Saudi houses and apartments are usually filled with people: children, aunts and uncles, all kinds of friends and relatives. Neighbors might knock on the door and come in with food, or send their kids back and forth. My mother was known for her North African couscous. My cousins loved my mother’s cooking so much that when she made this dish, she would make two pots, and Abdullah, Uncle Sa’ad’s older son, would come over to get one. My uncle’s house would always be crowded with an endless cycle of coffee and tea and snacks put out for arriving guests. Often, the adults would kick the children out of the rooms because we made so much noise. We would be sent up to the roof to play soccer. Sometimes we would play in the streets. My parents wouldn’t have allowed it, but they never knew. Those are nearly the only times I can remember running around in the streets.
But my uncle and his wife rarely came to visit our house, even though for a number of years we lived right across the street. Nor would my mother go to theirs. She would only send them her couscous pot. The only one of my father’s relatives who made my mother feel welcome was my father’s oldest sister, Aunt Zein, who was named after an al-Sharif queen and was nicknamed “peace dove.” Even then, my mother would not visit her house when my uncle and his family were expected to be there.
Family mattered most during the yearly celebration of Eid al-Fitr, the happy end to the monthlong dawn-to-dusk fast of Ramadan. Eid was my favorite holiday. It began at sundown with nighttime shopping, perhaps for fabric for new clothes or shoes, but always ended at Shara’a al-Halawiyyāt, the nickname we had for a street in the Thieves’ Market filled with confectionery vendors, literally the “sweets street.” Beneath the glittering lights and decorations, we would stroll past stall after stall of vendors in white robes, colorful vests, and Aleppo turbans, listening to each seller as he promised the softest, sweetest sweets: “Turkish delight as you can’t find it anywhere else. Whoever chooses to eat any kind except this will break his teeth!” Amid the bustle of the market, the saqa’, or water carrier, would wander by, offering copper cups of cold water to quench the thirst of those who had neither eaten nor drunk during the fasting days.
After we passed by the chewy halawa, or Turkish delights, there were all kinds of other tempting sweets and candies set out for the holidays: al-limoniyyah, a colored sugar candy with a piece of almond in the center, and al-loziyyah, toasted almonds with a sugar coating. My favorite and the most expensive of all were Mackintosh’s chocolates, sold in a white aluminum tin with pink edges. A man in the famous red uniform and black hat of Britain’s Queen’s Guard clasped the hand of his smartly dressed female companion and beamed out at us from a picture on the tin’s lid. Mama didn’t allow us to eat Mackintosh’s sweets—they were for guests only—but we always managed to pilfer one or two while her attention was elsewhere.
Eid was a time to make our apartment beautiful, to bring the mattresses and stuffed cotton cushions to the upholsterer to be refurbished, to take down the curtains and wash them. My mother prepared the cups for tea and coffee and infused the rooms with the scent of aloewood, which was too expensive to use any other time of the year. We always spent the night of Eid baking ma’amoul, a shortbread cookie stuffed with nuts, and ghureeba, a buttery cookie. All these years later, the smell of freshly baked cakes and cookies still takes me back to the Eids of my childhood. After we finished baking, Mama applied henna to my palm and my sister’s, and wrapped them in plastic bags before we slept. We didn’t untie the bag until Eid prayers.
Mecca is the only city in Saudi Arabia in which the holy month of Ramadan and the day of Eid al-Fitr are welcomed with a twenty-one-cannon salute, a custom that survives from the days of the Ottoman Empire, and one of the few Meccan traditions that was not undone by the rising Wahhabi-Salafi militancy, which promotes a fundamentalist reinterpretation of Islam. On the actual day of the holiday, my father would take us to Mecca’s Masjid al-Haram, the Grand Mosque—to attend al-Mashhad, the Eid prayers. We wore our special Eid clothes, and Mama made sure to carry with her a portion of the sweet halawa and a bundle of small change to distribute to the children we passed as we left the mosque after praying. When we arrived home, Mama arranged our own plate of halawa and prepared tea and Arabic coffee with cardamom for any guests who would stop by. She distributed the freshly baked cookies to our neighbors.
That day, we would begin the formal holiday celebration with an Iftar feast, literally a breaking of the fast, at Aunt Zein’s, then on the second day at Uncle Sa’ad’s, and on the third day at our apartment. But while during the first two days my aunt and uncle’s rooms were crowded with cousins and relatives, my mother was not among them. And on the third day, although friends and neighbors came by, none of our relatives ever gathered in our apartment, and not one of my father’s family ever knocked at our door. I never asked Abouya why this was, but I could see the hurt in my mother’s eyes. “Mama,” I finally asked her, “why does no one visit us?”
“Because I’m gharība [foreign],” came her curt reply.
I was a child, so I didn’t understand the complexity of this particular situation. My mother felt shunned, but in truth my father’s family had not rejected her. Before my father had married my mother, he had been married to the sister of his brother’s wife. The friction that my mother felt came largely from the severing of those multiple ties. And so my mother isolated herself, even though most of my father’s family appreciated her generosity, her many talents, and her perfect etiquette. It was not until her death, not until my father’s extended family came to pay their condolences, not until I was long grown, that I began to understand any of this. For all of my childhood, I felt like an outcast.
On the second day of Eid, and despite Mama’s objections, we always went with Abouya to eat breakfast and lunch at the house of Uncle Sa’ad, my father’s older—and only—brother. The atmosphere in his house was very different from Aunt Zein’s. Because money was tight, Mama bought my sister and me only one dress each for Eid; in fact, often she sewed them herself. I wore this dress on all special occasions throughout the whole of the following year, since I would outgrow it by the time the next Eid came around. Invariably, when I entered Uncle Sa’ad’s house, one of his older daughters would say with a sneer, “Oh look, the same dress as yesterday!”