Girls of Riyadh

With the help of Lamees, Gamrah got to know the world of chatting. In the beginning, Lamees would ask her if she wanted to accompany her into the chat room. That way, Lamees said, she could introduce Gamrah to her friends online. Little by little, Gamrah got addicted to it. Soon she was spending all hours of the day and night chatting away with some guy or other.

From the start, Lamees was up front with Gamrah about the realities and hidden pitfalls of chatting. She made sure Gamrah was wise to the wiles and glaringly obvious pranks of savvy young men, which might trap a newcomer to the Net. Lamees even read out to her friend a few conversation histories with various Web buddies that had been automatically saved on the computer.

“Look here, Gammoorah, dear. All these guys have the same style, but there are some simple variations they use. For example, guys from Riyadh are a little different than the eastern province boys, and they’re different from the western province and so it goes. Let’s start with the boys-of-Riyadh style, since they are your main interest.

“The first thing he’ll say to you after Hi would be: May I please know your name? And of course you are not going to give him your real name, you just give him any name you like, or you say to him, sorry, I don’t want to give out my name. The way I handle it is, I dig down and I give him some name, whatever comes into my head. But you have to pay attention and remember which name you’ve given to which guy! My advice is to do what I always do—write them all down in a notebook so you don’t get fouled up. Or you just choose one name and stick with it. But I find that pretty tame.

“So then, what happens next is, a few days after he gets this name of yours, he’ll say to you, I am really so into you and I have never seen anyone like you, so, can we talk on the phone? He’s going to pick on you and pester you and of course you are not going to agree, but he is going to give you his number anyway. And then a few more days go by, and he’s going to demand that you two exchange pictures, but in the end he’ll get impatient and he’ll send it along even though you never send yours.

“And then you’ll see one of two: a guy sitting behind his desk in a nice office, with a Montblanc pen in his hand and a Saudi flag on a pole right behind him, a ‘classic picture!,’ or a guy who’s making himself out to be a big strutting Bedouin and sitting old-Arab-style on the floor with his head wrapped up in a shimagh—Bedouin-style—and he’ll have one knee lifted off the ground with his elbow resting on it. All he’s lacking is a falcon on his shoulder and he’ll be ready to go on one of those Bedouin TV series!

“Next, he’s bound to tell you that he was really in love with this fabulous girl two years ago and then she got married. She was totally, totally in love with him, but a good man proposed to her family and she couldn’t say no to it. And he—apple of his mommy’s eye!—was still so young and fresh and couldn’t set up a household and so he didn’t have a choice and he stepped back for her own happiness. Anything just to show you what a great, trustworthy and noble man he is!

“Then after all these confessions, he’ll start leaving offline messages for you whenever you’re not there—a nice song or poem or a URL of a romantic story or an article that talks about love and how wonderful it is, whatever, and then after just a week or so, it will all come out: He will confess that he is in love with you! He’ll say, I’ve been looking for a girl like you for so long and I want to get engaged, but we have to get to know each other better and talk on the phone. What’s really on his mind is arranging things so he can go out with you, but of course he doesn’t say that to you, all he’s trying to do at this point is to get your phone number. That’s enough to start with, and he doesn’t want to scare you.

“Then it creeps up, slowly. The tiresome stuff starts. You get stuff on your screen like: Why are you avoiding me? Why do you take so long to answer my message? You’re not talking to some other guy, are you? I don’t want you talking to anyone but me. I warn you, I’m a very jealous man. If you don’t find me online, you don’t have to stay. Log off!—and other stuff like this that will make you so sick of him that you put him on block or ignore or even delete him from your buddy list altogether! That will teach him to never use that manly attitude with you ever again, ’cause you’d go off and find someone else who doesn’t cause you a headache.

“The most important thing, Gammoorah, is that you don’t trust anyone and you don’t believe anyone. Just keep in mind that it is nothing more than a game and that all these Saudi guys are cheats and all they want to do is fool dumb girls.”