Girls of Riyadh

My friend Bandar, from Riyadh, is totally exasperated. He is furious with me because my intent, as he sees it, is to portray men coming from Jeddah (the west coast) as angels who do no wrong, not to mention their being courteous, refined and witty. Meanwhile, rages Bandar, I am portraying Bedouins and men from the interior and east of the country as vulgar and savage in the way they treat women. I also depict the girls of Riyadh as being miserable head-cases while Jeddah girls are up to their ears in bliss which they procure with the flick of a finger!

Hey, Bandar. This has nothing to do with geography. This is a story I am telling just as it happened. And anyway, one can never generalize these things. All kinds of people exist everywhere: this variety is a natural feature of humankind and we can’t deny it.

On a page in her sky-blue scrapbook, where she used to paste the photos of Firas that she collected so carefully from newspapers and magazines, Sadeem wrote:

Ahh, the blemish of my heart, and my only love;

To whom I gave my life past and what’s ahead.

What makes the body stand tall when the heart’s pierced through?

With you gone, I’ve no sense, no sight and nothing said!

O God, O Merciful One—You wouldn’t return him,

But You needn’t make him happy! Or loving her instead!

Make him taste grot and jealousy like me

And go on loving me!

God is generous,

He’ll repay me for the one who sold me off and fled.

Sadeem had never been in the habit of writing down her thoughts. When she met Firas she was inspired to write a series of love letters, which she read to him from time to time (feeding his arrogance so much that he would strut around afterward like a peacock spreading his tail feathers). After Firas’s engagement, though, she found herself spilling out lines of poetry in the silence of the night, during those hours which for the last three and a half years had been devoted to speaking to him on the telephone.

To my best friend, most cherished of mine,

To the star that one day fell down into my palms,

You were so near yet so far, so oppressed, so divine.

The Fates burst us apart! that we meet once again…

My friend, we will become the heroes of tales

We spin for our children, false names assign’d,

The internal struggle Sadeem lived in that period—the way her emotions zinged back and forth between extremes of rage and forgiveness—made her life a nightmare. She was incapable of discerning her own true feelings: she would curse Firas and spit at every picture of him that she could find, only to leap back and plant a kiss tenderly on each photograph as she begged it for forgiveness. She would recall how, through all those years, he had seemed to stand by her, and it would make her cry, but then she would remember the day years ago when he had alluded to broaching with his parents the subject of his attaching himself to a divorcée, and their response, which had hurt her so deeply that she had intentionally “forgotten” it (exactly what Michelle and Lamees warned her not to do). And that would make her cry even more bitterly over the lost years of her life, and wish all kinds of horrible fates for Waleed, who was the true reason behind all of her troubles.

Gamrah, Lamees and Um Nuwayyir began to notice that Sadeem had started to become careless, even neglectful, about performing her prayers. They also observed that she was exposing some of her hair when she threw on her hair cover, which was supposed to leave only her face visible. Sadeem’s religiosity seemed to be in direct proportion to her relationship with Firas. Her anger at him made her angry at everything that reminded her of him, and that included religious duties.

Throughout Sadeem’s whole ordeal, her aunt Badriyyah had been traveling back and forth between Riyadh and Khobar, all the while keeping up her relentless campaign to convince Sadeem to move out east to live with her and her family permanently, or at least until her “fated share” would come to her.