Black Book of Arabia

THE BLACK BOOK OF ARABIA

 

THE BLACK BOOK OF ARABIA

Hend Al Qassemi

 

I dedicate this book to my father, a doctor, who taught me that hard work pays off; to my mother, the school principal, who taught me perseverance; and to my beloved grandmother who taught herself to read and write when I was ten. I hope my book inspires us all to be better than yesterday and stronger for those we love.

 

CONTENTS

Yours Truly

The Princess and the Pauper

I Will Never Leave You

The Apple of My Eye

The Grass on the Other Side

I Sold My Kidney for Love

Voodoo in New York

Raped for a Living

Sleeping with the Nanny

Crazy for You

From Riches to Rags

Bleeding Freedom

Acknowledgements

Yours Truly

Sara gave birth to her three daughters—the eldest child followed by twins—back to back, barely a few months apart. The unplanned babies, high pregnancy hormones, and exploding from a size eight to a size sixteen had left Sara with zero self-esteem and confidence. Her marriage, as it were, had evolved into a flurry of daily activities that kept her preoccupied at every turn. Between housework, extended family obligations, and her children, at twenty-six years old Sara enjoyed very little time for herself.

Charming and enchanting, Sara had once held the world at her sumptuously manicured fingertips; now she could not rest easy. She had gone from being a highly organized, competitive manager who dressed to impress and who could summon an employee's best efforts with a radiant smile and a well-placed compliment, to being a housewife whose body paid no heed to diets and whose hormones made her feel defeated, challenged, weak, and needy. Perhaps it was her need for recognition or perhaps it was her longing for a time when obligations and duty did not trump desires and dreams but Sara frequently found herself pondering the ways her beloved husband Ali could or would betray her.

As soon as she would wake, without realizing it, she would find herself imagining Ali eyeing another women—a business associate, a coworker, a retail clerk. In the afternoon, anger would boil up as she pictured him in a tête-à-tête with a mysterious, attractive woman, huddled closely, stealing whispers and smiling languidly with hooded eyes. As each day came to an end, Sara fell into bed after feeding her babies, exhausted by her inner turmoil and battling her doubts and demons, ready to wake every few hours to feed and change her eldest child, aged sixteen months, and her colicky four-month-old twins.

Ali, Sara's husband, had warm hazel eyes and towered at six feet two inches tall partly owing to his German mother. He had always been an attentive husband and was looked up to at the office. His hair was brown, and he wore it short. His facial hair was trimmed to minimum stubble, which suited him. He had dimples when he smiled, making him seem like a gentle giant. He was a light conversationalist, full of support and recognition for any effort done for him. As a result, people always wanted to be around him. He was the envy of many due to his unrivaled charisma and his particular sensitivity toward people. Magnetism at its best. Ali also was a good husband and father, the kind of man who would carry pictures of his daughters in his wallet and whose face would light up when he talked about them.

While Sara felt an endless love for her brood, she resented the toll that the long and hard journey of pregnancy had taken on her body. Her once-tight stomach was now a “kangaroo pouch” of loose skin that hung around her hips.
The stretch marks on her stomach were like a road map of shiny jagged silver lines. She tried to remove them with creams from Sephora, rich cocoa butter-and-chemical concoctions that had received high customer satisfaction ratings in international fashion columns, blogs, and journals. The lines decreased in color, but they still gleamed a fluorescent whitish-gray every time Sara switched on the light in the bathroom's full-length mirror. The scars of pregnancy. Her vanity suffered a daily blow, and her racks of silhouette-emphasizing clothes started to collect dust.

Sara would stand for hours in front of the mirror, reminiscing about her past glory only to walk away with a sinking feeling of defeat and disgust, the same feeling that caused her to shrink from her husband's touch every time he reached out for her. She did not want him to feel her empty sack of loose skin.

It did not help that three different plastic surgeons had refused to perform a restorative procedure to her abdomen, advising her—begging her—to lose some weight on her own to allow them to do a better job. It had only been four months since she gave birth, and that was too soon, they said. Surgery was best done after she was finished having children. They advised a grace period of another three to six months to allow the body to regain its shape, but Sara was deaf to this.

As much hype as there was for fashions for the happy mother-to-be, there was absolutely nothing for the post-delivery mom. Sara was left staring at her old slim-fit fashions and the clothes she had worn when she felt like a pregnant
hippopotamus. Naturally, she would choose the loose-fitting clothes because they were comfortable and allowed for a quick breastfeed without too much trouble. The comfort factor masked her size. She pined for the old days.

Sara also had developed freckles and blotchy areas of darkened skin known as mask of pregnancy on her face. Women with darker complexions are more prone to this condition, which becomes more pronounced with each pregnancy. Sara struggled to find creams to lighten her skin because she disliked the comments that her husband was fairer-skinned than she was. Once, when traveling with Ali during their honeymoon, someone asked where they were from, observing that Ali looked European while she did not. “His mom is German,” Sara replied. “I guess that helps.” One European lady once asked, “Are you Indian or African?”

Ali told Sara that the changes to her body did not matter, but she did not believe him. He thought she was simply suffering the postpartum blues. He even took the time to read about it, because her depressive isolation was affecting him. He felt partially to blame for her condition, believing they should have spaced out the pregnancies to better allow her body time to return to its previous shape.

In bed, if Ali casually stretched his arm out to his wife, his touch would be rebuffed as if he had electrocuted her, scaring him to the point that he began to worry that he might accidentally brush against her while tossing or turning. He knew she was nervous and physically unhappy, but understood that she had just borne him his pride and joy. He
missed the intimacy they once shared. It hurt that she refused to sleep with him, but he simply thought that she perhaps needed time to accept her shape, or that she would fix her body with diet and exercise as she had done before. However, with three children under two years old, Sara never had the time to establish an exercise regimen. At night she was grateful if she had a few hours of sleep to allow her not to doze off during meals or while taking care of the children.

Sara tried to lose weight, but diets backfired, exercise depleted her energy, and her children and housework dominated every waking minute. She breastfed because her babies had sensitive stomachs and baby formula induced colic. Breastfeeding allowed her to sleep longer and rest better, but it also made her hungry in an angry way, to the extent that her stomach would hurt if she did not eat to her heart's content. But if she gave the babies the artificial milk, their gentle stomachs would ache and they would keep her up at night wailing.

Sara's mother, blessed with a youthful figure that she worked hard to maintain, taunted Sara about her weight gain. She said she was only trying to motivate Sara to return to her old self, but she could not quite mask the tone of superiority and, perhaps, secret pleasure in her voice. Sara's father reminded her like clockwork of how she had once wanted to model in school shows, wear her own designs in photo shoots, and explored being a fashion blogger. His jokes struck sensitive chords that no one but she could hear. Her friends sent her pictures that would infuriate her, snapshots from past parties, weddings, and days out when she
was the fittest of the bunch. It was easier to isolate herself than to explain to everyone that she was having a difficult time coming to terms with her new life and shape. The world simply refused to accept the new her, and that made it difficult for her to accept herself.

With colicky babies and a growing toddler blurting out new words at every turn, Sara found herself drowning in self-doubt. Unable to appreciate her husband's many attempts to alleviate her stress, she felt frazzled and overwhelmed. She avoided him at home and more so in bed. The fire of discontent burned deep inside. She would look at herself in the mirror on the medicine cabinet and, seeing dark circles around her eyes, wrinkles, freckles, dark patches, and capillaries, would ask herself why her husband would want to be with her. She was ugly now. It was ridiculous how she used to fret over a few kilos but now had an extra twenty-five. She felt like a large object and did not want to be seen.

“A fat cow,” she said one night in bed. “That's what I've become. You don't like me anymore.”

“What do you mean?” asked Ali. Half asleep, he thought she was referring to feeding the babies cow's milk, because she had been talking about different kinds of baby formula that gave babies colic and how she had researched lactose-free milk, goat milk, and soya milk, and found they were better.

“I'm ugly. I hate myself and I hate what I've become. I feel like a barrel. I have to get everything tailored to fit me.” Her voice broke. A silent tear found its way down her face, unnoticed and ignored.

“Honey, you just had a baby. Give it time. You had twins. One baby is a big job. You're doing two jobs, and you're just one person.” Ali paused. “Let's go away for a weekend,” he suggested, thinking that a bit of travel could change Sara's mood.

“And what am I going to do with the babies?” She began yelling. “My breasts will burst if I leave the children behind, and I can't depend on anyone to handle them. Every time my motheror your mother decides to help, they mess up their sleeping patterns, and I end up suffering with grumpy babies!”

Silence. He had tried to help; he had failed.
Women are impossible to please
, he thought. They simply spoke a different language or accent and too much was lost in translation. Spoil them and they will love you, they say. It had never worked for him. Ever. When he offered to have his mother help, Sara called him a momma's boy. If he offered to allow his mother-in-law to help, Sara said he was siding with her mother. When he suggested a wet nurse to help with feeding the babies, Sara labeled him as “spendy” and told him they would never be able to build their dream house. Impossible to please was one of the definitions of women. Ali just wanted to get as much sleep as he could before the alarm went off. He worked hard and needed the rest. He was a man, and he tried to be fair. He wished that she would indulge his misunderstandings, which were entirely unintentional anyway.

Gradually and secretly, Sara's fear of losing her husband consumed her. She was scared. It was no longer a matter of if, but of when, where, and how. When Ali failed to answer her
phone calls, she pictured him in a hotel with another woman, pushing the elevator button, walking her to a room, showing her a luxurious suite overlooking the city. She imagined him standing behind her as she gazed out the window, red roses in his hand, the city at her feet. He would leave Sara and her babies because she was no longer as pretty as she once had been. The scenes and feelings were so real that Sara felt she was not imagining them but actually seeing them as they occurred. The fires of suspicion raged, consuming her waking hours. She had too much time with the babies and no company but her demons.

She grew determined to prove once and for all that Ali, a seemingly loving husband and doting father, was in fact a lying, cheating, deceitful man. The coals were there, and she just needed to turn them for the fire to rage wildly. After all, aren't all men looking for the perfect woman? Why should he be patient with her while she failed to restore her figure and glamour? It was just a matter of time, and she could not simply sit around and wait for some home wrecker to steal her happiness.