Girls of Riyadh

“It doesn’t matter to me if it is a boy or a girl. Let’s buy the basic stuff now and the rest can come after it’s born.”

“Don’t you have any feelings about all of this, Gammoorah? You sound so cold. If I were in your place, I couldn’t wait to know what sex it’ll be!”

“Sadeem, you just don’t understand. I’m not eager to have this baby! This little thing is going to change my whole life. And then who will be willing to marry me? Nobody wants a full package! So tell me—is this the way my future is supposed to be? I’m going to live out my life saddled with this kid whose father doesn’t want it and doesn’t want his mother, either? Rashid goes off to live his life free and without any ties. He can fall in love, he can get married, he can do whatever he wants, while I have to live with this aggravation and trouble the rest of my life! I don’t want this baby, Sadeem. I don’t want it!”

They were in the car, on their way back to her house. Gamrah burst into tears of utter despair. Sadeem couldn’t find anything convincing to say that might comfort her. If only Gamrah would return to the university to study with her! But Gamrah had been insisting that she didn’t have the energy for it. Her body, which used to be so perfectly slender and sleek, was bursting at the seams from so much lying around. Of course, she suffered from boredom, imprisoned in the house as she was. Even her younger sister Shahla had more freedom than her! That’s because she was not a divorced woman. Meanwhile, Mudi, her cousin who came from the conservative city of Qasim to live with them while going to college in Riyadh, never ceased to annoy her with all her criticisms. She disapproved of Gamrah’s neatly tweezed eyebrows and the fact that she wore an over-the-shoulder abaya instead of the abaya that you drape over your head that covers your figure completely. As for her older brothers, Mohammed and Ahmad, they were completely engrossed in their friends and the adventures they had endlessly inundating girls with their phone numbers. There was no one left to entertain her but Nayif and Nawaf, who were only ten and twelve. Pitiful!

What could Sadeem possibly have said to Gamrah? How could she have comforted and distracted her? After all, there was nothing worse than a person who claimed to be filled with sympathy, to be all there for someone drowning in grief, when streams of happiness were so obviously glistening in her own eyes! If only she could have faked a little misery, thought Sadeem. But how could she possibly have managed that when she had Firas?

Yes, in Firas, God had answered her prayer. After she went through the breakup with Waleed, how often had she begged God to return him to her. But the fever of her prayers had cooled gradually, until finally, praying for Waleed’s return turned into praying for Firas’s presence. This Firas was no ordinary man! He was an extraordinary, marvelous and divinely made creature, and Sadeem felt she must offer her thanks to God for him night and day.

What did he lack, after all? He must be missing something. There must be some hidden defect—something, anything, to detract from his total gorgeousness. No human being could be this perfect, for perfection belongs only to God! But Sadeem was unable to figure out just what that crucial defect could be.

Dr. Firas Al-Sharqawi was a diplomat and a politician, widely connected and respected. A successful man with a fertile brain and a forceful personality, he was known to be someone who leads and is not led, who rules and is not ruled. Very soon after his return from London, Firas’s reputation spread. In his capacity as a counselor in the king’s cabinet, the royal diwan, his face often shone out from the pages of newspapers and magazines. Sadeem regularly bought two copies of every newspaper or magazine containing an interview or a news item about him. One copy she bought for herself and the other for him, since he was too endlessly busy to follow his own coverage in the press. Moreover, from what Sadeem could pick up, his parents weren’t particularly intent on reading newspaper stories about their son. His father was a very old man who suffered terribly from various physical ailments, and his mother was a housewife who didn’t read or write very well. As for his sisters, the last thing to interest them would be politics and its great men.

In Sadeem’s eyes, such family circumstances only made Firas’s stature seem even higher. Here was the man who had risen by his own efforts, who had crafted so much from nothing! Here was an extraordinary individual who would one day ascend to the very highest positions. She made a point of reading to Firas every single word she could find that anyone had written about him. Secretly, she made a scrapbook of articles and photos of him. She had a plan: she would give him the scrapbook on their wedding day.