“Like what?”
“I mean, like I imagine myself welcoming him home in the evening once we’re married. And of course, he always comes home tired. I sit him down on the sofa and I sit on the floor in front of him. I imagine myself rubbing his feet under salted warm water and kissing them! Do you understand what this picture I have in my head does to me, Aunt? It drives me mad! I never imagined I could think things like that about any man, no matter who he was. Even when I loved Waleed, I was too proud to imagine such things! Do you see how this Firas has rocked all my thinking and left me loving him in a totally hopeless way?”
Um Nuwayyir took a long breath and let it out as a deep sigh. “Oh, my dear. I just don’t want to see you get hurt again. That’s all I’m saying. May God give you according to your good intentions, my darling, and keep evil away from you.”
30.
To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com
From: “seerehwenfadha7et”
Date: September 3, 2004
Subject: Same Old Same Old Gamrah
And if Allah touches you with harm, there is no one who can remove it but He; and if He intends any good for you, there is none who can repel His Favor which He causes it to reach whomsoever of his slaves He wills.—Qur’an, Surat Yunus
(chapter of Jonah), verse 107
I’m getting many, many responses rebuking and insulting Um Nuwayyir, and censuring the families of my friends who have allowed their daughters to spend a single evening at the home of a divorced woman who lives alone. Wait a minute. Is divorce a major crime committed by the woman only? Why doesn’t our society harass the divorced man the way it crushes the divorced woman? I know that you readers are always ready to dismiss and make light of these naïve questions of mine, but surely you can see that they are logical questions and they deserve some careful thought. We should defend Um Nuwayyir and Gamrah and other divorcées. Women like them don’t deserve to be looked down on by society, which only condescends from time to time to throw them a few bones and expects them to be happy with that. Meanwhile, divorced men go on to live fulfilling lives without any suffering or blame.
Gamrah’s life didn’t particularly change after the birth of her son, since the real burden of caring for him fell onto the shoulders of the Filipina babysitter whom Gamrah’s mother had hired specifically for the job. The mother knew how lazy her daughter was and how she neglected even herself. How could she possibly look after a newborn? Gamrah remained as she was. In fact, she reverted to what she had been before she was married. She was busy enough tending to the profound melancholy that had enveloped her after she cut herself off from chat. She went on thinking about Sultan for quite a while. She often felt a strong yearning to talk to him, but she always retreated as soon as she recalled his situation and her state of affairs. Both would make it very difficult for them to be together in any real sense of the word.
Every evening, her thoughts took her far away. Envisioning her three friends, she compared her life with the lives they were leading. Here was Sadeem, totally consumed with adoring ( full-time) a successful politician and a man about town, who might at any moment rise up to ask for her hand in marriage. That image was based on what Sadeem was telling her about their splendid love and how they saw absolutely eye to eye on everything. Oh, how I envy Sadeem, she thought. She is lucky to get Firas instead of Waleed! An older guy is a lot better than those amateurs who don’t even know what they want out of the world.
Lamees was in her third year of university, and soon she would become a doctor and have the world at her feet! No problem if she was a little late in getting married, since marriage later in life was common in medical circles. In fact, it was so commonplace that one might even hear murmurs of disapproval about the “early” marriage of a female medical student. If a girl wanted to stay single without being labeled a spinster, all she had to do was go into medicine or dentistry. It had a magic ability to turn away prying eyes. But for girls in liberal arts colleges or two-year diploma programs, not to mention those who didn’t even go to a university, those eyes started staring and the fingers started pointing the moment they turned twenty.
Even more, Gamrah thought, Lamees is so lucky with her mother, God protect her! Her mother is very smart and cultivated and she often sits and talks with Lamees, and with Tamadur, too, and they spill their hearts out to her freely because she’s understanding. My poor little mama is so old-fashioned and unsophisticated. Every time we asked anything of her, all she ever answered was no! We shouldn’t do this, we shouldn’t say that! She always criticized everything. Like that day when Shahla went and bought a few thongs and sexy pajamas, saying all her friends had some. Mama really gave it to her. She grabbed it all and threw it in the garbage, screaming, “This is the last straw! You want to dress like a hussy and you haven’t even gotten married!” She went straight to the old outdoors shops of Taiba and Owais*and bought her a dozen old-fashioned, matronly nightgowns and brought them home, insisting that Shahla was going to like them! She handed them over and said, “This is it for you, missy, and those other things you can have only when you’re a married woman.”
Even Michelle, after Faisal dropped her, was luckier than I was, Gamrah thought. Michelle’s family had let her study in America, while Gamrah wasn’t even allowed to leave the house by herself. And in her rare visits to Sadeem’s house, her mother insisted that one of her brothers deliver her in person and bring her back even though the driver was always around. You’re so lucky, Michelle. You can relax and live your life the way you want to! There’s no one shadowing you and breathing down your neck, asking every minute where you’re going and where you’ve been! You’re free and you don’t have to hear people’s relentless gossip.
Whenever she was with her three friends, Gamrah sensed an enormous gap that separated her from them, now that they had entered the university. What had happened to Lamees? She had changed. Why would she sign up for courses in self-defense and yoga? Ever since joining the lousy College of Medicine, she had been acting weird and had grown away from her old friends, especially in her way of thinking.
Meanwhile, Michelle had become truly frightening lately, the way she talked about freedom and women’s rights, the bonds of religion, conventions imposed by society and her philosophy on relations between the sexes. She was continually advising Gamrah to become tougher and meaner in asserting herself and not to give an inch when it came to defending her own rights.