I cloaked my ensemble with the mask of my abbayah, drowning all my meager efforts at appearing stylish. Firmly tying my headscarf on, I was ready for my first evening out. As I looked at my departing face in the hallway mirror, the only familiar emblem of my dressed-up self was my lipstick, in traffic-light red. Everything else about me was already changed beyond recognition in just these few weeks. I stepped outside my building and waited in the forsaken silence, my cheek caressed by the evening wind. In the glare of headlights a taxi pulled up, with two fellow party goers beckoning me in. This was my ride.
I jumped in, careful that my abbayah and scarf didn't entrap me in the car door and turned to greet my fellow passengers. These women were also compound-dwellers who worked with Zubaidah in the nutrition section, both of them dieticians. One was a pretty, blond Irish girl, the other a tall, imposing redhead, Christine, a Canadian. Christine had been in the Kingdom for some time and knew Zubaidah well. We chatted along the way, talking of home (which was always elsewhere, no matter how long anyone had lived in the Kingdom). We shared our common stories of adjusting to life in the Kingdom. I mentioned to Christine how much I missed my duck-down duvet which I had left in New York. I was astounded and delighted when the ladies told me I could pick up a new one at Ikea! In Riyadh? There was a market for Scandinavian furniture here? Somehow, I couldn't imagine a Saudi assembling flat-pack furniture.
As we drove on, I discovered Christine had been in the Canadian army and had been a UN peacekeeper patrolling the Golan Heights before she was a nutritionist here. The diversity of backgrounds amongst the expats was only beginning to come into focus. Everyone was more than they appeared, often having lived in several other countries, and often having more than one profession.
The driver headed away from the compound in a westerly direction, along the Khuraij Road, as he always did. Our compound was at the eastern-most tip of habitable land before the desert engulfed everything in earnest. Tonight we were headed into town and soon joined the fast-gathering traffic jams. Zubaidah's home was in a discreet corner of the residential and commercial neighborhood of Olleyah. Her home was on a road just off Siteen Street, a chic shopping address frequented by locals. She lived in the heart of Riyadh.
Tonight, the night before Ramadan, was everyone's last reprieve in this city of four million. An ambient urgency of compressed pleasures suffused the air. City dwellers were intent to revel, albeit in private, before the gravity of the month-long fasting set in. For many, there was cause to celebrate the arrival of the most holy month of the Islamic year, a joyous and rewarding time for observant Muslims. Repressed excitement mingled with anxious anticipation, forming a critical mass of novel energy in the usually torpid, humorless Riyadh. The air was charged.
As we coursed along the Khuraij Road, a six-lane highway, to the left and right of us cars raced at a perilous speed, leaving us trailing behind as we journeyed at sixty-five miles per hour in the middle, the supposedly slower, so-called “expat” lane. I fastened my seat belt in the rear seat and focused on buildings rather than cars, anything to distract me from the wildness of the traffic that barely grazed past us at deadly speed.
I strained to see everything through the cheap adhesive tint of the taxi windows. We passed the gleaming Lucent building, empty of employees, then Zahid Tractors with rows of shiny, flat-nosed, sunflower-yellow tractors. On our right, we zipped past the Astra compound, also belonging to the National Guard, where our Saudi counterparts lived, separate, divorced from us, the expat population. On the opposite side of the road, car dealerships stretched out, Toyota, Cadillac, Porsche, cars and trucks gleaming in the evening light, each waiting for an eager, first, male owner.
Within fifteen minutes we were well into the city. Brightly lit public areas opened out into shopping centers and market places which tonight were spilling over with Saudis carrying armfuls of shopping in overstuffed plastic baskets and boxes. Neon illuminated the night sky from fast food outlets. Aimless urban planning, dominated by arterial, never-ending roads in turn flanked by commercial businesses, was reminiscent of a generic America. Entire developments were perhaps only a block deep, making for a curiously pockmarked landscape; highly developed commercial buildings and vacant lots side by side, the lots nothing more than mounds of partially dug-up, barren land, a galling reminder of what must have been here only a few years before. No grass, no public gardens, no shade of trees could be seen along the entire route. Riyadh was built of concrete, plate glass, and sand secured with a tarry mortar of oil and cheap foreign labor. Entirely man-made, the only animation in Riyadh was the flutter of litter swirling in the wake of the fearsome traffic.
Overhead, even though it was three hours past dusk, it still wasn't dark. The petrol-blue night sky, its vastness accentuated by squat buildings, was darkest sapphire, never black, backlit by strong moonlight and prevailing light pollution. Devoid of clouds, there was nothing to absorb the moonlight. A filigree silhouette of a mosque made entirely of mesh gently impressed its form against the soft pile of the velvet night. What lacked in the department of parks and services was made up for in houses of worship. Almost every other building, if it wasn't selling goods, was selling God.
Myriad round domes and skeletal minarets catapulted me to my new reality—unmistakably Arabia. No amount of fast food pylons or American cars could distract or dilute. As I admired the mosques extending seemingly in every direction, I was surprised to feel an unexpected yearning for lost churches in New York I had left behind. I missed the neighborhood church around the corner from my first apartment. I missed the damp, inviting silence of St. Patrick's, a relief from the Midtown madding. I smiled, recalling my favorite hymn, “I Vow to Thee My Country,” from my distant childhood at a Church of England school. It would never ring out across these plains. Silently I checked. I could still recite the Lord's Prayer, even after all these years. My experience of Islam had been built on a bedrock of books from diverse faiths, foremost among them Christianity. My Islam was not birthed in a monolithic vacuum like this one. Here in Riyadh there was one flavor for all, and only one. Everything else was expelled. Even Islam here was officially of one brand only. I gazed at the multitude of mosques, at once striking and singularly ominous.
The cab slowed and took a right turn off Siteen Street. As we trundled along the side road, we approached a mosque spilling worshipers left and right. Isha (evening prayer) had just ended. A fluorescent umbra cast by the harsh lighting of the minaret bathed the streetscape in lurid green. Short, thobed figures scattered to either side of vehicles, each one a boy playing in the street. One figure, kicking a dusty soccer ball, drew a swarm of boys following him intensely, tackling with dusty, slippered feet. We turned left across from another mosque and stopped. This was Zubaidah's house.
As we clambered out of the car, straightening our abbayahs, I looked around. There was no sidewalk. Underfoot, a thick layer of dust covered the once-black tarmac. Small oil puddles punctuated dirt. Again there was not a single planted tree in sight. The neighborhood looked in poor repair, not particularly affluent. Approaching the gate, however, I saw cars parked by the house, a Jaguar, two Benzes, a few other German automobiles. This was a moneyed neighborhood after all, and those boys with dusty, worn sandals didn't live in these houses; that much was clear.
Christine rang the dusty bell in its fractured casing. An intricate steel gate towered above our veiled heads, the twisting white metal work supported by sky-blue metal plates. It wailed open. The house was surrounded completely by a barricade of high walls, over twenty feet high.