Black Book of Arabia (3 page)

What have I done?
she thought. She prayed to God to help her, to guide her, to forgive her for what she had done to the man she loved. “I am so sorry. I don't know why I did it,” she prayed. “He didn't deserve to suffer like this. I love him so very much, and I can't see my life without him. I want to make it up to him.”

He walked about the house deathlike and stopped eating and sleeping normally. He became socially autistic, having no communication with anyone, and absentminded. Once they found him sleeping in the car with his hand hugging his mobile. It was like watching a drug addict cut off from all drugs. The withdrawal symptoms were scary to watch. Usually drug abusers are provided with therapists and antidepressants; all Ali had were the haunted messages of his former love. Tamara was his morphine, his obsession, his fix, and now she was gone. The veil of mystery that surrounded her kept him from any sin or hurt or dissatisfaction, because, simply put, he had never seen her.
She had simply been taunting, teasing, and provoking his emotions with no intention of satisfying his curiosity. It fueled an unkind, maddening craving in him, and his open, sensitive nature left him unprotected from its ravages. He could not understand why Tamara had disappeared. She came to him in his dreams, and he would wake up weeping like a baby.

Having pledged never to leave his wife and to remain faithful and true, Ali, desperate and confused, would quietly cry himself to sleep as Sara listened. In the morning, with dark circles under his eyes, he dragged his feet as he got ready to go to work. Before he left, he would hug his babies as if he was worried he would die before he returned. It was heartbreaking to watch, especially for someone who was once such an inspirational thinker and aggressively enterprising businessman.

Unable to admit the truth, Tamara sent him one last email telling him to stop, that it was unfair to his wife, unfair to his children, and unfair to her. This would be the last message he would receive from her. She said she was going to study at Harvard University to get a Master of Business Administration. She had lost interest in him because he was married and tied down with children. She did not want his “baggage.” She wanted to explore her life and build her career. It was a cruel email, but as they say, sometimes you have to be cruel to be kind.

Within minutes Ali's response arrived in her inbox. He had divorced Sara. He was a free man. He was ready to marry her.

He sent Tamara an email with the divorce contract attached in a last attempt to prove his love for her. He had left her as promised. He was hers at last.

Sara called Ali, but he ignored her calls. He was waiting for Tamara to call. Surely she would be eager to be with him now that he was free. They loved each other. She understood him better than his own wife did. He needed her in order to be happy, and he believed in her with such fierce adoration that for her to fail him would be like the sun failing to shine the next day.

Sara rushed to the bedroom. All of Ali's cabinets had been emptied. She ran downstairs to the garage. His car was missing. He had gone. He had left her for another woman.

He had left her for her.

*   *   *

 

Dear Sara,

I never knew I had a wild heart, but now I do, and wild hearts cannot be tamed. I tried to stop myself, but I had to say goodbye. You will receive everything you need and my girls will want for nothing. But I am in love, and this love has broken me. I did not choose this state of heart, mind, and soul; it chose me.

Perhaps I was weak. Perhaps her love sated me during my days of drought from you. I don't want to blame you or blame myself. All I want to say is that my heart has chosen another, and you are free to choose who you want to be with, as am I.

I haven't cheated on you, but I cannot be with you anymore because the Angel of Death visits me five times a day. Every time I lower my head in prayer, I cannot help beseeching my God to give her to me. When I rest my head on the mat, my heart breaks that I call for her to be praying next to me. They say we are allowed four wives, but my heart can only hold one powerful love. She has my heart.

I have struggled to come to terms with what is right and wrong. She is everything that is right with the world, and yet she is everything that is wrong with me, because I am not with her.

She is the love I never believed could exist, the poem I never knew how to write, and the story I have always wanted to live. Every time I say goodbye to her, I die a little. I learned that to truly love is to allow myself to be vulnerable. I did this to myself, I admit it. But Sara, I want to allow it because this love has made me feel alive. This is the real thing. It is everything I ever wanted and will ever need.

I am moving to America to study and begin a new life. I hope you can find it within your heart to forgive me and move on. I wish you the best and I hope that we each get what we deserve in this life.

Yours truly,

Ali

The Princess and the Pauper

Lulu's father was from the south of Saudi Arabia, Najran, but moved to Riyadh after marrying his cousin Fatima, who lived in the capital. He sold camels, sheep, and goats, which was a lucrative trade in the region, although it was regarded as slightly primitive, showing how limited in their thinking and how traditional these people were. Her father was stingy, would haggle where and when he could, and was always interested in making deals and cutting corners. Some of his camels would fetch millions of Saudi riyals, yet he still collected their manure and sold it as fertilizer.

Fatima bore him eight children: three girls and five boys. When the children were older, she opened a beauty salon in the Al Takhasussi and Al Aliya area. It gained a reputation as a prestigious salon and afforded her the opportunity to meet women from different backgrounds. After two years, she was steadily making money and friends in high society.

One day a tall, plain-looking Moroccan woman in her late twenties and dressed in an old abaya came in and asked for work. Having no experience or training in the
beauty profession, she was of no use so Fatima politely refused her. The woman said she would work for minimum wage and did not mind starting at the bottom as long as she could sleep in the salon after work hours and earn an honest living. She stayed in the salon even after receiving her rejection, trying to make herself useful by picking up behind customers, cleaning, and complimenting customers on their hair or whichever service they had come in for. It was irritating yet heartbreaking to witness her desperation, so Fatima eventually gave in, allowing the woman to work for minimum wage and sleep in the salon until they could figure out which job or service best suited her.

Hadeya, the Moroccan, worked hard, and soon began to learn the ways of professional beauty care. She realized that the hairdressers earned the most money, as opposed to the employees, who were mostly lower-paid Filipinos, that gave massages, helped with the scrubbing at the Moroccan baths, gave facials, waxed, or provided nail care. Hair was the final touch, which could take a long time to finish, but would be the crowning glory of any girl aiming to dazzle and shine. The best tips were also in the hair business, especially home services, which was a double rate charge and tips were multiplied.

Eventually, Hadeya picked up hair styling and coloring, advancing quickly to the point where she even styled Fatima's hair. She did so well and was such a pleasure to work with that she was invited to Fatima's house to do both her and her husband's hair.

Within a year, Fatima was divorced, and ownership of her property, which had been under her husband's name, was now under Hadeya's. The camel herder had divorced his wife of twenty-seven years and turned her out into the streets in the middle of the night, informing her that he was to marry Hadeya. When his wife started to quarrel, he simply and quietly told her that he had divorced her that morning, then handed her the papers and told her to leave.

Heartbroken, the sudden divorcee went to live with her second son and wife, who eventually built her an independent house on his home grounds. But the “midnight divorce,” as it had come to be known, was a scandal that was never forgotten. The salon was boycotted for a while, but eventually its convenience, familiarity, and fantastic location took precedence over everything else, and everyone wanted to know how and what Hadeya had done to get a rich and mature man to give up his partner of many years to marry the help.

Lulu was the product of this notorious union. She and her siblings were treated as the children of sin, the seed of a home wrecker. Mothers would instruct their children not to have lunch with Lulu or her siblings for fear of consuming anything concocted with black magic. As a result, other children would ask Hadeya's children not to hurt them or to share their magic tricks. Lulu and her younger sisters and brother would smile or act like they did not understand, because acknowledging what was said was more painful. Sometimes they would defend themselves and their
mother, but no one paid attention because they already had an opinion of them.

Their classmates had Lebanese, Iraqi, Syrian, Algerian, and Moroccan mothers married to Saudi men, but they did not suffer the same discrimination that Lulu did, and she resented it. She blamed her mother for her stigma and never forgave her for her dishonorable entry into her marriage. The situation made it difficult for Lulu to make friends and undoubtedly would make it nearly impossible to find a suitable husband in the future. The other children of Moroccan mothers would even go so far as to avoid her because they said she gave all Moroccans a bad name. Lulu felt suffocated by the prejudice against her and yearned to leave the country in order to escape it all. She wanted to enjoy more liberty, far from Saudi Arabia's strict rules prohibiting women from driving and requiring them to cover, and its lack of entertainment. She wanted people to think that she was like her friends, from a normal Saudi family, or as she would often insinuate, a royal. If people laughed at her or mocked her, she would say that eventually she would be a princess. If her mother was smart enough to snare a Saudi, she was smart enough to snag a prince! She was a failure in her studies, and was on the heavy side of the scales. But she would pacify herself by saying that men liked heavier women anyway.

Lulu never overcame the condescending manner in which people regarded her. The scandal was quite dramatic and all the more celebrated in disgust and envy because Hadeya was running a successful, inexpensive salon. People
continued to criticize Lulu's father for marrying a woman who bit the hand that not only fed her but also had given her a home and the skills to earn a livelihood. But Lulu's father, now seventy years old, put all of his wealth in the names of his new wife and her children, so the eight children from his first marriage would inherit nothing after he passed away. Hadeya came up with the plan, saying that she feared his orphans would be attacked after her wall was gone. And so he arranged for all his wealth and property to go to the children of his new, beloved wife. He even bought the building that housed the salon and registered it in Lulu's name.

Lulu often voiced her embarrassment and bitter resentment to her nanny, a Moroccan of Berber origin. Her nanny was fat, tall, extremely loving, and always forgiving of her spoiled little mistress, who she had raised since she was a child of three years old. The nanny knew everything there was to know about Lulu—from her good nature with those she loved to the bad that she was capable of doing. When the nanny was forty-five, a suitable suitor proposed, and she decided to wed before it was too late. Lulu never forgave her loving confidante for leaving her, regarding her nanny's actions as some form of treachery and never spoke to her again. In a way, Lulu saw in the nanny someone more worthy than her mother to bear the title of “mother,” and Lulu felt that in deciding to get married her nanny had given up on her “child.”

At five foot, two inches tall and seventy-four kilograms, Lulu was as round as someone who ate three fast-food
meals a day would be expected to be. She could not move fast or find clothes that fit her off the rack. She had to buy oversized trousers to allow for her lower abdomen and torso and then trim the bottom for her short height. Elastic leggings and T-shirts were her favorite outfit, the one-size-fits-all dress code. She desperately wanted to marry someone of a princely stature, but no one would have her. She was too short, too fat, and too lacking in her studies. She was incapable of striking up an intriguing enough conversation for a man to inquire after her or even to call.

She wanted to get a world-class education and meet the kind of people who would lift her up and eventually allow her to marry into the very society that excluded her from their activities and social gatherings. She wanted to be made exceptional, elite in any way or form that she could. She was willing to buy it, to cheat for it, to skim, to work, or to study for it even though she knew herself to be a hopeless student.

Working in the salon was a chore, and she longed to be served instead of serving people. Every sunrise was the start of a new battle between herself and her reality. It was degrading to be doing menial work when she went to an elite school, though she did not know the first thing about speaking in millions or leaving an unfinished croissant on her plate. Her father had millions but would give her only enough for a single, cheap meal, and she always finished whatever she had to eat—which was fast food only and always. She went to the same schools as the elite girls she
admired, spoke with their Arabic accent, and learned their good and bad habits. Yet, however much she tried she was disregarded and disconnected when and where it counted. She battled her demons but never lost hope. For after all, if her mother, a low-paid immigrant could do it, she surely had better options.

Lulu's English-language skills were weak, and she passed only with much bribery and gifts. She struggled to switch from pen and paper to the laptop and smart technology that her classmates so easily mastered. However, she never surrendered to her lack of linguistic knowledge and was accepted as a silent guest since she never hurt anyone. She just wanted to be one of the girls. Still, a tornado stirred in her whenever she lounged with the socialites; half the class was made up of princesses and the other half was from the richest families of Riyadh.