The Angels Weekly

This is a narrative of a (mostly) true incident right before I left home for college (700,000+ miles away) the first time.
I noticed Angels doesn’t seem to have many stories of a narrative style, and since mine isn’t the average first-time-leaving-home story, I thought it’d be interesting to share.

“Come on, you guys, we’ve already been here! This is where we started; look! There’s the guy with the Qur’an recitation CDs.” My sister protested, as we wandered through the vast, open-air market in downtown Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. Ignoring her as much as possible, I tried to wander over to get a better look at the CDs that were on sale, condemning our mother to her persistent nagging.
I stepped over to begin squinting at titles, trying to decipher the yellow Arabic calligraphy, and almost didn’t respond when, “Okay, we’re going!” came from behind me from the only woman for kilometers who had a sufficiently Westernized mentality to shout in English. In public. I smiled apologetically at the approaching Hijazi salesman, and ran off to catch up with my family.
“I need to get scarves! We’re gonna be away for a year, and I want enough different colors to go with everything – besides which, I get tired of wearing the same ones all the time.”
“Tut. KJ! Don’t spend –” I objected.
“It’s my money!” came the popular lecture, “I spent the last two years earning it at Berlitz, so I can do what I want with it! Come on, sweetie pie, I’ll get you some, too.” One had to admit she was generous.
“Tutut. No, no, no. La’. You guys save your money. I’m buying them.” Mother injected in that tone that would have been commanding just a few months ago. Now, it sounded more like the thud of someone trying to knock another’s sense back into them with a club.
As KJ and our mother argued amiably about whose money to spend, I made a half-assed attempt to volunteer my own, which was hardly considered. Resigning to the financial fate of whichever of them guilted the other first into letting them do what they wanted, I pulled out the new Nikon camera my sister and I bought together the day before.
I don’t want either of them to buy… but I’m not going to cut people off over it, I thought, stealing a shot of the street from under the ancient arch that stood on the edge of the market, marking the place of some battle or another of Muhammad’s time, like so many things back home did.
Tagging along behind them, I scanned the scene for potential picture subjects that I probably wouldn’t find in the States, and the vendors for merchandise they surely didn’t have there. My eye caught the walls of an old, whitewashed mosque in the middle of the market, and as I looked up the minaret, I noticed how cultural it looked with the moon hanging right next to its green lights. I risked taking a picture without fiddling with the unfamiliar settings before answering KJ’s pleas for my opinion on some item of interest or another.
“You know, you guys, the Gold Souk is right around here somewhere. Wasn’t there somebody we wanted to get gold for for something?” Our mother wondered in her chipper Midwestern accent.
“Well, Mariem Yasser’s just about to have a baby, but it’s a boy… Can we get her something gold?” KJ’s eyes were jumping out of her head, her heels hovering over the soles of her strappy sandals, two-foot sleeve tails shivering at her sides as her balled up fists vibrated with uncontainable excitement. I closed my mouth and forced a smile at our mother so KJ wouldn’t see my irritation.
“Oh yeah, let’s get her a bracelet or something. She’d like that. Young women like gold.” Mother generalized.
“I don’t think she’s much of a bracelet person… what if we get her a watch?” I suggested, when I didn’t think a verbal shark would spit out of anyone’s mouth in a word-starved frenzy to devour my delicately phrased speech in the catastrophic whirlwind that is so often the demise of said speech in the company of my garrulous mother and sister. Whom I love.
“You don’t think so? Arab women love jewelry.” She persisted.
“I’m Arab, and I can’t stand it.” I retorted.
“You don’t count.”
I wanted to object, but Mother’s view of Arabs and Arabian culture had come to be more offensive to me in the past year or so since I actually started thinking of myself as one of them and part of it.
As she led us through the rows of stalls towards a plaza consisting solely of gold shops she thought should have sunk for their sheer weight, I had a thought I didn’t mind being aggressive about sharing.
“Mom, if our family’s not supposed to wear gold, why’re we getting gold for Mariem?”
“No, no, no. We’ll get her white gold!” KJ shrieked with glee.
“Yeah, there’s an opinion that that doesn’t count as gold because the molecular makeup of it is different. You guys would know that if you ever read the messages I send the group.” Mother said, in that way that actually means she’s hurt that we don’t find her interests interesting.
“I do so read them!” I declared indignantly. “In fact, I read that very article where it was talking about gold and platinum regarding the Prophet’s family, so I know exactly what you’re talking about! Pray for him.”
“A’alayhi salatu was salaam .” KJ and Mother said in unison.
A while later, after purchasing a white gold watch for our pregnant cousin with more karats than most gold stores could offer, in one that really was sort of underground, KJ stepped over to me so that Mom wouldn’t hear. “I think we should get her something.” She suggested, eyes wild at the chance to get her sharp little paws on something shiny and expensive.
Raising a skeptical eyebrow, I said, “That’s a nice idea, but it’ll irritate her skin. She never even wears earrings. What if we get her a new phone instead? The one she has isn’t working right anyway, and –”
“No, no, no! It’s gold! Even if she never wears it, she’ll be so happy! And remember when she gave you that gold ring she couldn’t wear and you lost it in the Mediterranean? This’ll be like giving it back!” She insisted.
“But we’ve got other stuff to worry about…”
“No, Tum, don’t worry about it. We’ll split it half and half. Please, please, let’s get her something!”
We ended up buying a pair of gilded gold bracelets. I believe they’re still in the back of Mother’s sock drawer.
We continued to wander the Gold Souk, and when, after desperately trying, KJ realized she couldn’t think of any female family members who might deserve gold gifts, decided that leaving the country to start college in the States was a perfect reason to get one such gift for herself. Mother and I dragged our feet, moaning, into what was probably the thirtieth or so gold store, smiling and nodding when my sister swooned over a thick, studded bangle.
“Please, sir, how much is this?” She asked the well dressed, Indian clerk behind the display case in Arabic as distinctly Saudi-and-not-Egyptian as she could manage.
“That’s two thousand riyals, ma’am.” He replied happily, in flawless, though accented, English.
“Oooohhh!” She spun around to bubble at us, the silver brocade of her a’abaya sleeves catching the light nearly as brilliantly as the real silver and gold around her. “Isn’t it beautiful?! I’m getting it!”
“It really is beautiful, and that’s actually not a lot for a bangle, ma’am. It would look even nicer on her, too.” The pro salesman was putting his back into buttering up his female victim and her mother.
I knew she wasn’t getting the thing, so I let Mother do the dirty work of discouraging the outrageous splurge. I nodded and patted her throughout the debate over the $600 piece of jewelry to express appreciation for its unfathomable, unmatched, magnificence, as well as for Mother’s arguments to bring my sister to her senses.
When we finally left the store, KJ sighing and delighting at the memory of such unique splendor like a girl after her first kiss, I was finally able to match their pace and take pictures without feeling as though I was neglecting either of our interests.
“It still feels kind of weird taking pictures in public, even now that Abdullah’s made it legal.” I remarked to our mother, as I took pictures of everything I was sure Louisiana didn’t have: the dust-strewn tile pavement, the assortment of hundreds of varieties of dates, the black tapestries smeared with religious scripts of gold calligraphy. I even suspended the belly of a 747 in the beet-red night sky above, forever.
I didn’t think the sky could differ so much from one hemisphere to another, and since it did, it was a good thing that I got a picture of it.
After walkie-talkie-ing over the phone with our father until we spotted the big blue jeep-like van, we got in, and as soon as my sister and I had kissed his hand in greeting, she proceeded to report on everything we saw, did, bought, and finally, the grand finale, what mother hadn’t let her buy.
“Ya Binty, why to buy such a thing?” He asked, shocked, for some unknown reason.
“I didn’t buy it, Papa! You didn’t let me finish. It was just so amazingly beautiful!!!” She reminisced louder than was necessary.
“Ah, ma’alish , Habibty, when you get maarid, I’ll get you gold addi kiddah ,” he said, holding his hands about four feet apart.
“Oh, thank you, Papa! Thank you. Can we go back and get that same bracelet, then? Will you get it for me, Papa?”
“Of course, Habibty.”
Another thought occurred to me, only this time I was sure I wouldn’t be interrupted because KJ was staring out the window at whatever stars she could see through the dust and exhaust fumes, dreaming of the day when thousands of Egyptian relatives would be sending fleets of gold over from Egypt to congratulate her on her marriage to some unforeseeable figure whose identity was of secondary importance in the event.
“Papa, since I don’t like gold, when I get married, will you get me electronics addi kiddah?”
He laughed so hard he forgot to try to beat the traffic light. He also agreed!
As the car inched north, homeward, Mother started to babble pleasantly about the various things in the area that had changed or stayed the same since she first came to Jeddah. “Tareq, why don’t you take us to see Eve’s grave ? It’s right down the block, behind one of those apartment buildings, isn’t it?”
“La’, it’s nott practical right naaw. The traffic is too heavy, and Allah knows I’ll be too tired to drive hom if we go to it now. And you can’t see it, anyhow. The Saudis putt a woll up around it becuz some iggnorant people startted to worr-ship it. ” He answered, unnecessarily stressing and mispronouncing certain parts of words in the delightful way that is his custom.
“That’s okay, Papa, take us to see it another time. But really, it’s silly that we’ve never actually seen it, since we grew up here.” I said, attempting to get pictures of the traffic. I remembered from my previous visits to the US that even that was different enough to make me homesick.

Crossing the street on my way home from class, I smile at how colorful America is with it’s enormous live oaks, it’s seasonal flowers, grass, and redbrick buildings. I imagine that a large part of the reason Jeddah is so colorless by comparison is that everything is covered in dust, whereas here, the town is frequently washed by rain.
It makes me smile to think how the phrase, “Oh, rain” has opposite meanings back home than it does here; how it wasn’t until I was ten or eleven that I could understand the Western fascination with clear skies. To me, clouds were a glorious shade that dulled the excruciating light, and inspired gratitude and poetry, whereas the only thought the sun inspired was, “yikh.” Even when there were only a few clouds, the light bounced through the smog and off of them in the most breathtaking ways.
I look down the road, and notice for the first time how the moss-covered branches meet overhead in a canopy, as I’d read in so many books and poems. Like the clouds I so seldom see here, they look like something out of a storybook.
I look up at the undersides of the branches above my head and see a web of wet wood blocking out the sky.
Date trees don’t do that.

Miss. Osman

by: Guest Author

Tags: college, gold bangles, Leaving home, photographs, Saudi Arabia

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