Girls of Riyadh

“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.

Gamrah believed her mother trusted her but was too concerned with what other people thought. Her mother had never learned the truth of the old adage that anyone who tries to watch all the people all the time will die of exhaustion. Dozens of times every day, Gamrah was told the same thing: “What? Did you forget you are a divorcée?” Of course she hadn’t forgotten it, not for a single second. But wasn’t that painful enough without having her freedom so horribly curtailed? And without spending so much time worrying about all the busybodies and their stupid chatter? Believe it or not, this was the first day that she had been allowed to leave the house since her return from America three weeks before, and she did not think her mother would let her repeat an outing like this anytime soon.