Girls of Riyadh

The girls made their way toward the elegant Italian restaurant they had picked out for dinner. After eating, they headed for a tiny shop that sold water pipes, or what we call the shisha— otherwise known as the hookah or hubbly-bubbly. The girls bought enough shishas that they would not have to share, and each girl chose her favorite flavor of the water-pipe tobacco mixed with molasses and fragrant essences.

They spent the rest of the evening at Lamees’s, inside a small tent in the house’s inner courtyard where her father and his friends retired to spend their evenings two or three times a week. The men would smoke shisha and hold conversations ranging from politics to their wives or from their wives to politics. As usual, though, the family had gone to Jeddah, their native city, for the summer holiday. Lamees and her twin sister Tamadur had stayed behind to attend Gamrah’s wedding.

But the father’s shishas went with him wherever he traveled. Like many Hijazi men and women, he was addicted to it. So the girls set up the newly purchased shishas inside the tent and the maid got the coals going. The music blared and the girls danced and smoked and played cards. Even Gamrah tried smoking the shisha, though it’s considered inappropriate among Najdi females, after Sadeem convinced her that “a girl doesn’t get married every day.” She liked the grape-flavored tobacco the best.

Lamees tightly fastened her spangle-edged, jingly scarf around her hips. As always, her dancing was exquisite: no one could possibly match her, especially as she shimmied to the strains of a recent version of Um Kulthum’s song “One Thousand and One Arabian Nights.” None of the other girls danced with her. For one thing, none of them could approach Lamees’s perfection when she danced, but more importantly, they all loved to watch her. Now and then, they would come up with a funny name for a move she made. There was the “blender” move, the “juicer” move and the “follow me” move. Lamees performed these sequences over and over to popular demand. As for the third reason why nobody joined her on the dance floor, Lamees, as they all knew well, would refuse to go on dancing unless she got a good dose of loud encouragement, whistles, clapping and cheers befitting her stature as Queen of the Dance Floor.

Lamees joined Michelle that night in consuming a bottle of expensive champagne. Michelle had filched it from her father’s storage cellar, which held special drinks meant strictly for important occasions. After all, didn’t Gamrah’s wedding deserve a bottle of Dom Pérignon? Michelle knew a lot about brandy, vodka, wine and other such things. Her father had taught her how to pour him red wine with red meats and white wine with other dishes, but she didn’t drink with him except on very special and rare occasions. Since drinking alcohol is forbidden in Saudi Arabia, as it’s against Islamic law, Lamees had never before tasted any of these drinks, except once at Michelle’s, and then she did not find the taste of whatever it was particularly pleasant. But, hey! After all, tonight the two of them were celebrating Gamrah’s wedding! So she joined in with Michelle, since they wanted to make this evening special and unique in every way they could.

When the volume of the music soared, there wasn’t a girl left in the tent who wasn’t on her feet dancing. It was the famous Saudi singer Abdul Majeed Abdullah’s song:

Girls of Riyadh, O girls of Riyadh,

O gems of the turbaned fathers of old!

Have mercy on that victim, have mercy

On that man who lies prone on the threshold.

3.

To: seerehwenfadha7et@yahoogroups.com

From: “seerehwenfadha7et”

Date: February 27, 2004

Subject: Who Is Nuwayyir?

To all of those who abandoned whatever they were doing in order to urgently ask the brand of my bright red lipstick: It is new on the market and it is called: Get your nose out of my business and get back to reading about things that actually matter.