Princess: A True Story of Life Behind the Veil in Saudi Arabia

bed with, she
stated with assurance. Boys are kings in the eyes of their mothers.
Suddenly aware of pervasive evil, I asked Ali why he and Father
traveled to Thailand and the Philippines three times a year. He
scowled and told me it was none of my business. But I knew the
answer, for many of the brothers and fathers of my friends made the
same trek to the beautiful lands that sold their young girls and
women to any beast with money.
    I discovered that I had known little about
men and their sexual appetites. The surface of life is nothing more
than a façade; with little effort I uncovered the evil that lurks
under the thin crust of civility between the sexes.
    I, for the first time in my young life,
comprehended the impenetrable task facing those of our sex. I knew
my goal of female equality was hopeless, for I finally recognized
that the world of men harbors a morbid condition of over-fondness
for themselves. We women are vassals, and the walls of our prisons
are inescapable, for this grotesque disease of preeminence lives in
the sperm of all men and is passed along, generation to
generation—a deadly, incurable disease whose host is male and
victim is female.
    Ownership of my body and soul would soon pass
from my father to a stranger I would call my husband, for Father
had informed me I would be wed three months after my sixteenth
birthday. I felt the chains of tradition wrap tightly around me; I
had only six short months of freedom left to savor. I waited for my
destiny to unfold, a child as helpless as an insect trapped in a
wicked web not of its making.
     

Chapter Ten: Huda
    It was ten o’clock at night on January 12,
1972, and all nine of my sisters and I were spellbound with the
telling of Sara’s future by our old Sudanese slave, Huda. Since
Sara’s traumatic marriage and divorce, she had taken to studying
astrology and was convinced that the moon and stars had played a
determining role in her life’s path. Huda, who had filled our ears
from an early age with stories of black magic, was pleased to be
the center of attention and to provide distractions from the
sameness of life in dull Riyadh. We all knew that Huda, in 1899, at
age eight, after straying from her mother who was busy digging yams
for the family supper, had been captured by Arab slave traders. In
our youth she had entertained the children of the house for
countless hours with the saga of her capture and confinement.
    Much to our merriment, Huda always reenacted
her capture with great flair, no matter how many times she retold
the story. She would crouch by the sofa and sing softly, pretending
to scratch in the sand. With a wild screech, she would yank a
pillow cover from behind her back and pull it over her head,
gasping and kicking against her imagined tormentors. She would moan
and fling herself to the floor and kick and scream for her mother.
Finally, she would leap onto the coffee table and peer out the
sitting-room windows, describing the blue waters of the Red Sea
from the ship that transported her from Sudan to the deserts of
Arabia.
    Her eyes would grow wild as she fought
imaginary thieves for her small portion of food. She would snatch a
peach or a pear from the fruit bowl and hungrily gobble all but the
pit. Then she would march solemnly around the room, hands behind
her back, chanting to Allah for deliverance as she was led to the
slave market.
    Sold for a rifle to a member of the Rasheed
clan of Riyadh, she stumbled as she was led from the streets of
Jeddah through blinding sandstorms to the Mismaak fortress, the
garrison for the Rasheed clan in the capital city.
    Now, in her reenactment, Huda lurched from
one piece of furniture to another. We would squeal with laughter as
Huda leaped around the room dodging bullets from our kin, the young
Abdul Aziz and his sixty men, as they attacked the garrison and
defeated the Rasheeds, reclaiming the country for the Al Sa’ud
clan. She would throw her fat body over a chair and scramble for
cover as the desert warriors slew their enemies. She told of her
rescue by my father’s father and would end her playacting by
wrestling the nearest one to the floor and kissing her repeatedly
as she swore she kissed our grandfather upon her rescue. This is
how Huda came to be in our family.
    As we grew older, she diverted us from our
various dramas by frightening us with supernatural claims of
sorcery. Mother used to dismiss Huda’s proclamations with a smile,
but after I woke up screaming about