Girls of Riyadh

She didn’t ask in order to uncover a wound in his heart that might match hers and put him on the same footing. Her love for Firas was too strong to be affected by a past, or a present, or a future—and anyway, she knew that of the two of them, she would always be the one furthest from perfection! Her question was merely a simple and perhaps naïve attempt to see if she could find some little scratch on Firas’s knee that would prove he was as human as she was.

“Don’t ask me this question again if you really care about me.”

Just drop it! she told herself. Who cares about his past? He is mine now. And to hell with curiosity!

25.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: July 30, 2004

Subject: It’s a Boy!

Well! So it is I who calls for vice and dissolute behavior! What do you know? I am the one who promotes moral corruption and hopes to see fornication and abomination spread through our paragon of a society! Moreover, it’s I who has a mind to exploit pure, undefiled and noble sentiments, turning them away from their most honorable intentions! Me??

May God be merciful with everyone, and may He remove from their eyesight the grim affliction that compels them to interpret everything I say as morally depraved and wanton. I have no recourse but to pray for these unfortunates, that God might enlighten their vision, so that they would truly see at least some of what is going on around them, as it really is, and guide them to the ways of respectful dialogue, without attacking others as unbelievers, without humiliating them, and without rubbing them in the dirt.

Gamrah’s labor went on for five shifts, as the position at her bedside rotated among her mother, her three sisters and Sadeem. It was not really a difficult birth, but it was her first one. And the first one, as her mother was always saying, comes out with more difficulty than the second, or the third…

Um Gamrah spent the last seven hours of labor in the birthing room with her daughter, working hard to calm her and make things easier for her. Gamrah screamed with every bout of pain.

“O Lord, may Rashid suffer from whatever I am suffering from right this moment and more!”

“I don’t want his son. I don’t want him! Just leave him inside of me! I don’t want to have a baby!”

“Mama, call Rashid…Mama, tell him to come see me…Mama, shame on him, how could he do this to me?…Wallah, I didn’t do a thing to him…I’m tired, I’m so tired! Mama I can’t stand this!”

And then Gamrah would burst into sobs, bitter sobs, her voice gradually fading as she got dizzier and the pain got worse.

“I want to die! Then I’ll be rid of this! I don’t want to have a baby and why does this have to happen to me? Why, Mama? Why?”

After thirty-six hours in labor, the cry of a newborn sounded from Gamrah’s room. Thrilled, Sadeem and Gamrah’s sister Shahla, who were sitting outside the room, jumped up. They were eager to know what sex the baby was. A few minutes later, the Indian nurse told them it was a healthy beautiful boy.

Gamrah refused to pick up her baby when she first saw it, all splattered with blood, its head elongated and its skin wrinkled in a really scary way. Her mother laughed at her and held the baby after the nurse had cleaned him. She repeated the name of God over him. “Ma shaa Allah. He looks exactly like his darling little mother!”

Hours later, as Sadeem gazed softly at that tiny person in her arms, that tiny face with eyes shut tightly, and as she searched for his soft fingers to get them to close around her finger, she asked her friend, “So what have you decided to name him?”

“Saleh, after Rashid’s dad.”

Rashid was still in America when Gamrah gave birth. His mother visited her at the hospital and then later at home, several times, and his father—Saleh—came by twice and was thrilled that the child was named after him. Still, Gamrah sensed that these visits from his family and the gifts and the money were the very most that Rashid was ever going to provide her and their child.

By summer, Gamrah’s mother decided to do something to cheer up this daughter of hers who had grown old before her time. They traveled together—with the rest of the family—for a month to Lebanon, leaving the nursing child with his eldest aunt, Aunt Naflah.

In Lebanon, Gamrah submitted to the makeover procedure called “tinsmithing.” It began with a nose job. It ended with sessions of facial chemical peeling. The regime also consisted of a strict diet and exercise program under the supervision of an extremely elegant specialist, and Gamrah topped it all off with a new hairstyle and coloring at the hands of the most famous and skilled hairdresser in all of Lebanon.