“I’m sure you’ll find your mother leaping for joy that you’re coming home,” Sadeem said warmly.
“Yes, she would, but actually, she’s still in Paris with my sisters. Poor thing, she was so miserable the whole time I was away studying. She called me every day with the same questions: ‘Are you happy? Don’t you want to come home? Haven’t you had enough? Don’t you want to get married?’”
“Well, she has a point there. Don’t you want to get married?” Sadeem’s question was impulsive and her eyes were fixed on the gap between his two front teeth.
“Hey, this is the second beating—after that you’re too old remark—I’ve gotten in the space of a minute! Can’t a guy get a break? Am I really that old?”
“No, no, I didn’t mean that, please don’t misunderstand me! It’s just that, I mean, I’m not used to seeing a Saudi guy over thirty who isn’t married. Usually our boys start nagging their mothers to find them someone to marry even before they have the faintest shadow of a mustache!”
“I’m a little difficult, I guess. I have very specific qualifications that are hard to find in many girls these days. Frankly, it has been years since I gave my family my description of the girl I would want to be with. I told them, look around but take your time. But they still haven’t found me the right one. Anyway, I’m fine as I am, perfectly content, and I don’t feel like I’m missing anything.”
“So, can I hear what these impossible qualifications are, since no one can find anyone with them?”
“At your command. But before I forget, can I make a small request?”
She was studying his white teeth, deep in serious thought. It really was the cutest little gap. Would her little pinkie finger fit in it? “Sure.”
“Can I call you later? I’d like to hear your voice tonight before I go to sleep.”
20.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: June 25, 2004
Subject: Return to Um Nuwayyir
One reader who says she has followed my e-mails from the beginning was extremely thrilled by the ending of my previous e-mail and sent me the following message: YAAAAAAAAAAAAY!! Finally! What we’ve been longing for! We were running out of patience waiting for this Firas to make a move! Alf mabrook, many congratulations to Sadeem!
How enchanting this give-and-take is! It compels me to forge ahead with this series of mine, this scandal-mongering, highly committed and seriously reform-minded series. Aren’t messages like this a thousand times nicer than the others I get every day telling me how liberal and how decadent I am?
Some say I speak of the faults of others but claim to be faultless myself by simply removing myself from the events told. No, I’m not making any such claim. I’m not pretending to be some kind of paragon of perfection, because I don’t consider the actions of my friends to be wrong or sinful in the first place!
I am every one of my friends, and my story is their story. And if I have refrained from revealing my identity at present for my own private reasons, I will reveal it someday when those reasons no longer exist. Then I will tell you my whole story, just as you want to hear it, with complete sincerity and transparency. As for now, let’s return to our darling Gammoorah.
All this time Gamrah had been anxiously pondering her unknown future. As Sadeem had done with Waleed, for many weeks Gamrah went on dreaming that Rashid would return to her or at least would make some attempt to contact her after coming to regret how awful he had been, and how terribly he had wronged her. But when that didn’t happen she began to worry about her future. Would she remain parked in her father’s house like an old piece of furniture in the back storeroom? Would she return to the university to finish her studies? Would the university administration even allow that, now that she was a whole year behind her classmates? Or should she sign up for one of the courses offered by private institutes and women’s associations to fill her free time and obtain some kind of certificate? It didn’t really matter what it was.
“Mama, I want some more limes with salt.”
“Too much lime isn’t good for you, my dear. You’ll get a tummy ache.”
“Ufff! I’m just asking for some lime and salt, for God’s sake! What if I was craving something really hard to get? Then what would you have done?”
“I seek God’s refuge from your tongue!” Gamrah’s mother turned to her housemaid. “Bring her this lime, may she get acid tummy for it, then maybe she’ll know how to control her temper!”
Gamrah’s younger brothers, Nayif and Nawwaf, were delighted that she had come home. They were always trying to divert her and cheer her up, inviting her to come and play Nintendo or PlayStation with them. But the severe mood swings that Gamrah suffered—brought on by Rashid and by Rashid’s child, who had begun to rule her life even before he was born—made her tense and ready to argue at the drop of a hat.
“Is this the way I’m going to be for God knows how long? God give you no rest, Rashid! May the Lord not absolve you, wherever you go and whatever you do! May what you have done to me be done to your sisters and daughters! O Lord, make my heart cool down and make his burn and take away the pain from me and put it all on him and his cheap mistress.”
SADEEM GOT in touch with her friends the minute she arrived in Riyadh, and the four girls agreed to meet the next day at Um Nuwayyir’s house. They hadn’t all gotten together for a long time—after all, each of them had been caught up fully in her own circumstances.
Um Nuwayyir offered them cups of chai tea with milk and cardamom sweetened with lots of sugar in the Indian-Kuwaiti style, as she scolded them for neglecting to visit her. Sadeem was the only one who had remembered Um Nuwayyir during her travels: she brought her a luxurious cashmere shawl that absolutely delighted Um Nuwayyir, and she congratulated her on the return of her son Nuri from America, where she had enrolled him two years before in a special boarding school for troubled teens.
When the counselors informed Um Nuwayyir that Nuri’s condition was psychological rather than physiological, and that it was a temporary phase any adolescent might go through—especially one who was experiencing family problems—Um Nuwayyir breathed an enormous sigh of relief. She was well aware that even if showing signs of being homosexual might not be considered an illness in America, in Saudi Arabia it was an utter calamity, an illness worse than cancer. She had almost fainted when the doctors told her, at the start of it all, that her son was “defining his sexual identity.” Over time, they said, he would choose between masculinity and femininity. And when Um Nuwayyir asked what would happen if his choice rested on femininity, she was aghast to hear them say that at that point it was possible to intervene medically to help him with a surgical operation and hormone treatment along with psychological counseling.
Nuri stayed in that school for two years, before deciding on masculinity, at which point he was promptly returned to his mother’s embrace. Her spirits soared when she saw that her only child had grown into a man she was proud of, someone she could stick in the eyes of his father and everyone else who had slandered and despised her and her son. Especially all those female relatives and neighbors and coworkers!
Once the girls were reunited, Michelle could talk of nothing but the corruption of Saudi society, its backwardness, its benighted rigidity and overall reactionary nature. She was bursting with enthusiasm about traveling in two days’ time to begin a new life in a healthy place—somewhere other than “this rotten-to-the-core, toxic environment that would make anyone sick,” as she put it. Sadeem, meanwhile, cursed Waleed after every sentence she uttered. As for Gamrah, she kept up a steady stream of complaints about her mother’s constant harassment; she moaned that her mother forbade her to go out the way she used to, just because she was now a divorcée and, her mother claimed, all eyes were fixed on her, waiting for a single misstep and prepared to spread the most lurid rumors about her.