Girls of Riyadh

Somehow none of her friends caught on to their relationship. In front of her friends, Lamees acted as if nothing were going on between the two of them, that he was just tutoring her every now and then. Only Fatimah knew, because her brother told her. It turned out that he had asked her to arrange that meeting at the train station. He had seen Lamees’s photo framed in his sister’s room at their home in Qatif and he was smitten with her. In the photo, Lamees, Fatimah and some other classmates, all dressed in white lab coats, posed next to a corpse they had dissected in the anatomy lab of the Medical College for females in Malaz—a horrifically depressing room in which you could smell the mingled odors of formalin and cheap bukhour* that the workers burned all the time in their attempts to mask the strong odor of the preserved bodies.

Ali was in his final year of medical studies and he was supposed to start his internship immediately after graduation. He would be assigned to one of the hospitals in the eastern part of the country. Lamees and Fatimah were still in their second year of university.

One day, as Lamees and Ali sat together in a café on Al-Thalatheen Street, a band of men from Al-Hai’ah** swooped down on them and led the pair off swiftly to two separate SUVs and headed immediately for the organization’s nearest bureau.

There, they put Lamees and Ali into two separate rooms and began interrogations. Lamees could not bear the hurtful questions put to her. They asked her in detail about her relationship with Ali. They used coarse language and they forced her to hear words that would have embarrassed her even in front of her most intimate girlfriends. After trying for hours to appear self-confident and completely convinced of the rightness of everything she had done, she collapsed in tears. She really did not believe that she had done anything that was cause for shame. In the next room, the interrogator was putting pressure on Ali, who lost his cool completely when the man asserted that Lamees had confessed to everything and that he might as well come clean.

The senior officers contacted Lamees’s father. They told him that she had been apprehended with a young man in a café and was being held at their headquarters and that he must come and get her after signing a promise that his daughter would never again engage in such an immoral act.

Her father arrived, his face so pale from the sudden call. He signed the necessary papers and then was allowed to take her. On the way home, he tried to suppress his anger and to console, as much as possible, his sobbing daughter. He vowed he would not tell her mother or sister what had happened, on one condition: she must never again meet that boy outside the hospital building. Yes, he admitted, it was true that she was allowed to go out on her own with her male cousins and the sons of his friends and her mother’s friends in Jeddah. But in Riyadh, things had to be different!

Lamees worried about Ali. At the headquarters, she had heard a policeman whispering into her father’s ear that they had found out the boy was “from the rejectionist sect.” He was a Shiite from Qatif and so his punishment would certainly be worse than hers.

That day marked the rupture of Lamees’s relationship with Fatimah as well as Ali. From then on, every time their eyes met, Fatimah repudiated her with a burning stare, as if she blamed Lamees entirely for the whole thing. Poor Ali. He had been such a sweet guy, and frankly, if Lamees had been allowed to continue seeing him, and more important if he hadn’t been Shiite, she might actually have fallen in love with him.

24.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: July 23, 2004

Subject: Firas: The (Near) Perfect Man!

I am so tired of getting these boring responses that try to dissect my personality after every e-mail. Is that really what matters most to you, after everything I have written? Whether I am Gamrah or Michelle or Sadeem or Lamees? Don’t you get that it doesn’t matter who I am?

I didn’t know that shopping for the baby could be so much fun!” Sadeem said to Gamrah, her voice laced with enthusiasm. “These baby things are so adorable! If only you would agree to ask your doctor about the sex of the baby during your next ultrasound—then we would know what we are shopping for!”

Because Gamrah’s two older sisters, Naflah and Hessah, were so busy with their husbands and because her little sister, Shahla, was so preoccupied with her high school studies, Sadeem offered to go with her pregnant friend to buy whatever would be needed for the newborn. And occasionally, when Gamrah’s mother’s arthritis was acting up, Sadeem would take her place and accompany Gamrah to the gynecologist for the periodic checkup.