologize with my eyes. My mother had no further patience for the protesters and their revolution. Between her paranoia about government surveillance (which wasn’t really paranoia when your husband had been arrested for seditious activity) and her determination to avoid any reminders of the past, she rarely interacted with other people at all. Sometimes I thought she had forgotten how normal women behaved.
Speaking of “normal women,” some of those were on Fatullah’s Facts, asking the host questions from behind a mesh screen.
“Is it permissible to shape the eyebrows?”
“Is it haraam to name a baby Rahim?”
“If you dye your hair on earth, will your hair be dyed in paradise?”
“Is it still backbiting if we are warning our brothers and sisters about a person whose mistakes are known to all?”
But there wasn’t even the hint of a smile on Imam Fatullah’s face. He took every one of these stupid questions seriously, the camera zooming in on his perfect bronze skin and those big eyes with their ridiculously long eyelashes.
“Walaikum assalam wa rahmatullah,” Imam Fatullah said gravely, and then answered, “Remember what the prophet—peace be upon him—said of slander, that it is saying of another person that which he would not like. Even if what you say is true, you will be following in the footsteps of those hypocrites of Medina who slandered Aisha and were burned with hellfire and given
only hot pus to drink as relief.”
Applause! What wisdom! What eloquence! I dug my nails into my thigh. How was it fair that a guy like this ended up on TV, rich and famous, with hordes of fools following his “legal” advice, while my father was still rotting away in jail?
Just then, Hossein appeared with his wife. My mother stood, said, “Don’t touch anything, don’t say anything,” and followed the couple into an office.
“No, I don’t know why we’re here,” I said to Faraz before he could ask.
“I was going to ask if you wanted a Twix,” he said.
I grinned. He handed me the bar he’d been hiding in his pocket.
“I hear the community is still active,” Faraz said. “Waiting for your father, or for someone to take his place.”
Faraz seemed about to say something more but stopped. I felt suddenly irritated. Mishail always said that you had to verify three things before having any interest in a man. He had to be at least two years older, attractive, and of the right horoscope. Everything else could be negotiated. But Mishail’s accounting missed some pretty important qualities. For example, being able to have a conversation with a girl like a normal human. Not being in jail, headed for jail, or thinking about making life choices that would lead to jail, like talking about my father’s “community” of rebels.
“Your voice,” Faraz said. “You have your father’s voice.”
I frowned.
“I don’t mean that you sound like a man. Just that you both speak the same way.”
“And how’s that?”
“As if you’re commanding an army,” Faraz said.
I looked away, landing on the various SAT and TOEFL books scattered everywhere. The school world of boys was actually pretty similar to ours. By law, the boys’ school had to be at least five kilometers from ours to prevent the ever-troublesome potential indecency. But boys had to study the same things, take the same tests, and try for the same scholarships.
“My father says I must go abroad to study,” Faraz said. “What about you? What are your scores?”
Driving by Starlight Page 3