The usual custom would have been to wait for my father to return home from work and have him deal with the issue, but Mama’s patience would not allow it. She pulled her abaya over her head and dragged my sister and me by our hands to the neighbor’s home. My mother found the boy and started screaming. He yelled back, and although they battled with words alone, to me standing there it seemed dangerously close to physical fighting. “I swear to God,” my mother warned him, “if you ever approach either of my daughters again—in the building or on the street—I will cut off your male parts and hang them round your neck!”
The boy hadn’t in fact touched us; his advances had been verbal only. But Mama said that if it were not for the sitr—the veil of protection—of Allah over us, things could have been much worse. Afterward, she made a promise between herself and God. Believing that He had kept us safe, that He had allowed us to retain our precious and all-important virginity, she vowed that she would fast every Monday and Thursday for the rest of her life. Mama adhered to these two days of fasting without fail. It was only when I heard of my mother’s vow that I became fully aware to what extent a girl’s virginity determines her fate in Saudi society.
Although Mama never told our father what had happened, my sister and I lived out the rest of our childhoods under a kind of house arrest. We were never again allowed to play with our neighbors’ children in the corridor between the apartment doorways or on the roof of the building. The most we were permitted to do was to open the shara’ah, a small window in the front door, so we could watch the other children play, and perhaps occasionally use a water gun ourselves from behind this narrow window. Whether or not he ever knew about our neighbor, Abouya was equally strict; he permitted us only to enter two houses in Mecca: Aunt Zein’s and Uncle Sa’ad’s.
It did not matter even when our family moved from one apartment to another. No matter where we lived, the rules were always the same and absolute. But they only applied to Muna and me. Mama and, later, Muhammad were free to leave. So, for hours on end, Muna and I would be locked in the apartment, alone.
We did all kinds of crazy things. The apartment did not have water all the time, so whenever the water did come on, Mama told us to fill up the tank on the balcony and then to turn off the water once it was full. One time we didn’t turn off the water, and the tank overflowed, sending water all over the balcony. We quickly realized that with the right preparations, we could have our own outdoor pool. We put down a towel to trap the water and keep it away from the drain and then took off our clothes, until we were wearing nothing but our underwear. Like little mermaids, we went water skiing on the water on the balcony floor. Another time, I got out of the shower with my wet, long curly hair. There was a small opening, a type of window, on the balcony, and I could slip my head through it and dangle my hair down toward the ground. Anyone looking up would have thought that there was a dead body on the balcony, its lifeless head hanging above the street.
We spent hours, days, and weeks like this alone, particularly in the summers, when there was no school and nothing to do. At least once a week, no one was here at all when Mama went off to the Grand Mosque to conduct her fast, give her gifts, and keep her pledge to Allah in thanks for Him keeping us safe. To amuse ourselves while she was out, we smoked the small, expensive cigarettes that my uncle had given my father as a gift and that my mother had hidden away because my father smoked other brands. One time, we put oil in our hair and then decided to play a game we had invented. We lit candles and I danced around my sister singing, “Happy birthday to you” and waving a candle. Suddenly the candle fell from my hands onto her oiled hair. We both started screaming. I remembered a safety program from TV about a spray that put out fire. I ran all around the apartment looking for the spray. I found a can of Raid and started spraying it, but Raid was not a fire extinguisher. It was designed to kill insects. My sister lost all her hair. Mama was furious. The beating she gave me afterward almost killed me.
Perhaps the worst of all was the time Muna announced that she was going to do a trick. She started climbing up the door and asked me to hand her the broomstick. I gave her the stick and just then she slipped. The stick went through the roof of her mouth and into her nose. We were alone, and she was bleeding everywhere, but we had no phone and we were locked inside, so all we could do was wait. Muna bled until Mama came home. She was rushed to the hospital and they stitched the hole closed, but she almost died. Afterward, I got another beating from Mama.
All those years of confinement with one another also meant that my sister and I would often fight between ourselves. We fought in the house, at school, anywhere. Muna was very strong, and I was very thin, so she had the advantage. One time at school I was eating breakfast and Muna and her friends were cleaning the paintbrushes after doing watercolors. Muna said, “Watch me” to her friends and then walked up and spilled the dirty brush water all over my face in front of everyone. I grabbed my orange-colored drink and splashed it on her face in return. Then Muna grabbed my hair, pulled me from my seat, and dragged me over to the dirt, where she started pummeling me. No one stopped her. Finally, after she walked away, the older sister of one of my friends took me to the bathroom and washed my face. I couldn’t tell my teachers what had happened because Muna was my sister. I couldn’t tell my mother because if I told her, Mama would give me a second beating, probably worse than Muna’s. I learned to keep my mouth shut and take whatever came.
There was one pain that my sister and I shared, a moment of such deep wounding that the scars will never fully heal. The story of these wounds begins with my older female cousins, the same ones who mocked my single dress and my “Egyptian” mother. “Dirty girls,” they said of my sister and me. “They still haven’t been circumcised.”
I knew circumcision was a fearful word before I knew its meaning. I had once seen an elderly woman named Hasaneyya visiting my uncle’s house: my cousins told me that she was the one who performed “circumcision” on girls. If my sister or I failed to behave properly during our visits, we were told, “Be careful, or we will call Aunt Hasaneyya to come and circumcise you.” Today, my body still clenches at the mention of her name.