The girls made their way toward the elegant Italian restaurant they had picked out for dinner. After eating, they headed for a tiny shop that sold water pipes, or what we call the shisha— otherwise known as the hookah or hubbly-bubbly. The girls bought enough shishas that they would not have to share, and each girl chose her favorite flavor of the water-pipe tobacco mixed with molasses and fragrant essences.
They spent the rest of the evening at Lamees’s, inside a small tent in the house’s inner courtyard where her father and his friends retired to spend their evenings two or three times a week. The men would smoke shisha and hold conversations ranging from politics to their wives or from their wives to politics. As usual, though, the family had gone to Jeddah, their native city, for the summer holiday. Lamees and her twin sister Tamadur had stayed behind to attend Gamrah’s wedding.
But the father’s shishas went with him wherever he traveled. Like many Hijazi men and women, he was addicted to it. So the girls set up the newly purchased shishas inside the tent and the maid got the coals going. The music blared and the girls danced and smoked and played cards. Even Gamrah tried smoking the shisha, though it’s considered inappropriate among Najdi females, after Sadeem convinced her that “a girl doesn’t get married every day.” She liked the grape-flavored tobacco the best.
Lamees tightly fastened her spangle-edged, jingly scarf around her hips. As always, her dancing was exquisite: no one could possibly match her, especially as she shimmied to the strains of a recent version of Um Kulthum’s song “One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.” None of the other girls danced with her. For one thing, none of them could approach Lamees’s perfection when she danced, but more importantly, they all loved to watch her. Now and then, they would come up with a funny name for a move she made. There was the “blender” move, the “juicer” move and the “follow me” move. Lamees performed these sequences over and over to popular demand. As for the third reason why nobody joined her on the dance floor, Lamees, as they all knew well, would refuse to go on dancing unless she got a good dose of loud encouragement, whistles, clapping and cheers befitting her stature as Queen of the Dance Floor.
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.