Girls of Riyadh

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!

Lamees began to sense Michelle’s instant jealousy whenever Lamees showed signs of getting close to any other girl at the university. In the first term of their first year, Lamees and Sadeem would meet daily on the sidewalk of Street No. 5, or “the Champs,” as they called it, after the Champs-Élysées in Paris, because it was the street that all girls in the university spent their free time between classes walking down. It had been the two girls’ dream to see the Champs of Olaisha, after all that they had heard about it. And now here it was, nothing more than a few old wooden benches placed in front of Gate No. 5. The Olaisha Campus, one of King Saud University campuses, consisted of just a few buildings on the point of collapse. It was initially built in 1957 and was strictly for male students at that time. Later on, the males were moved to a huge new campus, leaving Olaisha for females. Inside the Olaisha Campus, the streets were layered with the remnants of dried dates that had fallen from the palms that lined the streets. The place was so neglected that even the clusters of hanging dates had despaired of seeing anyone come to gather them. Even after dropping to the ground, they were ignored year after year; no one came to pick them up.

Michelle, who had come from her college in the Malaz Campus one morning expressly to explore the Champs of Olaisha, was so disappointed that she loudly bewailed the fate that had decreed she attend a university in Saudi rather than in America. It was all the fault of her aunts. Her father’s nosy sisters had really gone out of their way in this case to stuff her open-minded father’s head with retrograde ideas. They warned him of the likely consequences of letting her go abroad all by herself to study. Girls who traveled out of the kingdom to study, the aunties argued, found lots of unflattering talk swirling around them when they returned. And then they couldn’t find anyone who would marry them. The greatest tragedy of it all was that her highly civilized father was persuaded by these ridiculous, stupid arguments!

The sidewalk of Street No. 5 had its secrets, many of them having to do with legendary students. Many stories were told, some of them true and some of them highly embroidered.