Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh

The voices of the bride’s friends floated upward in the ballroom’s hot air. “A thousand blessings and peace be upon you, beloved of Allaaaaah, Mohammed!” the bride’s friends chanted, and the piercing sound of women’s trills filled the room. The men, except for the groom, soon left the place heading home as their part in the females’ celebration was over and their own celebration—which was only a big dinner—had finished before the females’ party even started. The couple, followed closely by every female relative, headed toward the food tables to cut the cake.

It was then that Gamrah’s friends started chanting at the top of their voices. “We want a kiss! We want a kiss!” Rashid’s mother smiled and Gamrah’s mother blushed red. As for Rashid, he sent the girls a scathing stare that sliced them into silence. Gamrah cursed her friends under her breath for embarrassing her in front of him, and cursed him even more for embarrassing her in front of her friends by refusing to kiss her!

Sadeem’s eyes welled with tears as she watched her childhood friend, her Gamrah, leave the ballroom with her new husband to go to the hotel where they would spend the night before heading off for a honeymoon in Italy. Immediately after the honeymoon they would leave Riyadh for the United States, where Rashid was to begin studying for a PhD.

Among the group of four girls, Gamrah Al-Qusmanji was closest to Sadeem, as they had been classmates since second grade. Mashael Al-Abdulrahman—or Michelle, as we knew her—didn’t join them until the second year at middle school, after she returned with her parents and little Meshaal—or Misho, as everyone called her younger brother—from America. Her father had gone to college there, at Stanford University, where he met their mother. After college he stayed in America for a few years to work and start his family. Only a year after Michelle came back to her home country to live, she transferred to a school where all the classes were taught in English. She simply didn’t have the command of Arabic that she needed in order to attend Sadeem and Gamrah’s school. At her new school, she got to know Lamees Jeddawi, who became her closest friend. Lamees had grown up in the capital city of Riyadh, but, as her last name implied, her family was originally from Jeddah—a port city with a long tradition of bringing together people from many places and therefore the most liberal city in the kingdom. Gamrah’s family was originally from, Qasim, a city known for its ultraconservative and strict character. Only Michelle was not from a well-known family tribe linked to a certain region.

In college, Sadeem studied business management, while Lamees went to medical school.* Michelle decided on computer science. Gamrah, the only one among them who wasn’t so keen on her studies in high school, needed to use pull from several family friends to get accepted to college as a history major, one of the easy fields to get into in college. But she got engaged a few weeks after the semester started, and she decided to withdraw in order to devote herself full-time to planning the wedding. Since she would be moving to America right after the wedding anyway so that her husband could finish graduate school there, it seemed like an especially good decision.

IN HER ROOM at the Hotel Giorgione in Venice, Gamrah sat on the edge of the bed. She rubbed her thighs, legs and feet with a whitening lotion of glycerine and lemon that her mother made for her. Her mother’s Golden Rule was spinning in her mind. Don’t be easy . Refusal—it’s the secret to activating a man’s passion. After all, her older sister Naflah didn’t give herself to her husband until the fourth night, and her sister Hessah was more or less the same. But she was setting a new record: it had been seven nights and her husband hadn’t touched her. Rashid hadn’t touched her even though she had been quite ready to ditch her mother’s theories after the first night, when she took off her wedding dress and put on her ivory-colored nightgown (which she’d put on quite a few times before the wedding, in front of the mirror in her room, provoking the admiration of her mother, who had murmured God’s name over and over to ward off envy as she gave her daughter a few suggestive winks). Her mother’s delighted approval had filled Gamrah with confidence and pride, even though she knew that the expression on her mama’s face was a bit overdone.

But on her wedding night she came out of the bathroom to find him…asleep. And although she almost could have sworn that he was faking it, a theory her mother dismissed in their last telephone conversation as “Satan’s evil whisperings,” she agreed to devote all of her energy to “leading him on,” especially since her mother had recently announced to her on the phone that the policy of withholding had decidedly backfired in this case.

Since Gamrah’s marriage to Rashid, her mother had gotten bolder about discussing “the business of men and women.” In fact, before her marriage contract was signed, her mother hadn’t talked about such matters at all. Afterward, though, Gamrah got immersion training in the art of seduction from the same woman who had ripped pages out of the romance novels Gamrah used to borrow from her friends at school, and who wouldn’t even let Gamrah go over to her friends’ houses, with the exception of Sadeem’s, after Gamrah’s mother had gotten to know Sadeem’s aunt Badriyyah quite well through several social circles among other ladies of the neighborhood.

Gamrah’s mother was a firm believer in the theory that “woman is to man as butter is to sun.” But her strong convictions that girls should be utterly naïve and guys should be experienced melted away in an instant the moment the girl had that marriage contract. As for Gamrah, she started listening to her mother’s anecdotes and treatises on “the enterprise of marriage” with the heightened enjoyment and sense of pride of a young man whose father offers him a cigarette to smoke in front of him for the first time.

2.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: February 20, 2004

Subject: The Girls Rally Round Gamrah’s Big Day, in Their Own Way

First, I have a little message for the following gentlemen: Hassan, Ahmad, Fahad and Mohammed, who made my day with their earnest e-mail inquiries.

The answer is: Uh-uh! Forget it, guys…no, we cannot “get to know each other.”

Now that I have applied my signature bright red lipstick, I will pick up the story where I left off last week.

After Gamrah’s wedding her friends lined up the petite keepsake clay jars engraved with the names of the bridal couple alongside the other souvenirs they had collected from other friends’ weddings. Every last one of Gamrah’s girlfriends was secretly hoping that the keepsake from her own wedding would be the next one to be added.

Well before the wedding, their little clique—the shillah —had made special preparations for its own intimate precelebration celebration. The idea was to put on something like the bachelorette party that, in the West, friends of the bride throw for her before the nuptials. The girls weren’t interested in doing a DJ party, because these days, that was becoming as common as sand. Besides, a DJ party meant that it would have to be a positively massive dance party that might even have involved hiring a professional local taggaga, a female singer, the kind that once upon a time just had a drum backup but now might have a whole band. They would need to send out invitations to every one of their girlfriends and female relatives and everyone that anyone knew, while pretending to keep the bride in the dark the whole time. And, of course, the little shillah of friends hosting the party would be burdened with all of the expenses, which would mount up to nothing less than several thousand riyals.