Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh

“And just who are these friends of yours?”

My God, Lamees thought. Doesn’t this woman ever stop asking these kinds of questions?

“As you know, ma’am, I can’t tell you that.”

“Your problem, Lamees, is that you think you’re the godfather of your own little mafia , willing to take the blame for everything wrong they do. Either you tell me the names of the girls who are with you or I will confiscate the movies.”

Lamees considered the principal carefully. “If I tell you their names, can you guarantee that my friends won’t find out? They will never know that I told on them? And do you promise that you won’t punish them?”

“Yes, Lamees. I promise.”

Lamees divulged the names of her partners in crime, took back the films and after school distributed them to the four of them to watch over the weekend. Where was her hiding place, they wanted to know, and how had she managed to hide this enormous bag? But Lamees just replied with a confident smile and her usual line: “Hey, I’m Lamees! The one and only.”

7.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: March 26, 2004

Subject: The Legends of Street No. 5

Many people have accused me of imitating the way certain writers write, though they say I put all of them together in one big pot and end up writing in an eclectic and strange way. Frankly, this is a great honor as far as I’m concerned, as long as they truly believe I am imitating writers like those whom they mention! Even though, I swear, in truth I am too insignificant to imitate them.

Our Saudi society resembles a fruit cocktail of social classes in which no class mixes with another unless absolutely necessary, and then only with the help of a blender! The “velvet” Riyadh upper class was, to the four girls, the whole world, but it comprised only a tiny fraction of the university world’s enormous diversity.

When the girls entered the university, they got to know for the first time girls who had come from faraway areas about which they had heard very little. If you counted up all of the girls who came from beyond greater Riyadh, they would make up more than half of the entering class of sixty young women. The closer she got to those girls, the more admiration Lamees felt for them. They were energetic, independent and strong. Graduates of public government schools, these girls from the kingdom’s interior had not had a quarter of the resources and support she and her three friends had had in their posh private schools. Yet they had excelled and obtained the highest examination marks, and if it were not for the fact that most of them were weak in English, no one could have told them apart from her friends, except perhaps by the simplicity of their clothing. None of them had ever heard of the famous brands that everyone in the little four-person shillah exclusively bought.

Michelle was surprised and upset one time when she heard one of the students who was walking close behind her and Lamees vigorously start asking forgiveness from God when she happened to hear Lamees’s description of the sexy dress she was going to wear that evening to her cousin’s wedding! And Sadeem told her that one of their classmates was always saying that she was on the lookout for a bride for her husband, whom she had married just one year before, so that she could present him with the bride herself! The reason she gave was that she wanted to find some time in which she could clean the house and dye her highlighted hair roots and beautify her hands with henna designs and adorn herself for him, and care for their child and the children still to come. She’d be able to do all of that, she said, during the times her husband was with his other wife!

Among the four girls, Michelle was the only one who could not stand this type of girl. She wasn’t interested in entering into deep discussion and debate with any of them, and she wasn’t at all happy at Lamees’s obvious enthusiasm for associating with them. She privately accused Lamees of playing the Alicia Silverstone character in the movie Clueless, which had been everyone’s favorite film when they were teenagers. Lamees, she said, was taking the least sophisticated girls on a voyage of beautification and cultivation—giving them complete makeovers—only to make them aware of Lamees’s superiority.

What made Michelle more resentful was that Sadeem shared Lamees’s interest and easy rapport with those girls. With all of their simplicity, the girls were utterly polite and very delicate and, in a way, refined. Their innocent goodness attracted everyone to them, in addition to their sense of humor, a trait that had been all but obliterated in the refined circles of society.

Is there an inverse relationship between one’s social and economic status, on the one hand, and good humor and a merry personality, on the other? In the way that some people believe in the existence of an invariable relationship between being fat and being funny? Personally, I believe in such things. Being disagreeable, dull, constitutionally insufferable or truly odious—these are widespread diseases among the rich. Look at the degree of dullness among blond females, especially upper-class blondies, and you’ll know exactly what I mean!

Lamees began to sense Michelle’s instant jealousy whenever Lamees showed signs of getting close to any other girl at the university. In the first term of their first year, Lamees and Sadeem would meet daily on the sidewalk of Street No. 5, or “the Champs,” as they called it, after the Champs-Élysées in Paris, because it was the street that all girls in the university spent their free time between classes walking down. It had been the two girls’ dream to see the Champs of Olaisha, after all that they had heard about it. And now here it was, nothing more than a few old wooden benches placed in front of Gate No. 5. The Olaisha Campus, one of King Saud University campuses, consisted of just a few buildings on the point of collapse. It was initially built in 1957 and was strictly for male students at that time. Later on, the males were moved to a huge new campus, leaving Olaisha for females. Inside the Olaisha Campus, the streets were layered with the remnants of dried dates that had fallen from the palms that lined the streets. The place was so neglected that even the clusters of hanging dates had despaired of seeing anyone come to gather them. Even after dropping to the ground, they were ignored year after year; no one came to pick them up.

Michelle, who had come from her college in the Malaz Campus one morning expressly to explore the Champs of Olaisha, was so disappointed that she loudly bewailed the fate that had decreed she attend a university in Saudi rather than in America. It was all the fault of her aunts. Her father’s nosy sisters had really gone out of their way in this case to stuff her open-minded father’s head with retrograde ideas. They warned him of the likely consequences of letting her go abroad all by herself to study. Girls who traveled out of the kingdom to study, the aunties argued, found lots of unflattering talk swirling around them when they returned. And then they couldn’t find anyone who would marry them. The greatest tragedy of it all was that her highly civilized father was persuaded by these ridiculous, stupid arguments!

The sidewalk of Street No. 5 had its secrets, many of them having to do with legendary students. Many stories were told, some of them true and some of them highly embroidered.

One of the famous tales of the Street No. 5 sidewalk, transmitted like wildfire among university students within Olaisha Campus, was the story of Arwa. She was a student known for her lovely features and set apart by her extremely short hair and her masculine stride. Everyone sought Arwa out, mainly because everyone was so afraid of her. One of the girls swore that she had seen Arwa one day sitting on the Street No. 5 sidewalk with the white hem of a man’s long underpants showing from beneath her long black skirt. Another student was sure that a friend of hers had seen Arwa slipping her hand around the waist of another girl in a most dubious manner. Sadeem mentioned that she had nearly died of fright when Arwa happened to walk by her while she was gossiping about her. She had never met Arwa before, so she didn’t realize what a fix she’d gotten herself into until another girl mentioned that the girl leaning on the wall with her gaze fixed on Sadeem and a mysterious smile on her lips was none other than Arwa! “Do you think she heard me, girls? If she heard, what will she do to me now?” Sadeem asked her friends, sweat beading on her forehead. Her friends cautioned her against walking alone on the campus grounds from then on, for it was clear that she had been added— seriously added—to Arwa’s blacklist.