Over the next couple of weeks, Fahad and I went on more dates on the days I finished early from uni and had enough time to be dropped back in time for the five o’clock bus.
After three weeks of dating, the furthest we’d gone physically was holding hands while he drove the car. He’d have one hand on the steering wheel and his other hand holding mine, our fingers interlocked. I was relieved he hadn’t tried to go any further. It hadn’t taken me long to become smitten and he was already calling me his habibah, the Arabic word for girlfriend.
When I was at home, we contacted each other via text message, and every time I saw him, he’d give me a top-up card with more phone credit.
One evening, he sent me a text asking me to come to his house for lunch and to play video games in the majils. The majlis is the part of a Gulf family’s house where only male family members and their friends are allowed to hang out. They chat, play cards, eat and play video games.
His invitation sounded innocent enough and so I accepted.
FAHAD: So what are you going to tell your dad?
ME: I’ll say I’m at a friend’s house studying and having dinner. That way I don’t have to rush back to university to catch the bus. But how are you going to sneak me into the majlis?
FAHAD: Oh don’t worry about that. It’s a separate building so no one will see you. I’ll have it sorted.
I was going to take a big risk and have him drop me off home, not too close to the house, probably a few streets away from it, so that the neighbours wouldn’t see me.
Now I just needed to ask Baba for permission to be out after university the next day. I’d only been out three days ago over the weekend, at one of Heba’s friends’ parties, so I wasn’t sure how he’d react to a request to go out again so soon, even if it was on the premise of studying.
I went downstairs to see what kind of mood he was in. He wasn’t in the living room, and I could hear water running in the ground floor bathroom, so I assumed he was in there making wudu, the ritual washing Muslims make before praying.
I perched myself nervously on the edge of the sofa, barely listening to the TV. Baba walked into the living room towards the crockery cabinet, where he’d left his glasses and watch.
“I didn’t know you enjoyed watching Faisal Al-Qasim. I think it’s time he went to Turkey like all the other Al Jazeera presenters and invested in a hair transplant,” Baba said grinning, as he buttoned up his shirt cuffs.
I pretended to find his joke amusing and faked a loud laugh. He seemed to be in a good mood.
“Baba, can I go to Heba’s house tomorrow to study?”
“Didn’t you just see her a few days ago when you went to that engagement party? I think you’re going out too much these days,” he replied, fastening his watch to his wrist.
“We have midterms coming up and I don’t know how to do some of the calculations in our Principles of Finance module. She’s really good at maths. She helped me pass our last quiz.”
I’d become a really good liar, almost pathological. He looked me straight in the eye.
Finally he said, “Go, and I better see you with an A for this module.”
“Shukran, thank you Baba,” I said, and leapt up to go to the bathroom so I could text Fahad.
He was going to pick me up at lunchtime from the men’s campus, and I was going to lie to my professor and say that I needed to go home because I had an upset stomach.
Fahad wasn’t like the other Gulf guys I’d heard about from the women at university. He didn’t ask me to cover my face when I was with him, or to walk ten steps behind him so no one would see us together. He worked out at the gym and had broad shoulders and bulging biceps that made his thowb sleeves just a little too tight for him. He wore his ghutra wrapped loosely around his head, not all prim and precise like most other Gulf guys, whose ghutras were starched and pointed. He just threw both ends of the ghutra over his egaal like he didn’t give it any thought.
He’d told me many times that he didn’t like wearing the thowb and ghutra, and he preferred Western clothes, but his father told him it wasn’t manly not to wear the thowb.
“You should wear whatever you want,” I said.
“My dad doesn’t get it,” Fahad replied, shaking his head. “He said it’s our customs and traditions. As long as he’s putting a roof over my head I have no freedom of choice.”
I hadn’t realised that guys here could be trapped too. They definitely had more freedom than the girls—they could go out whenever and wherever they liked—but they were still expected to obey all their fathers’ wishes.
As we left the vicinity of the university in Fahad’s car and stopped at a traffic light, he turned to me and said, “We’re going to need to stop off somewhere quiet and get you to wear one of my thowbs and a ghutra.”
“What?” I laughed. “You’re joking, right?”
But he didn’t laugh with me. “That’s how we’re getting you into the majlis.”
“Come on! No one’s going to see me sitting beside you and believe I’m a man.”
“Just trust me. You do trust me?” Fahad asked.
“Of course I do,” I replied quietly.
Fahad drove the car into an area which was populated with run-down, one-level houses. They were once occupied by the grandparents of today’s rich generation who had left when they acquired their oil wealth. They built grand mansions elsewhere. These neglected traditional Arabic houses—which had open courtyards in their centre—were now inhabited by poor South Asian labourers. The beige cement walls were decorated with graffiti in Urdu, English, Hindi and Arabic.
Fahad pulled into a quiet alleyway. “Climb over to the back seat.” He went to the boot and passed through a white thowb and ghutra along with a black egaal.
“Take off your abaya and shayla and put them in your bag, and then put the thowb on over your clothes,” he instructed.
The thowb was far too big for me and swallowed up my arms. I climbed back into the front seat and he got into the driver’s seat. He tried his best to tuck my hair into a skullcap and then arranged the ghutra over that. He handed me his dark aviator sunglasses to wear and wrapped one end of the ghutra over my nose and mouth. On me his sunglasses were so big that they covered half my face.
“You look like a Bedouin now. Look in the mirror!” he said, laughing.
I pulled down the car sun visor and opened the sliding mirror. I looked ridiculous.
“You can still see that I’m a woman!” I protested.
“No you can’t!” he said. “It will be fine.”
As we got near his house, another car driving in the opposite direction slowed down beside us. A middle-aged Gulf man had his window wound all the way down and he looked at me and then looked at Fahad, squinting with confusion drawn all over his face, and then he drove off. Fahad found this hilarious and burst out laughing, while I was absolutely terrified the man was going to stop the car and question us because he thought we were a gay couple.
Fahad pulled into the driveway directly outside the one-floor annex that was the majlis. It was a separate building to the house. I couldn’t see into it because its long glass windows had been tinted.
“Get out of the car quickly and shut the car door quietly,” he said.
He took the majlis key out of his pocket, unlocked the door and we went inside. As soon as I was in, he quickly scrambled to lock the door from the inside.
The majlis was pretty traditional. Sturdy red and black Bedouin floor cushions formed an L shape around the fully carpeted room, and a giant flat-screen TV stood to one side. Two PlayStation handsets lay strewn on the floor. There was a low-lying glass-top coffee table in the middle of the room, which was laden with bowls of Celebrations chocolates. The majlis had an en-suite bathroom too.
“Are you hungry? We usually eat lunch here at two or three, and it’s only one, but if the food is ready I can have the maid bring it in,” Fahad asked.
“I’m a bit hungry,” I replied.
“Okay, wait here, and our maid Nancy will bring it in.”
I frowned. “Err, if Nancy sees me isn’t she going to snitch on you to your parents?”
“No, don’t worry, Nancy’s cool. My brother brings girls here all the time.”
I looked at the long, flat, floor cushion I was sitting on and wondered how many hook-ups had taken place on it.
“You can take off the thowb now by the way,” Fahad said, and smiled, before turning around, leaving the majlis and locking the door quietly behind him.
He came back several minutes later with Nancy, their petite twenty-something Filipina maid, who was carrying a large round metal tray with a giant lid, smoke billowing out from its sides. She was wearing a servant’s uniform, consisting of a lilac smock with white buttons down the centre, and matching lilac trousers. Her straight black hair was scraped back into a bun.
I didn’t see why Fahad couldn’t have brought the food in himself. He was carrying two small pots of plain white yoghurt and a little plate of salad while she carried a tray that was almost as big as she was.
“Hello madam,” she said in a meek voice, as she knelt down precariously, trying to keep her balance as she laid the tray down on the floor.
Fahad didn’t even offer to take it off her. I felt bothered by this. This fully grown man who worked out at the gym wouldn’t lift a finger to help. After Nancy scurried out, Fahad locked the door behind her. He took off his white ghutra and crocheted skullcap, draping them over the side of a floor cushion, and then he pulled his thowb over his head, leaving on just his white vest, called a faneela, and white cotton trousers that Gulf men wore under their thowbs called sirwaal.
I’d seen men dressed in their undergarments like this on TV in Gulf soap operas, and they usually sported a pot belly, which they called a karsh. But Fahad had no karsh and he made his faneela and sirwaal look sexy.
“Let’s eat,” he said as he sat down cross-legged on the carpet and patted the floor, motioning at me to sit beside him.
He lifted the heavy metal lid off the tray, revealing a huge mound of chicken kabsa. Kabsa was the national dish consisting of rice and either chicken, fish or lamb cooked with lots of spices like cardamom and cloves.
“The secret is to put a bit of yoghurt on the rice and eat it.”
I looked at the spread on the floor. “Fahad, you didn’t bring spoons.”
“You don’t need a spoon! Use your fingers like me,” he replied, and he showed me how with his thumb, forefinger and middle finger how to mould a ball out of rice, before popping it into his mouth.
“Yeah, I don’t think I can do that,” I said, dropping rice grains all over my lap as I tried unsuccessfully to form a rice ball.
Fahad stood up, opened the majlis door and yelled, “Nancy! Nancy, bring a spoon!”
Nancy rushed back over to the majlis from the main house with a spoon and handed it to me.
“Thank you,” I said.
As soon as we were done eating, Fahad unlocked the majlis door and yelled again for Nancy to collect the tray.
Once Nancy had gone, Fahad locked the majlis door, turned on the TV and sat down and started playing FIFA on the PlayStation.
“Do you want to play?” he asked, offering me a handset.
“I’m not really into football,” I said. “Don’t you have anything else? GTA or Call of Duty?”
“Oh man, sorry, I don’t,” he said, and then he carried on playing on his own.
He was so engrossed in his game that he didn’t notice how bored I was beside him. He wasn’t even trying to make conversation with me! Why had he brought me here if he was just going to play video games and ignore me?
So I decided to do something a little unlike me, something a little daring, to get his attention.
I lay with my head draped across his crossed legs and stroked the side of his face with my right hand. Then I moved on to his left earlobe and used my thumb and forefinger to gently rub his soft skin. I moved my hand down to the left side of his chest and stroked it. I felt his nipple harden through his vest.
Finally, he put his handset down on the floor and looked at me.
“What are you doing?”
“Getting your attention,” I replied, before I sat on his lap, wrapping my legs around his back.
“You’ve got it now,” he said, his voice thick.
He kissed me softly and this time I didn’t freeze. I kissed him back. He ran the tips of his fingers up and down my back, sending shivers down my spine, as he alternated between sucking on my lips and tongue. I started to feel things I’d never felt before. This must be what the Cosmopolitan website meant when they talked about getting turned on.
He brushed his lips across my face and moved on to my ear, gently breathing warm air into it, and then he moved ever so slowly down the side of my neck. But when he tried to move further down, cupping my breasts over my blouse with his hands, I froze. I patted away his hands and hurried off his lap.
“Stop,” I said. “I don’t want to go any further.”
“But you started it,” he said, grabbing my arms and pulling me back towards him. “You’ve turned me on. You can’t just tease me leaving me with blue balls. Come on, take off your top.”
He tried his best to lift up my blouse, but I forced my hands down on his so he was unable to pull it up past my belly.
“Stop,” I said, pushing him away, and then I began to cry.
“You know what those tears are called?” Fahad said, crossing his arms. “Crocodile tears.”
“What? I can’t believe you just said that!” I exclaimed. “These are not crocodile tears!”
Fahad sat beside me and wrapped his arms around me, so my head was nestled against his neck, my tears making little damp patches on his white vest. I inhaled the strong woody notes of his perfume.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’d never do anything to you by force. It’s just you’re so sexy and you turned me on. I’d never do anything without your consent.”
“It’s just, I’ve never been with a man before,” I told him, drying my eyes with my sleeve. “I haven’t kissed a boy before. Well, not really.”
I thought back to my experiences with Faisal and Aziz. You couldn’t call those real kisses.
“Are you kidding?” he asked, surprised. “But you’re from the UK. You must have had boyfriends over there?”
“No, never.”
He gave me a big kiss on my cheek and hugged me harder. “You know what this place is?” he said. “It’s our love majlis. Come on, let’s get you home.”