Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh

When various women visited, pouring out their congratulations on her pregnancy, Gamrah repeated what she had rehearsed with her mother:

“Rashid, poor man, is at the university night and day—he won’t even take any time off on holidays. The minute he realized I was pregnant, he insisted that I must give my family the good news in person, the darling! A month or so here, and I’ll go back. I know he can’t stand waiting for me any longer than that!”

In private, her mother would say, “There will be no divorce in our family. I don’t care if your brother did divorce his wife. Al-Qusmanji girls never get divorced!”

But Rashid the jerk did not let things go long enough to give Gamrah’s mother time to think of a solution. In a virtual reenactment of Sadeem’s tragedy, the divorce papers were delivered to Gamrah’s father two weeks after Gamrah landed in Riyadh, effectively blocking all possible maternal machinations. It appeared as though Rashid had just been waiting for the moment in which he felt he could justifiably rid himself of the wife that had been imposed on him by his family.

The divorce document was not particularly gruesome-looking in itself, but its contents were indeed pretty horrifying. When her brother handed it to her, Gamrah read the lines of script and collapsed onto the nearest chair, screaming, “ Yummah !* Yummah , Mama, he divorced me! Yummah, Rashid divorced me! It’s all over, he divorced me!” Her mother took Gamrah into her arms, weeping and cursing the wrongdoer with vile invectives: “God burn your heart to ashes and the heart of your mother, too, Rashid, like you’ve burned up my heart over my little girl.”

GAMRAH’S SISTER HESSAH, who had gotten married a year before Gamrah and had been eight months pregnant at Gamrah’s wedding, joined her sister and mother in hurling curses, but in her case they were directed at all men. She, too, had suffered since getting married. Her husband Khalid, who had been mild-tempered and tender through the entire engagement period, had turned into another person immediately after marriage, when he became completely aloof and uninterested in her. Hessah complained constantly to her mother about his neglect. When she got sick, he would not take her to the doctor. And when she got pregnant, it was her mother who accompanied her to the standard pregnancy checkups. Once the baby girl arrived, her older sister Naflah had to go with her to buy the necessary baby products. What infuriated Hessah most in Khalid was his lack of generosity with her, since she knew he had a lot of money and he certainly was not stingy about his own expenditures. He refused to give his wife monthly expense money the way her sister Naflah’s husband did and the way her father did for her mother. Instead, he handed money over for each specific item she wanted to buy, and even then only when she had harassed him to the point where she felt humiliated.

If she needed a new dress to wear to her cousin’s wedding and asked him for three thousand riyals, he would come up with whatever excuse he could find to avoid giving her the money: “No need for the dress, you have lots of dresses.” Or, “Didn’t I buy you a dress six months ago?” Or, “I have barely enough money. Go and get it from your father, he’s always buying one of your brothers a new car, or did they dump you on me so they could rid themselves of your ridiculous demands?” Or some other equally outrageous comment that generally succeeded in getting her to turn her eyes away from whatever it was she happened to need or want. On those rare occasions when he did give her money, he would give her five hundred instead of the three thousand she had asked for, or fifty if, hoping to spare herself his humiliating response, she had only asked for the five hundred in the first place. And for some reason that escaped her, his mother encouraged him. In fact, the Scorpion (as she had nicknamed her mother-in-law) positively applauded her darling son Khalid for being so stingy with his wife. That’s how a good Najdi man should be. It was how her husband, Khalid’s father, treated her all those years.

Gamrah suffered a great deal of pain as a result of her divorce from Rashid. Though Sadeem had told her how excruciating her official separation from Waleed had been, Gamrah was overwhelmed in a way that Sadeem had not prepared her for. Nighttime was the worst. Since returning to the family home, she had been unable to sleep for more than three hours a night—she, who had never found it hard to sleep ten—or twenty—hours at a stretch before her marriage, and even during it! Now she would wake up tormented in anguish. Was this the “emotional instability” that was such a popular topic of conversation among her unmarried girlfriends? She had never once been aware of the importance of Rashid’s presence in her life until he left it.

Lying in bed on her side, she would extend her right leg full length and when her foot would not collide with Rashid’s, she would turn over restlessly. She would recite the two talismans and the protective Throne Verse from the Qur’an and all of the bedtime prayers she had ever memorized, and then she would clutch her pillow and lie on her stomach. Finally, she would doze off, her head at the upper right corner of the mattress and her feet stretched down to the bottom left corner. Only when she lay down on the diagonal like this could she fill the big emptiness that Rashid had created in her bed, but only a small part of the emptiness that he had created in her life.

17.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: June 4, 2004

Subject: All I Need Is Another Saudi!

Have We not laid your chest open for you, and put aside your burden for you, that burden which weighed heavily on your back even as it exalted your mention among people? For with hardship comes ease; indeed, with hardship comes ease. —Qur’an, Surat Al-Sharh

(chapter of easing), verses 1–8

During the past few weeks, I have been reading news stories that talk about me, or let’s say, about my e-mails! Eminent national newspapers are writing about

a prevailing uproar here, and behind it is an anonymous young woman who sends an e-mail every Friday to a large number of Internet users in Saudi Arabia. In these e-mails, she tells the stories of her four female friends, Gamrah Al-Qusmanji, Sadeem Al-Horaimli, Lamees Jeddawi and Michelle Al-Abdulrahman. The girls belong to society’s “velvet class,” an elite whose behavior is normally kept hidden to all but themselves.

Each week, the writer reveals new and thrilling developments, leading her ever-widening circle of eager readers to await Friday noon prayers breathlessly. Every Saturday morning, government offices, meeting halls, hospital corridors and school classrooms metamorphose into arenas for debate about the latest e-mail. Everyone weighs in. There are those who support this young woman and those who object to her. There are those who believe that what these girls are doing is perfectly natural (and also is no secret) and there are others who boil with rage at the revelation of what they consider to be the excesses that are going on around them in our conservative society.

Whatever the outcome, there is no doubt whatsoever that these strange and unusual e-mails have created a furor in our society, which has never before experienced anything like this. It is clear that these e-mails will continue to furnish fertile material for exchange and debate for a long time to come, even after the e-mails cease to appear.

Sadeem began to enjoy her job at the HSBC Bank. Everyone treated her affectionately and politely. She was the youngest worker there, and people went out of their way to offer her help and advice. She was especially comfortable with Tahir, a Muslim Pakistani colleague who was the cheeriest and most fun of everyone.