“This is called a negative attitude, Lamees. You have to cooperate with us if you are going to keep up your grades. Why aren’t you like your sister Tamadur?”
After this cruel threat, and the usual provocative remark about her sister, Lamees had to tell her mother about the incident. Dr. Fatin came to school to meet with the principal. Lamees’s mother cautioned the principal in no uncertain terms against speaking to her daughter in such a way ever again. As long as Lamees herself had not been behind the prank, they had no right to make her divulge the secrets of her friends. It would be more appropriate for them to search for the real culprit on their own, instead of trying to force Lamees to be their spy, and lose her self-respect and her classmates’ great affection for her.
It was true that the teachers were always asking her why she was not more like her sister Tamadur, but, in compensation, her friends would ask her why Tamadur wasn’t more like her!
Lamees had been sure that the principal would be easier on her this time around, especially since it had only been a few days since her mother’s last visit. Dr. Fatin had some prestige and weight to throw around at that school, since for the past five years she had been president of the Mothers’ Association—a Saudi version of the PTA. She had worked hard to further the school’s charitable activities, in addition to the fact that her daughters were among the school’s top pupils and were very often selected to represent it in regional academic competitions.
“As you can see, a certain paper bag has reached me,” the principal said to Lamees, sitting in her office. “However, I promised Ms. Hana that I would not punish you, and I am sticking to my promise. All I will do is take the films with me today, and I’ll return them to you after I’ve watched all of them.”
“Watched all of them? Why?”
“To make sure there isn’t any of that sort of film among them.” She winked.
How rude of her! What sort of film was she insinuating? Each tape had the name of the movie written on it. They were the latest American movies and she was sure that Ms. Elham had heard about each one of them. There were Braveheart, The Nutty Professor and a few others that the girls’ brothers got from Dubai or Bahrain or from American compounds in Riyadh where they sell noncensored movies. She wasn’t carrying sex tapes! Maybe Ms. Elham just wanted to watch the movies for fun! But why didn’t she just ask to borrow them in a direct way instead? In any case, Lamees decided that this horrid principal was not going to get the pleasure of watching her films, after all of the misery she inflicted on Lamees every day.
“I’m so sorry. The films aren’t mine. If my friends knew the films had been taken they would skin me alive, as some of them belong to their brothers.”
“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!