Rajaa Alsanea - Girls of Riyadh

Lamees joined Michelle that night in consuming a bottle of expensive champagne. Michelle had filched it from her father’s storage cellar, which held special drinks meant strictly for important occasions. After all, didn’t Gamrah’s wedding deserve a bottle of Dom Pérignon? Michelle knew a lot about brandy, vodka, wine and other such things. Her father had taught her how to pour him red wine with red meats and white wine with other dishes, but she didn’t drink with him except on very special and rare occasions. Since drinking alcohol is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, as it’s against Islamic law, Lamees had never before tasted any of these drinks, except once at Michelle’s, and then she did not find the taste of whatever it was particularly pleasant. But, hey! After all, tonight the two of them were celebrating Gamrah’s wedding! So she joined in with Michelle, since they wanted to make this evening special and unique in every way they could.

When the volume of the music soared, there wasn’t a girl left in the tent who wasn’t on her feet dancing. It was the famous Saudi singer Abdul Majeed Abdullah’s song:

Girls of Riyadh, O girls of Riyadh,

O gems of the turbaned fathers of old!

Have mercy on that victim, have mercy

On that man who lies prone on the threshold.

3.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: February 27, 2004

Subject: Who Is Nuwayyir?

To all of those who abandoned whatever they were doing in order to urgently ask the brand of my bright red lipstick: It is new on the market and it is called: Get your nose out of my business and get back to reading about things that actually matter.

Two weeks after Gamrah’s wedding, Sadeem’s eldest aunt—Aunt Badriyyah—got a number of phone calls from matchmaker mothers asking for her pretty niece’s hand in marriage for their sons. Ever since Sadeem’s mother passed away when Sadeem was a baby, Aunt Badriyyah had tried to act as a stand-in mother figure. She had her own ways of checking out all marriage applicants thoroughly and she dropped those who, in her opinion, were unsuitable. She would only inform Sadeem’s father about the short list of key applicants, she decided. After all, if it didn’t work with them, the rest would still be there waiting anxiously in the wings. There was no need to tell Sadeem’s father—let alone Sadeem herself—about every single man at once. Aunt Badriyyah was anxious to protect the heads of her dear niece and her esteemed brother-in-law from the danger of swelling up larger than her own—no need to encourage them to feel superior to her and her daughters.

Waleed Al-Shari, BA in communications engineering, level VII civil servant. He is the son of Abdallah Al-Shari, one of the truly big real estate magnates in the kingdom. His uncle, Abdul-elah Al-Shari, is a retired colonel and his aunt Munirah is headmistress of one of Riyadh’s biggest private girls’ schools.

This is what Sadeem told Michelle, Lamees and Um Nuwayyir, her next-door neighbor, when she met up with them in Um Nuwayyir’s home. Um Nuwayyir is a Kuwaiti woman who works for the government as a school inspector of mathematics curricula. Her Saudi husband divorced her after fifteen years of marriage to marry another woman.

Um Nuwayyir has only one child, a son called Nuri—and there’s an odd story attached to this Nuri of hers. Since the age of eleven or twelve, Nuri had been enthralled by girls’ clothes, enchanted by girls’ shoes, fascinated by makeup and infatuated with long hair. As things developed, Nuri’s mother became truly alarmed, especially as Nuri seemed to get more and more carried away with creating the persona of a sweet, soft, pretty boy rather than the tough masculine young man he was supposed to turn into. Um Nuwayyir tried fiercely to steer him in other directions. She found various means of discouraging him. She tried tender motherly persuasion and she tried firm motherly thrashings, but nothing worked.

Meanwhile, Nuri’s father was much sterner with him. Nuri was careful not to exhibit his soft side in front of his father, of whom he was in dire awe. The father heard things by way of the neighbors, though, and what he heard put him into a fury. Bursting into Nuri’s room one day, he began to pummel and kick his son. The boy suffered fractures in the rib cage and a broken nose and arm. Following this incident, the father left the household to move in entirely with his second wife, permanently distancing himself from this house and this faggot boy who was such a freak of nature.

After this confrontation, Um Nuwayyir surrendered to the will of God. It was a trial visited upon her by her Lord, she decreed in her own head, and she must bear it with patience. She and Nuri avoided mentioning the subject and stirring up fresh trouble. So it was that Nuri went on just as he had, and people began to call her, instead of “Mother of Nuri,” “Mother of Nuwayyir,” i.e., the girlie version of the name. That’s how she became Um Nuwayyir rather than Um Nuri, and she stayed Um Nuwayyir even after moving to the house next to Sadeem’s, four years before the date on which Waleed presented himself as a suitable match for Sadeem, and after Nuri rejected his mother’s suggestion that they move to Kuwait.

In the beginning, Um Nuwayyir was truly shaken by society’s shallow view of her tragedy, but as time passed, she grew accustomed to the way things were and accepted her trying circumstances with such patience and acceptance that she even started introducing herself to new acquaintances deliberately as Um Nuwayyir. It was her way of affirming her strength and showing how little she thought of society’s unfair and oppressive attitudes toward her.

Um Nuri—or Um Nuwayyir—was thirty-nine. Sadeem often visited her or arranged to meet her friends at Um Nuwayyir’s house. Despite, or perhaps because of, her grief, Um Nuwayyir was an eternal fount of jokes and, if she chose, she could use her humor and insight to cut a person to pieces. But she was one of the sweetest and most truly good women Sadeem had ever met in her life. Sadeem’s mother had died when Sadeem was just three years old, and she was an only daughter, and all of this brought her closer to Um Nuwayyir, whom she came to consider as much more than a neighbor and older friend. Truth told, Sadeem really saw Um Nuwayyir as a mother.

How very often Um Nuwayyir was the preserver of the girls’ secrets! She was always right there with them when they were thinking through some issue or other, and she was always generous about suggesting a solution when one of them set out a problem for the clique to ponder. For her, it was a comfort to have them around, not to mention a diversion and source of entertainment, and her home became the perfect setting for trying out the freedoms to which they had but little access in any of their own homes.

Um Nuwayyir’s place was the safe haven par excellence for sweethearts. For example, the first time Michelle called Faisal after he “numbered” her at the mall, she told him to pick her up from Um Nuwayyir’s place after she gave him the directions. She said she had a couple of hours free and suggested that they go out for coffee or ice cream somewhere.

Michelle did not want to give Faisal any advance notice of her plans. She called him only a few minutes before he had to pick her up. That way, she figured, he would not actually be able to prepare for the date and then she could see him as he really was. When she came out of the house to climb into his car, she was stunned to find how much more handsome he was in jeans and a T-shirt and an unruly, unshaven beard than he had looked in the mall in his classy long white thobe and the Valentino shimagh ringing his head. She couldn’t help noticing that his T-shirt showed off his broad chest muscles and biceps in a very flattering way.