Girls of Riyadh

by Rajaa Alsanea

  Lamees’s relationship with Fatimah was altogether different. It was founded on mutual attraction. Lamees marveled at Fatimah’s strength and sparkle, while Fatimah loved Lamees’s boldness and quick mind. All it took was a short while until, somewhat to their surprise, each had become the other’s closest friend.

  After screwing up her courage, and then wondering how to phrase it, Lamees gently asked Fatimah about some things that baffled her when it came to Shiites. One day during Ramadan Lamees took her Fotoor* meal to Fatimah’s apartment so that they could break the fast together once the sun had gone down. On the way Lamees remembered (with a smile on her face) the days when she was afraid to eat any of the food offered to her by her Shiite classmates at the university. It was Gamrah and Sadeem who were always warning her to avoid the food; they insisted Shiites spit in their food if they knew a Sunni was going to eat it, even going so far as to poison it to obtain the blessing due to someone who slays a Sunni! So Lamees would accept the sweet pies and pastries from her Shiite classmates politely and then once out of sight toss them into the garbage can. She was even afraid that wrapped candy and pieces of gum had been doctored. Lamees never trusted any food from a Shiite until she met Fatimah.

  Now Lamees put a small plate of dates in front of Fatimah to break the fast. But after the dusk call to prayer signaling the end of the fast, she noticed that Fatimah didn’t tear into the dates as she had expected. In fact, she was so busy preparing the Vimto** drink and the salad that she didn’t break her fast with so much as a single bite until twenty minutes later. Fatimah could see Lamees’s surprise. Sunnis break their fast as soon as the sound of the Athan*** makes its way to their ears from the nearby mosque. But Fatimah told her friend that their custom was not to eat the moment they heard the call to prayer by a Sunni Imam,§ but to wait awhile in order to be certain of nightfall, in a way of striving for accuracy.

  Now Lamees’s curiosity about Shiite traditions was really roused. She plunged in, asking her friend about the decorations hung on the walls in her apartment. The elegant Arabic script suggested some religious meaning. Fatimah explained that the decorations were hung for some rites that the Shiites celebrated every year halfway through the Arabic month of Sha’ban, the month right before Ramadan.

  Then Lamees asked Fatimah about some photographs she had seen in the wedding album of Fatimah’s older sister. At the time, she thought they were strange but refrained from asking about them. There were photos showing the bride and groom dipping their bare feet in a large silver basin, coins scattered around the bottom. Two grandmothers were pouring water over the couple’s feet. This was just one of their wedding traditions, Fatimah told her, akin to the practice of drawing patterns in henna on the bride’s hands or the elaborate unveiling ceremony. They would rub the bride’s and groom’s feet in water that had been blessed by having verses from the Qur’an and certain prayers recited over it. Coins were tossed in front of their feet as alms to bless their marriage.

  Fatimah answered her friend’s questions simply and directly, laughing at the surprise and wonder on her face. When the conversation started to go too far, though, they both sensed the tension in the air. Either one of them could at any moment say something that would appear to disparage the other’s version of her faith. So they stopped the question-and-answer session and moved quietly into the living room to watch the popular sitcom Tash ma Tash the Saudi TV aired every Ramadan after Fotoor time. At least that was something that both Sunnis and Shiites in Saudi Arabia agreed on!

  Tamadur was first to reject her sister’s relationship with this rejectionist. She made it very clear to Lamees that all of the girls she knew at college were making fun of the friendship.

  “Lamees, wallah, I heard the girls saying things about her that are really bad! She lives by herself! Her family is in Qatif* so she can do whatever she wants while she’s in Riyadh for school. She goes out whenever she wants and comes home whenever she feels like it. She visits whoever she wants to, and whoever she wants visits her, too.”

  “They’re lying. I went to her place and I saw how tough the security men were over there. They don’t let anyone in, and she can’t leave the place on her own, no way. Her brother has to be there for her to get out.”

  “Lamees, whether it’s true or not, why do we need to be involved in this? If everyone is talking about her today, tomorrow they’ll talk about you, and they’ll say you’re a bad girl just like her! What is it with you? From Fadwa the psycho to Sarah the princess to Fatimah the Shiite? And the best friend you ever had is an American rebel that doesn’t worry about what people think!”

  Lamees frowned at her sister’s mention of Sarah, the girl from the Saudi royal family who enrolled at their high school for senior year. Lamees had genuinely adored Sarah. The princess bewitched her with her modesty and her high principles—bewitched her in part because Lamees had never expected a princess to be anything but arrogant and pushy. She didn’t care in the least about what the girls said about her relationship with Sarah. They snickered about the fact that Lamees gave the princess wake-up calls every morning. But there was a perfectly good reason for it: Sarah was afraid that, with the huge palace she lived in and the large number of people in it, the servants would forget to wake her up on time. Lamees also used to finish some of Sarah’s homework for her—but not on a regular basis, as certain people claimed. And she only did it when she observed that Sarah was occupied with more important matters, official occasions and family rituals and social duties that Sarah would tell her about in advance. Lamees would invite Sarah to study in her own modest home on the days preceding the exams they had every month, so that Sarah could concentrate on her studying more than she could in the palace. As for the hurtful rumors going around among the girls at school which Tamadur would confront her with—that she was the princess’s servant and would do anything for her—they had no effect—if anything, they brought her closer to her new friend and made her even more anxious to prove her devotion.

  With Fatimah, Lamees found herself for the first time friends with a girl so much like her that it was almost uncanny! The closer she got to Fatimah, the more she felt as though she were face to face with a soul mate. As usual, what others said about her didn’t bother her much, except that this time she did worry about how Michelle would feel. Michelle had forgiven her for her relationship with Sarah when she saw the way Sarah dropped her once they graduated. Sarah traveled to America, and she never again spoke to Lamees. At the time, Michelle had felt her own power, witnessing Lamees’s regret, hearing her plea for reconciliation and knowing how badly she wanted to regain the old friendship. But what would Michelle do now, if she felt Lamees had abandoned their friendship a second time? A better solution, as Lamees saw it, was just to hide the relationship from Michelle and the rest of the shillah. Her strategy backfired, though, when Tamadur, who had long been aggravated at what she thought of as her sister’s perverse ways, took it upon herself to inform the girls of everything.

  So Michelle now knew the real reason for Lamees’s inexplicable disappearances. For weeks on end Lamees had been hiding behind a host of excuses: that studying medicine was so time-consuming, that the work was so difficult, that she had so much to learn! Now the hurtful truth was out—Lamees had been choosing her new friend’s company over that of her old shillah.

  Lamees tried to justify her position to Sadeem, who was far ahead of everyone else in their clique when it came to being understanding, even indulgent, about such things.

  “Try to see my side of things, Saddoomah! I love Michelle. All our lives we’ve been friends, and we’ll go on being friends, but she doesn’t have a right to keep me from getting to know other girls! Fatimah’s got a few things Michelle doesn’t have. You love Gamrah, but she has her faults, too, and if you found what she lacks in another girl, you’d get attached to that girl, right?”

  “But Lammoosah, after all these years! It isn’t right to dump your lifelong friend just because you suddenly decid
e her personality is lacking some vital quality that you think you’ve just found in some other girl. That precious something didn’t matter to you before, though, because you lived years without it and you had no problem. Besides, the two of you are supposed to stick together through thick and thin. Suppose you were to get married and your husband turned out to be missing a certain something. Do you go and look for in other guys for what he’s lacking?”

  “Yah, maybe! And if he doesn’t like it, then let him go find whatever he’s lacking and spare me the effort!”

  “Wow, you’re one tough lady! Okay, look, I have a really serious question that’s bugging me so badly I’m about to burst. It’s about the Shiites.”

  “What is it?”

  With a twitch to her lips that gave away her mock-solemn expression, Sadeem asked: “Do Shiite men wear Sunni pants under their thobes?”*

  22.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: July 9, 2004

  Subject: Michelle Meets Up with Matti

  I’m sitting down in my La-Z-Boy with my feet stretched way out, just like I do every weekend when I write down these e-mails. And yes, my hair is fluffed and my lips are painted red…

  It was about ten o’clock in the morning when the airplane landed at San Francisco International Airport. This was not Michelle’s first visit to the city, but it was the first time she had been there without her parents and her little brother Meshaal.

  She breathed in air saturated with moisture and freedom. People in all shapes and colors, from everywhere in the world, were flowing around her in every direction. No one paid any attention to her Arab-ness, or to the fact that the person standing next to her was African. Everyone was minding his own business.

  She made sure her visa was in plain sight. That piece of paper confirmed that she was a student from Saudi Arabia who had come to study at the University of California, San Francisco. The woman in Customs told her she was the prettiest Arab girl she had seen in all her years working at the airport.

  After Michelle got through all the necessary official stuff, she searched the faces of the people waiting in the reception area. She caught sight of her cousin Matthew at the edge of the crowd, waving to her, and she started toward him, delighted.

  “Hi, Matti!”

  “Hi, sweetie! Long time no see!”

  Matti gave her a warm hug, asking about her mom and her dad and her brother. Michelle noticed that he was the only one from her uncle’s small family who was there at the airport to meet her.

  “Where is everyone else?”

  “Dad and Mom are at work and Jamie and Maggie are at school.”

  “And you? How come you came to meet me? Don’t you have lectures?”

  “My morning lectures today were canceled for the express purpose of coming to meet my darling cousin at the airport. We’re going to spend the day together until everyone else gets home. Then I have to go give a lecture in the evening. You can come with me if you want to, and I can show you around the campus, and you can get a quick look at your room in the dorm. By the way, are you still insisting on living in the dorm instead of at our house?”

  “It’s better that way. I’m really dying to try it out—living with some independence.”

  “As you like, but hey, my condolences. Anyway, I’ve gotten everything ready. I chose a room for you; you’ll be rooming with one of my students who I think you’ll like a lot. She’s your age and she’s as saucy as you are, but you’re a lot prettier than she is.”

  “Matti! Aren’t you ever going to stop spoiling me? I’m older now and I can handle things on my own.”

  “We’ll see about that.”

  He took her on a tour of Fisherman’s Wharf. They spent the day walking and window-shopping. Despite the smell of fish clinging to the air, Michelle took pleasure in everything she encountered: the merchandise displayed in open-air stalls and artists and singers everywhere you turned. When they felt hungry they ordered clam chowder and it came in a huge bread bowl. They enjoyed themselves thoroughly.

  Later on, Matti helped her organize her things in the dorm and advised her in choosing the courses to take that term. She decided to begin by following in her cousin’s footsteps and major in communications, after hearing him praise it. Among the classes she signed up for was the subject he taught, nonverbal communications.

  Michelle began to immerse herself in her studies and other university activities. She hoped she would forget what had been, and eventually she got her wish. With so much going on, and a new life in a new country that kept her occupied every day, bit by bit she was finally able to think about Faisal less and less.

  23.

  To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

  From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

  Date: July 16, 2004

  Subject: An Adventure Not to Be Forgotten

  The Qur’an verses, hadith of the Prophet—peace be upon him—and religious quotations that I include in my e-mails are, to me, inspirational and enlightening. And so are the poems and love songs that I include. Are these things opposite to each other, and so is this a contradiction? I don’t think so. Am I not a real Muslim because I don’t devote myself to reading only religious books and because I don’t shut my ears to music and I don’t consider anything romantic to be rubbish? I am religious, a balanced Saudi Muslim and I can say that there are a lot of people just like me. My only difference is that I don’t conceal what others would call contradictions within myself or pretend perfection like some do. We all have our spiritual sides as well as our not-so-spiritual sides.

  Lamees first encountered her friend Fatimah’s brother one day when she gave Fatimah a ride to the train station. Ali was four years older than the girls were, and was, like them, a medical student. Because his car had broken down, he decided to join his sister on the train. They met at the station.

  Fatimah was not very close to her brother Ali even though they were living within the same city of Riyadh. They seemed to spend very little time together. He lived in an apartment with his friends and his sister lived with her friends in another apartment far away. Ali didn’t come to visit her very often and every weekend he took his car or got a ride with a classmate going to Qatif, while Fatimah always took the train with her Qatifi classmates.

  The first thing that really pleased Lamees about Ali was his height. At five foot seven, she was taller than most of the guys she came across. But Ali was a full six feet tall, maybe even a little bit more. And then there were his looks! He had a tanned complexion and very thick and dark eyebrows, and he positively exuded masculinity. He even seemed to Lamees to be, strangely, a little magical.

  A week after they met, Lamees bumped into Ali in the hospital where she and Fatimah had gone to buy some reference books. It was before they had their rotation in that hospital later on. Many of the girls in the freshman class had met nice guys—colleagues—there by pretending they needed tutoring to understand the difficult medical courses, and Lamees used the same ploy with Ali, who was a senior. They met within the confines of the hospital at first and later on outside in one of the nearby coffee shops.

  Somehow none of her friends caught on to their relationship. In front of her friends, Lamees acted as if nothing were going on between the two of them, that he was just tutoring her every now and then. Only Fatimah knew, because her brother told her. It turned out that he had asked her to arrange that meeting at the train station. He had seen Lamees’s photo framed in his sister’s room at their home in Qatif and he was smitten with her. In the photo, Lamees, Fatimah and some other classmates, all dressed in white lab coats, posed next to a corpse they had dissected in the anatomy lab of the Medical College for females in Malaz—a horrifically depressing room in which you could smell the mingled odors of formalin and cheap bukhour* that the workers burned all the time in their attempts to mask the strong odor of the preserved bodies.

  Ali was in his final year of medica
l studies and he was supposed to start his internship immediately after graduation. He would be assigned to one of the hospitals in the eastern part of the country. Lamees and Fatimah were still in their second year of university.

  One day, as Lamees and Ali sat together in a café on Al-Thalatheen Street, a band of men from Al-Hai’ah** swooped down on them and led the pair off swiftly to two separate SUVs and headed immediately for the organization’s nearest bureau.

  There, they put Lamees and Ali into two separate rooms and began interrogations. Lamees could not bear the hurtful questions put to her. They asked her in detail about her relationship with Ali. They used coarse language and they forced her to hear words that would have embarrassed her even in front of her most intimate girlfriends. After trying for hours to appear self-confident and completely convinced of the rightness of everything she had done, she collapsed in tears. She really did not believe that she had done anything that was cause for shame. In the next room, the interrogator was putting pressure on Ali, who lost his cool completely when the man asserted that Lamees had confessed to everything and that he might as well come clean.

  The senior officers contacted Lamees’s father. They told him that she had been apprehended with a young man in a café and was being held at their headquarters and that he must come and get her after signing a promise that his daughter would never again engage in such an immoral act.

  Her father arrived, his face so pale from the sudden call. He signed the necessary papers and then was allowed to take her. On the way home, he tried to suppress his anger and to console, as much as possible, his sobbing daughter. He vowed he would not tell her mother or sister what had happened, on one condition: she must never again meet that boy outside the hospital building. Yes, he admitted, it was true that she was allowed to go out on her own with her male cousins and the sons of his friends and her mother’s friends in Jeddah. But in Riyadh, things had to be different!