MY BOOK: Chapter 3, on the road from Mutrah

http://howtolivelikeanomaniprincess.blogspot.com/2010/08/book-my-book-chapter-three.html from before, which you may or may not have already read:

Khaleel waited at the door for me and we went down the hallway and the elevator together.

The men at the front desk regarded us 'man and woman' with suspicion, but in this one instance, Khaleel figured our reputations didn't matter. There were worse things in the world tonight, and we were going to outrun them.

Masoud and Audrey met us, and Masoud got out from the driver's seat to let Khaleel in. Audrey was already buckled in, in the back.

I shook as I climbed in, lifting the folds of my abaya as if I were a parcel. Masoud looked magnanimously back at me with pity bleeding his kind brown eyes, and I reached for the seatbelt, ashamed.

Khaleel started to pull out, but noting my attempt to put the seatbelt on while struggling with the folds of the butterfly winged chiffon of my Dubai designer abaya, he stopped suddenly, and Audrey and I, our bodies lurched forward and our heads slammed into the boys' seats with a crunch.

"No seatbelts tonight," he warned me.

He paused one moment to turn up the MP3 player, music bled our ears, pounding worse than my heartbeat, so that I forgot I had a heartbeat.

Audrey and I glanced over at eachother, until I slowly, bravely, met Khaleel's reckless gaze. We could only make out the gleam of eachother's eyes in the dappled streetlamps of the Corniche, but we met eachother with the tips of our dead smiles invertered to the corners of our eyes, so that no one could read our gazes but us. We recognized the others' likeness.

He did not pull forward until I let the belt slip back into its nest.

With a whiz, and then a zip, it 'click'ed.

And then we were gone out into the night.

[The new:]

One lighted part of the world bled into the light of another as we raced down the corniche, taking the corners of Old Muscat at 3 am on all angles, trying to outrun the world.

What Khaleel wanted to forget I was not sure of as of yet. I couldn't fathom why he should be so haunted by my circumstances, as if they had melded with his own.

I stared at his brown neck and the frayed width of his t-shirt collar, trying to understand what made us so alike, and yet so apart.

Maybe, the fact that he had always believed I was a woman of privellage, with a nice expat 4x4 and a marble palace in MQ, none of which my family really owned. It all related to my father's job.

Now Khaleel didn't have that image.

I was a a western woman living out of a hotel room with a balcony overlooking the fish souq that had no lights beyond the light of Audrey's laptop when it was plugged in, which cost ten rials a day that I didn't have in my pocket.

Maybe it was something else. I don't know, but something made us equally insane that night.

"I want to drive!" I hiccupped from the backseat, and Khaleel laughed. "I want it to be like the old days when I was the bad one and you were the good one, and I was the one getting into all the trouble and you were the one getting me out of it!"

Masoud barked some semblance of laughter but was too kind to note, yet again I was in trouble and Khaleel was doing his damndest to find a way to get me out.

"No WAY!" Khaleel smiled. "Not in my car."

"I want to drive!" I demanded, pretty and petulant, and obviously spoiled. That usually worked with him, as prone as he was to his Omani cousins.

"And find a sure way to get yourself deported from Oman? Driving without a lisence! Ha. And in my car? No WAY!"

We slowed a little bit as we pulled into the Al Kuwair McDonalds and the boys bought us icecream and Big Macs.

Something must have happened between Old Muscat and Al Kuwair, I am sure, but my mental state was spewing wreckage, and I have no recollection to this day of anything but streaks of orange and purple light. I probably just stared out the window in numb shock like an accident victim.

Getting sugar and salt into me was good, though I won't call that food, but even Audrey was too starved to refuse.

We sat there munching our burgers as the boys raced us down Sultan Qaboos highway, taking a dangerous turn here and there until we ended up at Sawadi with the call to prayer that Audrey and I alone heeded, and a pink sunrise to greet us.

We slammed close the doors to ancient old Mercedes and felt our feet slip into sand. Khaleel wandered up the beach by himself a bit, and I sat down with Masoud and Audrey, Masoud asking us questions about family life 'in the West'.

"You mean you have to pay for your own education?"

"Your family can just kick you out when you turn eighteen?!"

Apparently, for any decent Omani man, these things our unheard of in relation to young women.

Audrey talked and I listened with quaint detachment. I don't think I had much to offer in the way of a comment, which reflects my mental state, for I think I am one of those people who likes to talk about myself, and about anything in general that I have even the slightest knowledge of.

Audrey spoke tentatively about ill-treatment on the part of her family, how they forgot to bring her when they went out for dinner or nelgected her education in support of her younger brother Gerome's efforts to become a rockstar, and how much money Gerome owed them all for recording his last CD, and yet they would not let her borrow even a fraction of that ammount to go to University.

I am sure Masoud had decided we were all barbarians in the West, after having seen my mother rip off her shirt in front of him with her boobs hanging out and yell at Audrey so.

I wasn't too bothered by that, since maybe I held that opinion at the time, tired as I was from being yelled at and treated as inferior in intelligence because of my religious dress.


But I was bothered by Khaleel being so alone, so I kicked off my shoes and chased after him, when I could see he was heading back towards us, his shoulders outlined by thin rim of white moonlight of the balck oily expanse of water.

"Hello," he smiled genuinely when I drew near.

"Hello." I scrunched up my nose at him. "You should say 'Asalaam alaykom' because we are Muslims."

"Right," he adjusted himself like those fern-like plants that you touch and they just curl up, or sea anenomes when you prick them with your finger-tip, "you are better than me."


It was like a slap in the face, for I could feel his self-loathing as if it were a wet cloth being thrown at me. I was ammune to abuse, crazed as I was. "Khaleel, what is wrong? Are you okay?"

He laughed a horrible deep laugh, the kind with no mirth in it, so that you know that it is darkness. The rising sun, growing in strength, did not lesson the hallowness of the sound.

"I should be asking you that, but I won't because it isn't any of my business."

We walked a few paces in silence, kicking sand.

I couldn't help myself though. Khaleel was like my medicine.

"Do you remember that time you took my Mum and Summer and I up here when we were kids?"

Khaleel's features softened. "Mhmm."

"It was the first time I saw an Omani fishing village," I continued with the invitation of his throat chords barely humming. "And you ditched us to play soccer---er, I mean 'football' with some Omani boys, and we had a picnic, and you were scared your uncle would see us the whole time? With us Devil-white women?" I was leaning into his path and grinning.

It worked. He grinned back.

"...And I played with the garbage eating goats, and you told us about the Castle, and it was the first day I didn't really hate Oman all that much."

We were both smiling, remembering ourselves before our cirucmstances in life had caged us, made him useless, and made me weak.

When we came up to Audrey and Masoud, as engaged as they were in what appeared to be, building a sand castle, Khaleel was staring directly into my face and really seeing me, not just who I used to be, for the first time since fate (or my mother's meddling, call it what you will) had forced us onto eachother's paths again.

His voice was kind when he spoke. "You were such a cute kid. I miss how you used to dress, like a little Kashmiri."

I scrunched up my nose at him again. "Don't remind me. I was trying to dress Omani but they charge us Westerners a fortune for Omani traditional dresses."

Audrey and Masoud were wholly absorbed in their construction, so that you'd never know that Masoud was 36, and Audrey 23, so they didn't even seem to take note of Khaleel and I standing there, feeling ancient with undocumented heartbreaks and disapointments belying our years.

"Why did you come back here Anna," his voice was hoarse. "Why don't you just go home?"

Khaleel wasn't trying to be mean, exactly, he just couldn't help me anymore than he had. I knew very well he didn't have the money to keep buying our meals and charging our cell phone with credit so that he could make sure we were okay daily.

I tried then to be thoughtful, and to remember my city. I remembered restaurants I had sat smiling at with Faisal and the tastes of familiar foods beyond a plain palate of rice and meat and salads of sliced onion with lemon, and I remembered sunny park benches in rose gardens he and I had cherished. That Faisal had been there with me, trying to hold my hand as I pulled away, and the the memory of his laugh was the most poignant...

And the pain of it all was really too much for me, even a world away from the harrowing absence of his presence.

All the rose petals in my memory are blown in a shock of wind to chill my young flesh, and disappear under thorny grey hedges in my mind's scape, with empty wrought iron benches taunting and wicked.

Lurid men cat-call me as I walk home alone from such places in my conjurance of the places and sounds of where once I made my life. They say sick things, like "take that scarf off or I'll come f**** you!" Or "I am nine inches, I bet you want the whole of me in you." Brave only because I am a diminuative woman alone, with a headscarf that supposedly makes me weak, and a face veil that makes them think I am deaf, or mindless.

I was not weak then.

A wan, thin smile grates my face.

I faced them bravely with a stone in my hand just in case, but with the courage and wit to use my tongue first, and well, that their pride was wounded, and their manhood less then my womanhood, which I did not have to bare to make known.

I was more than my face and my body. I was a woman and I had a home and I knew who I was and where I was going and what my life would be like someday if Saudi Arabia could just see that I was good, and not anything less for not being an Arab. I was a Muslim and that is all that mattered.

Where my strength had gone, I was not sure, but I was absolutely sure, that if even another woman refused to let me serve her at my work because I was "one of THOSE people" or another ignorant man in a plaid red coat inferred I should move to Saudi Arabia if I wanted to dress as I did, that I didn't deserve employment or school or to vote because of my headscarf and veil... I would not be able to work the one profession that was open to me in my headscarf. I would run to the staff toilet stall and sprall out on the floor with the good people that are in this world surrounding me but their voices making no differences.

"It's just ignornace!" "It makes me so mad!" "If he only knew you!" "Do you want me to smack him for you?" "I told her to take her business elsewhere!"

My hands were shaking, so Khaleel took his soft cashmere musayr [Omani turban-like headwrap] from his head, and draped it around my chest lightly, without touching me.

I was so weary of being the strong one, of trying, of trying, of trying. Defending myself, my religion, the men of my religion, defending countries like Oman and Saudi Arabia, explaining, explaining, and explaining, when in the end, that I was Muslim didn't matter to anyone but me. People maybe admired my idealism, and 'a wrong is a wrong' no matter what, but that is because we as whole, Muslims, humanity, what have you, were generally leaderless and divided within ourselves and with eachother. People would only follow my call so far, even if I said this way is better than that, because I could not break down the walls, and some people did not want them broken, high and safe in their palaces with people like Faisal and me fighting the battle they claimed in newspapers they wanted won. But like Joan of Arc, they left me to burn, only I was never pure enough to be a martyr.

"Go back to the West," Arabia commanded, when I, a Muslim, had announced "I have made hijrah!"

It smelled of an unfamiliar perfume, the mussayr, an Arabic strain stronger than any Faisal had ever worn, but that it was scented reminded me of Faisal's bright polo shirts with the collar flipped up with panache, and the feel of the rainbow's spread of cotton on my cheek.

I raised my eyes again to Khaleel's to control the shaking.

"I have no home anymore. I can't go back. There's nothing there for me anymore."

Khaleel looked out over the expansive plain there in Barka that was to be a future development project for the country and laughed bitterly. Two grey concrete future show homes sat like shell-shocked structures on the plain above us.

"There's nothing for you here. Trust me. I've lived thirty years of my life in Oman. I am thirty now and have nothing to show for it."

"That's not true," I defended him to himself. "You have friends who love you and speak endlessly of your loyalty, and family."

Khaleel ran a hand through his curly black hair. "And that's what an Omani man is supposed to want, to have?"

My heart was breaking but I asked it anyways. "And what DO you want Khaleel?"

He wandered us a ways to the water, where we dipped our feet in it, as fisherman started to splay open their areeshes and hefted up his dishdasha to tie it about his waist, to squat in the moist sand.

While we had been speaking (or not speaking), Masoud had been trying to teach Audrey an important verse from the Qu'ran that all Muslims are supposed to know flawlessly that she had struggled with in exasperation for nigh three years now and counting.

"I want a family that I CHOSE, just a small one, one baby, maybe more. A wife who is a good Muslim and doesn't want a ridiculous maher, who I like to be around, and who loves me. A simple house with simply things, a simple life. Maybe I'd paint again like I used to if I felt that kind of comfort."

My eyes bleed for his dream which was once my own, only I would write again, not paint.

"You can still make that," I tell him.

Khaleel tosses his head and stares bleakly as the morning fishing boats are dragged up onto the sand a ways away from us on the beach, and their silver catches glisten in the wane morning sun.

"What do you want now, ya Anna?" he catches me, like a fish, in the net of his thick lashed gaze.

But before I could answer Masoud and Audrey lumbered upon our private conference in elation for Audrey having memorized the Quran verse of Al Fatiha in almost perfect Arabic.

"Go take your madrassa elsewhere!" Khaleel barked at Masoud, and Audrey and Masoud skittered away from us like scared beach cats, laughing to eachother at Khaleel's bad temper. "Now," he turned back to me. "What does Anna need in Oman?"

I couldn't help myself. All my lost and vain dreams came pouring out and spilt on the sand between us like pearls who need their hard crusty shell for protection.

"I want to be married," I admitted to him. "I am ready to be married. I am good at being a wife and I like to take care of my husband, dress up nice for him, cook him things he likes, and I don't even like cooking!" He just listened as I went on.

"I want a house that is mine, that no one can take away from me, that I can decorate and make nice.

And I want to live in place where I feel safe and where people stop telling me to go live somewhere else just because I am Muslim or because I am not Saudi or Arab.

I am not ready yet, but maybe in one year, I'd like to have a daughter. But if I marry, it has to be someone who loves me for me, not just the idea of me 'cause I am a convert, or because I am white and ya'll Arabs seem to have a thing for that. I need to be known, and I know." In all this I was quite excited, and it drained me.

"I am so tired Khaleel, of wanting, of waiting, of hoping. I can't wait anymore."

[more later----to be continued]

THE BOOK: Undecided Chapter Number

CHAPTER SOMEWHERE NEAR MIDDLE'S END:

“Ouch!” One of the Emiratis winced as I slammed close the door. “Sister… Be nice!”

It was an accident, so I made no apology. I blinked and looked around the SUV, inundated with the scent of the laundry detergent from their freshly pressed t-shirts for the clubs, and different Arabic colognes, heady with musk.

I bundled the widely flowing sleeves of my abaya onto my lap, crunching the black chiffon fabric nervously with my hands.

“I’m used to beat up old Toyotas if I have to hold up my skirts to climb in.”

The Emiratis stared blankly at me, and the shortest one laughed.

“Sis… This is no Toyota.”

The other two echoed his amusement awkwardly in the lamplight of my driveway.

Mystery looked back at me from the driver’s seat.

“Everyone, Anna.”

We smiled.

“Anna, Majid.”

The shorter one who’d already spoken to me nodded his head in ascent, and Mystery continued his string of introductions.

“Khalid-” the biggest on smiled- “and Faisal.”

Faisal was one of those men who is perfectly in proportion and reserved in his smile, who women would naturally find attractive on a first impressions basis, and the name shook me.

My heart quivered, not for him, but for an old pain. He looked alot like my Faisal, same soft doe eyes and long lashes.

Faisal the Emirati held out his hand for me to shake and when it was just left hanging there in the space between us with me staring blankly at him he looked back at the others from M’s Thailand crew, like, ‘who is this chick and why is she with us?’

I got over it as Mystery pulled out from my drive and doubled back through Shatti.

I kind of glared at Mystery while we drove. I kept thinking of the guys saying that I had been trying to make it with Mystery while Majnoon was in Thai, and I really didn’t want anyone seeing me arriving with him at a nightspot to give credence to the gossip, even if I did suspect it all stemmed from Celeste or Mystery. Even if I got Majnoon to defend me, and insist to all the guys that he was the one that got Mystery to drive me in the first place, the guys would just chuckle that Mystery had it made.

Majnoon had an impression with the guys as this naïve innocent, and I was the one who’d ditched Khaleel for Majnoon in the first place after all, as soon as something better came along. I had a feeling Khaleel and Mystery would be the only ones who’d believe me, and I was pretty sure Mystery would do little to correct the guys’ impressions.

“Where is Majnoon?” I asked Mystery, while we stopped for petrol and phone cards to up our credit for the mobiles, wishing to hide from any of the guys that waved at our car as they drove by, recognizing Mystery. I didn’t want any of them to recognize me as Majnoon’s girl in any ride manned by Mystery.

“He’s gonna meet us at the Intercon.”

It was a short drive from there to the Intercontinental hotel, but being Friday night, the park between the coffee shop and Al Massa mall was packed with guys in their gleaming just-been-washed cars, identically dressed in white pressed dishdashas, or in cool, stereotypically ‘hip’ printed cotton t-shirts like my guys. It took us forever.

When we finally pulled into the Intercon. park I felt like I was a slave about to be auctioned off to the highest bidder, fighting with the snaps of my abaya while Mystery battled for a parking space in that giant gas-guzzling white monster SUV with Dubai plates. That is how it had always felt when I’d come here as an innocent young girl with my mother, all those years before. The feeling of being submissive to the place lingered. I didn’t like the memory, so brushed it off with solid jump from our stylish ride, hitting the pavement, my feet, and my abaya. Majid handed the black folded fabric to me so I could stow it safely inside before the guys locked our gear up.

The breeze was cool but the air was hot and humid, a perfect Muscat night.

Mystery laughed at me as I hugged myself, feeling naked without the folds of my abaya. We walked away from the hotel, towards the steps up to Trader Vic’s. He knew I always wore abaya, and my only exceptions to that rule were made for Khaleel, and, he suspected, Majnoon.

The Emiratis did not know, and probably thought of my cold aloofness as strange. Any girl who rolled ‘with’ Majnoon had to be the DJ’s sister or the stereotypical party/good-time girl and in my modest long beige skirt, tucked in white cotton button-up blouse, and with hair perfectly coiffed to fit under a slanted snow-white beret, not a single strand visible, I didn’t look like I understood the concept of ‘night-club crowd’ very well.

Well, lucky for me, neither do many Omanis and Expats.

Really, half of these people would never get let into a nightclub back home!

Besides one Osama Bin Laden look alike, one Jesus look-alike, and one cowboy, I also saw a woman wearing chop sticks in her hair, and one red vinyl mini dress resplendent with silver sparkle stripper shoes (like Santa’s naughty little helper). For Majnoon and I, it is half the fun of clubbing in Oman.

For those who have never been, Trader Vic’s is a Polynesian themed bar with a live salsa band that ensures a populated and pulsing dance floor. It is not to be judged by its patrons, including Stripper-Elf, Cowboy, and Jesus.

Mystery greeted the bouncer with a player's “salaam” and they chit-chatted while the Emiratis and I stood back, Majid already grooving out to the music coming from indoors in a bid to get all the rest of us all hyper.

Mystery gave us a wave and I followed like a puppy at his heels, nervous without Majnoon, and-because of my Emirates experience-not one hundred percent on yet with the Emiratis we were hosting.

Not that Mystery exactly gave me confidence. If any from their Omani-set spied us, I knew I’d hear from Celeste (or Khaleel) that Mystery and I were having ‘a thing’ behind Majnoon’s back, or even right under his nose, if they heard that Majnoon had asked Mystery to pick his Anastasia up.

But honestly, if I were a different kind of girl, the cheaper kind, the kind they took me as simply by the fact that they thought I’d hooked up with Khaleel and that I am Western, I’m not one hundred percent sure I would trust Mystery with me either, so I don’t blame the guys for wondering, really. They got the wrong impression of me from the very beginning.

An impression I was trying to ‘right’ with Mystery still, and to establish with the Emiratis.

But still, Mystery and the Thai crew were better than the dishdasha- clad Omani men pasted to the curving bar who had eyes that could devour a woman’s soul, I swear.

We didn’t get very far though, before security called us back.

Security spoke in Arabic to Khalid, the big one, and Khalid came forward to ask me if I would mind being so helpful as to give the man my ID card. After establishing that I was over and above the required age for entry into a licensed establishment in the Sultanate of Oman, we took to follow-the-leader again, with Mystery at the helm, and me by his elbow.

All the Omani men at the bar eyed me as we squeezed with difficulty through their masses aimed to this purpose, taking in first my covered body and the absence of any visible hair on my head, and then my face, my cheekbones as they are, and eyes the smoky gold shadow lining eyes the color of Sharqiyah wadis after rain. It was impossible I knew, to determine where I was from or what opening could be used to gain admission to the circle I occupied, as Mystery maneuvered us to what I now understand to be ‘our table’, a booth beside the balcony outside facing the dance floor and salsa band but tucked away from the main bar crowd in the corner.

As we sat, Khalid and Majid pulled out my chair, and Mystery leaned towards me as the pretty waitress dressed in a floral forties-style dress with a hibiscus flower in her hair sat down our drinks menus.

“They thought you were fourteen.”

It was hard to talk over the pumping salsa music.

“When I went with Khaleel-“ I shouted towards Mystery in confidence “-they asked him why he was bringing an ‘under-age’ girl to Copa.”

Mystery laughed, and waved the waitress over while the Dubai set, perusing the drinks list, confided that they were all, in fact, actually brothers, Majid oldest, then Khalid who I was seated next to, and the youngest, Faisal.

Mystery ordered for them after a brief consultation then looked to me. Mystery knew that I, like Majnoon, did not drink alcohol.

“Try the pineapple,” he suggested. It was what Celeste always drank when she came with their Indian-Uni Omani set here.

I bit my lip nervously. I didn’t bring any money with me as I never had a chance to spend it when I was with Majnoon anyways, so if Majnoon didn’t show up before we moved on, I wouldn’t have the funds to cover. That is not something you want to admit to a guy like Mystery, that an Omani man usually paid for a girl in anything [that would be an equivalent in Muscat to admitting to sleeping with his friend, and even if nothing had ever gone down it would be like saying it would someday to an Omani guy, and the status of Majnoon’s relationship with me was still undisclosed publically], so I nodded sure and hoped that Majnoon would show up before the bill.

Mystery went and ordered for me and the guys chatted in Arabic. I spoke a little to Khalid, and Majid goofed off, pretending to salsa dance all by himself, which made the petite little blonde salsa singer smile.

Majid’s personality was one of those infectiously delightful ones, so that you couldn’t help but like him immediately. It took very little effort for him to break down any walls of awkwardness, for he was much like a socially adept child relishing being center of attention.

When the band took a break from their set it got a lot quieter and the five of us were able to hear each other better, and the pretty blonde salsa singer sat at the table one-up from us on the diagonal, glancing back at us every once in a while.

It was obvious to me that she was entertained by Majid, as we all were, him drumming away on the porcelain log-mug his drink was served in with two extraordinarily long plastic straws.

Every now and then a group of plain-clothes Omanis from their Al-Khoudh/Mubhela set would saunter up to Mystery, who, like Majnoon, seemed to know everyone here in Muscat.

I sat back protected by my Omani/Emirati ‘brothers’ safe in the corner, sipping my tropical pineapple fare and suppressing an itch worse than a Muscat beach Mosquito bite to dance with the same childish abandon as Majid, playing the ice princess I was costumed as.

I longed for Majnoon to arrive, so I could drop the screen I used to protect myself with. I was safe in the reputation of his interest and amusement, and I knew he wouldn’t abuse my reputation to further his social status like the rest of the guys Khaleel had accidently set me out with.

The bar is laid out in the following: the entrance had a way to go off to dining or a way to hit the bar. Choosing bar, pass the washrooms, go up two steps. Lining the bar, Omani men in dishdashas and other Arab expat male with girls seated at tables across from the dishdasha crowd. Just past, some Philipino shop-girls sit together with some expat Western women taking a break from Salsa steps. Coming to the edge of the bar as it snakes around the corner, Western men who like salsa dancing (or just watching it) are mixed by the occasional Omani friend in Western clothes, and here is the dance floor and the band. At the edge of the dance floor are some tables and two booths along the window on the balcony that goes back to the dining area behind the band. This is where we sat.

Cowboy and Santa’s Naughty Little Helper were nearby, to our amusement, and when I went to the bathroom, I found the door difficult to open as I found Chopsticks girl passed out on the floor.
I always want to dance. Some people (like Mystery) need to buy drinks to lose the inhibitions that guard their movements.

I don’t.

I get drunk on a DJ, high on dancing off of someone else’s moves.

As Majid danced by himself, I wanted to join on along, but pinched myself to wait for Majnoon, who was late.

Mystery and I had texted him but to no reply, and the Dubai guys needed to have some fun and see more of Muscat nightlife, so Mystery wanted to leave.

Over my empty pineapple juice glass I smiled at the blonde salsa singer, and I wonder if simultaneously we both had the same thought: how did we both end up with our lives in this Muscat bar? How did she end up singing here, in this particularly quiet Gulf country, and dressed as I was, how did I end up surrounded by Omani guys and Philipino waitresses in Hawaiian print dresses carrying beers and cocktails?

Seeing my glass was empty, the youngest, Faisal, offered me a try of his. Mystery snickered.

“I don’t drink,” I commented off-hand to Faisal, and for the second time that night he gave his brothers a look of ‘who IS this girl?’.

Mystery, who was ready to jet, had asked for the bill, and told me to call Majnoon and tell him we’d meet him at the Hyatt. Helplessly, Mystery paid for my drink without a bequest from behalf, half to my relief, half to my devastation.

“Job of Omani men,” he winked and I just kind of sat there dumbly, aware of how easy it is to be absorbed as a conscious Muslim-woman here in the Gulf, like water by a dirty sponge. I tried not to think too much on it. The more power I gave their stupid social conventions and suppositions, the more they’d rule my life, and my world-my culture- was different than theirs. ‘I can move between worlds’ I told myself. ‘Like Audrey says, they are stuck in the box, and they didn’t make a box yet that could fit the woman that I am.’

I wouldn’t be defined by hypocritical Omani social stereotypes.

Recovered, I rolled my eyes, pressed open my Monsoon clutch with a deft “click”, and put one hand to my ear, and with the other clutching my cellphone, slid from our table, leaving the boys to settle the bill and say “see ya’ll” to their Al Khoudh/Mubhela set that I had none to do with.

My floor length silk skirts swished as I passed the dishdasha crowd, trying my damndest to appear haughty, cold, and proud.

Outside in the heat of the evening air, I rang Majnoon, only to be answered by an audible ringtone I recognized, and footsteps on the stairs.

We always seemed to meet with me standing, waiting, on the precipice of some great height.

Stairs always seemed to play a role in our seduction.

I turned, cellphone still pressed to my ear.

Majnoon smiled wide. He was wearing a white printed t-shirt, faded jeans, and designer sneakers as he came up the steps. He smelt like soap and sun and rain, even from a distance.

He had never seen me in anything but a headscarf before so I tilted my hatted head up so he could see my eyes under the slant of the beret as he drew closer.

Seeing my face up close, he paused as if struck, because I know, if I paint it the right way, I can be strikingly lovely.

Small bee-sting lips with cocoa-colored lipstick, grey-green eyes shifting to violet in their depths if I am so bold as to overwhelm them with thick black mascara…

I used to paint portraits with oil on canvas, and make-up is an easier art to master.

I blinked back at his wonderment, knowing I was the same girl underneath.

I’d always played my beauty down with Faisal and Khaleel. Majnoon liked me better free so I could do as I please. Not to say that I’d ever let Khaleel control me, or that Faisal had ever tried to, but when you love somebody, what makes them happy makes you happy. Majnoon loved me just for me. Every impulse of mine made him happy, so I drifted so naturally back into myself, the two of us like children, twins, our own natures ruling the dictates of the relationship, so that there were no dictates at all, no thinking.

My simple waterfall diamond earrings cascading from underneath the snowy white beret cast a glimmer onto his round, freckled cheek.

He smiled then, as if he’d remembered something he’d forgotten.

“You look so pretty- lovely, Honey.”

Enchanted, his hand reached out to cup my face, but then, remembering that people were watching us, withdrew, and took my hand instead. He held it with most of the strength in his as if he were afraid I were a mirage that would disappear. I was so giddy I almost started laughing, lost as I was in my Jane Austen world.

I squeezed his hand back to break the spell, his honey-colored eyelashes blinked twice, and his brown eyes laughed with me at the busy-bodies watching us.

A group of guys in different coloured dishdashes, off-white, mustard, and baby blue, stared without apology, at our exchange.

“Come,” I said. “You’re already late. Mystery is thinking to steal your guests and ditch you, you’re so late.”

Busy-bodies take note of my good comprehension and use of the English language, please.

He nodded, “Yes, yes,” and followed my lead through the bar to our table.

Dishdashas noted who I was with, whether or not he was Omani (which some find hard to determine), my smile, my new way of walking, that if the way became congested I would rather brush my body softly against Majnoon’s before I’d touch any other male accidently.

Majnoon shielded me to our table, waited until I was seated, then hugged Mystery and his Emirati friends, them exchanging greetings in Arabic in turn, and then, in English, he informed us Birdman was waiting outside.

“Birdman dances?” I asked Majnoon, fascinated by this news as is not something that I would have pictured. Having lived with Birdman for three days, and knowing that he waded out through a flood during a hurricane to pray his salat in the Mosque, I had trouble picturing him in Copa.

“He does in Thai,” Majid grinned at me with a playful wink as we went to go, and I smiled as we passed the cropped blonde salsa songstress who watched our depart.

I was practically skipping all the way to the car, where I switched from the Emirati’s ride, to Majnoon’s green 4x4.

Faisal and Khalid swung off with Mystery for the drive to the Hyatt, and we (Majid, Majnoon and I) met Birdman in Intercon. park.

Birdman and I exchanged our polite and semi-reserved “salaams” [a lot of personal things get shared when you are locked up in one house during a hurricane and you end up with a kind of respect and understanding for another person when you get a view into their life that otherwise, you might have trivialized into a superficial impression] and Majid laughed at me as I enthusiastically swung myself right next to Majnoon on the passenger side of the front seat, making certain no one else had a chance to cry shot gun.

Majnoon and I were singing all the way to Hyatt, down the highway, music blasted, and my hand out the window as he drove, making waves, oblivious to the world beyond that night.

Hyatt was always the same, fountains lit up, and bouncers knowing Majnoon, never checking our IDs or asking for cover.

I tucked myself between the guys typically, holding Majnoon’s hand. We took over a blue-lit table near the dance floor from another couple and the guys waved to everyone that they knew.

By now, the itch for dancing had burned through the soles of my shoes, so I kicked them off and tugged on Majnoon’s hand, begging, “Come dance with me!”

He laughed at my impatient bare feet, which I displayed en pointe, extending them gracefully and kicking up the hem of my long skirts for flourish.

“For sure, Hyati. Let’s show them how it’s done.”

If Faisal had wondered what I’d come for, he, and everyone else there knew it by the end of the night, because nothing is like dancing off of Majnoon’s moves, even in an extraordinarily predictable nightspot like Copa.

Majnoon, like me, got drunk on DJs and strung out on skillful sets. When there was a song that we loved we forgot everything but how to move to the rhythm and beat of the set, and when play became art, each other.

As I told Khaleel, I am not a particularly skilled dancer, but I have the benefit of purely loving to dance, and not caring what anybody else thinks of me.

Most men (and some women) only come to a nightclub come to drink or to flirt. Majnoon comes to dance, so how we ended up paired as we were was quite by accident, with Celeste saying it was safe to dance with Majnoon all those months ago at Trader’s before Canada.

Majnoon is a good dancer. I remember watching him and Celeste that first night out in Muscat, and how dance between those two was fun and a show, nothing to do with hormones and heat.

So I had agreed to dance. But I knew that I was not safe with Majnoon from the very first set we ever danced, from how he looked at me and moved around my body, and though I had let go of my body to the music, I had held my personal in, and held it very tightly.

Mystery knew this, as from, and because of Khaleel, it had become nigh legendary with the guys, the reason I had been 'stolen' away. Mystery knew more though.

Majnoon’s hands fit perfectly closed around my waist. My thigh is the size of his upper arm. This always moved me as primevil as that is for a fluffy female brain.

I was easy for him to move about out there on the dance floor. It was easy for the pair of us to look impressive on the dance floor, once we learnt to stop bopping heads, and merge our disparate styles.

I am more the Irish ballerina who likes flamenco and Arabic styles, and he is the hip-hop free styler with an attempt at Cuban salsa flair, but people would often come up to us and compliment how well we looked together on the floor.

Honest, I liked the compliments, because to me, I was dancing the way that I paint, not for sex or for show, but for art.

So I know, covered as I was from head to toe, any evil out there came from the hearts of others’, but still, for a Muslim woman, what I did, was not very modest, and not accepted by our society as an excusable act at all.

Never mind the many Omani men in dishdashas drinking it up (an actually STATED sin), flirting and dancing the night away.

Thus the resultant conversation between Majid, Faisal, Khalid and I.

Majid: “You are a good dancer.”

I had both my elbows on the bar, and Majnoon had gone to the other end of the counter to get me a Red Bull and a bottle of water, which we’d share.

“La!” I laughed, ‘no’ in Arabic, “really I am not. I just like to dance.” I wiped the sweat from my brow with the wool of the beret very delicately, before taking a swipe of the water as Majnoon came to my side and hugged me

Khalid: “You should take Anna to Dubai,” he suggested happily to Majnoon. “She says she’s never been to a nightclub in UAE.”

Faisal and Majid echoed encouragement for this plan in Arabic.

“After Ramadan, maybe,” Majnoon looked to me, knowing how much I hate UAE, and knowing it was unlikely as I wore niqab there as a rule.

Khalid paused to look to me.

“Do you understand what we are saying?”

“Not really,” I laughed. “I understand only a little Arabic, and most of that is Fusha, you know, from Qu’ran. But I know a few Omani words.”

The three brothers regarded me like I had shocked them.

“But I bet you have cooler clubs than this. I bet you don’t have Emirati guys done up in their kandoura to go clubbing,” I told them.

The five of us sniggered at the dishdasha sausage party milling around, ogling the scant female crowd already engaged on the dance floor by braver Omani male souls, all sans dishdasha.

“I don’t get why they can wear their dishdashas in but I can’t wear my shayla and abaya!”

Majnoon hugged me, “But you look so pretty tonight.”

I didn’t feel naked with his arms around me, but if he weren’t with me, I’d feel exposed and unprotected. Mystery and Birdman waved at us from the velvet ropes where they mingled with the bouncers they knew or were cousins with.

“An Emirati girl in the bathroom said I would be the prettiest woman in the club if I left my hat and scarf off.”

“Sometimes I am ashamed to be Emirati,” Majid broke in. “Sometimes we wish we were Omani.”

Majnoon let me go to hug the guys. “You are from Al Ain! That means you are as good as Omani!”
Right after that, proceeding, a man from the same tribe as Majnoon in Sharqiyah came up to me to tell me how good Majnoon’s character is, and if anyone says anything ill of him, they are a liar.

He was very drunk though, so Majnoon told me not to give the reference any serious credence.

After we finished our drinks we all danced together, like the bedu do sometimes in Oman, in an almost line, like a circle, men and women together but nothing wicked between.

An Arabic song played and I jokingly danced an Emirati hair dance which amused Faisal and Majid a great deal, as I had no hair to swing about to make the dance a success.

Majnoon and I danced one last song together and then our party made our exit.

In the parking lot the Dubai brothers tried to convince me to visit their city again for the nightlife but I declined.

“Really I can’t. I know too many people in UAE. I don’t want to be a bad example. I am a bad enough example of a Muslimah as is. And I don't want to run into any of my friends' brother in laws or husbands in the nightclubs there.”

Majid stopped as he unlocked the Dubai plated SUV, my things on his arm, absolutely shocked.
“You’re a Muslim?!”

The fact that it wasn’t obvious made me feel absolutely horrible.

“A bad example of one, but yes.”

Faisal’s eyes were apologetic, and Khalid was quiet.

I took my abaya from Majid’s hands and slipped it on. It dawned on them. It was why I didn’t drink or shake hands with men and why my clothing was loose and covered and why my hair was under wraps.

Majid want to say more but I never gave him the chance.

“Anna!” Majnoon called me.

“Coming!” I yelled with a soft smile over my shoulder. Back to Majid and his brothers, “Anyways, gotta run. It was a pleasure to meet all of you.”

I did my faux curtsey and we exchanged our “yalla masalama, hayakallahs” and I bid Birdman to send my “salams” to his family, and I thanked Mystery for driving me and buying my drink.

“Ma mushkila-no problem,” he grinned, eyes shadowed by a Muscat-beach-life confidance.

I ran off down the parking lot to Majnoon, the silver edged wings of my chiffon abaya trailing in the wind while the Hyatt’s fountains trickled, and Omani guys loaded their tipsy friends into Jeeps and Mercedes. Orange and white painted taxis honked to signal they were free for a ride.

I climbed into the passenger side beside Majnoon, and finally, we were still. He smiled at me.

“So.” He shrugged his shoulders looking at me.

“So.” I smiled back into his warm eyes.

“Ya Majnoonah, what did you think of my friends?”

He started the engine, and reversed to pull out.

“I liked them,” I said when he looked back at me, before we pulled back again. “I liked them more than I generally like Emirati men.”

“Mmmhmmm.” We laughed together and drove.

“I missed you,” I admitted. “I miss you a lot.”

“I know,” Majnoon was quiet. “I wish I wasn’t busy. I miss you too… My friends, they liked you. They said you were a good girl but fun and they think you are a good dancer.”

Thoughtful, I mused, a distance growing between Majnoon and I that I didn’t know how to bridge or to fill.

“They… didn’t know I was a Muslim.”

That was something that should have been obvious. Looking at Majnoon and I, I didn’t know what I knew anymore, because I had changed all the rules to move through their world, a world that was once my life, and who I was, but I wasn’t sure if I fit there anymore. I didn’t know if I wanted anything from that way of life other than Majnoon and my own ability to live as I saw fit.
Why did I want Majnoon?

As he drove us down _____ Street towards my home, I knew I loved Majnoon because he loved me for who I was, and I knew I loved Majnoon and wouldn’t change a single thing about him or his life or ask anything from him, and just wanted to be with him, but I also wanted a real life.

And nightclubs and camping and festivals were just play.

We could say “I love you” and “I miss you” but neither of those phrases had a meaning without a real action behind them.

It would be so easy for him to not miss me anymore. He’d just have to marry me.

When you are in love, really in love, this is an easy thing, even if it is difficult. I know I’d charm his family. Most Arab ladies love me, as Birdman can attest. His job, we could sort that out for sure, but easy, if you really love. Because when you really love someone, seeing them happy, and being with them is the most important thing to you in this life.

Like becoming a Muslim; when one believes in the message of Islam, that there is only One God, it is very easy thing to do, as it is the truth. Living, saying, doing anything different is a lie to one’s self, for a believing Muslim. The difficult part is dealing with your friends, your family, the laws of your country, that are against what it is you believe in to actually practice it.

Maybe that is why I didn’t accept what I already knew then.

That Majnoon didn’t really love me, or know how to really love, even though he thought he did.

And my Islam… It was and would always remain the truth to me, as Truth is a pure form that cannot be altered. So I had forgotten in the difficulties, that my religion was also easy. As easy as knowing it was the truth.

If you put a gun to my head and said, “Say that this is not the truth” of Islam, it would be very easy for me to say to you, “Pull the trigger, inshaAllah my Lord will know me and receive me, saying I believed in only One.” But put on a song and show me my love, make me choose between Majnoon and Islam the way I could choose between Islam and my life, I become confused in the choice that I am sure of.

If truth is more important than life, love that is true is worth the same [we are not accounting for souls, just this world, in the equation].

But if love is only true for one person, not both, does it cease to be the truth then? Or can it be, as my father believes of love and religions, that there is more than one truth?

I watched the shadows and the light pass Majnoon’s face as we drove and I wanted to cradle that face in my hand and take away the difficulties, smooth out the creases he saw in marriage, iron it like his cotton t-shirts, smooth as my love.

Like the truth, real love is easy, but because of that, it is also difficult.

I paused in the car before going out to the green and gold wrought iron gate of my villa. We didn't peck eachother's cheeks like we usually would, but I grasped his hand and held it tightly, and didn't want to let go because if I did, I knew my world would change.

Because it already had.

I looked behind me as I closed the gate, my body reduced to a pillar of salt like Lot's wife in Sodom and Gomorah. And yet, as fractured as I was, my body broken into a thousand primsed shards of different hopes and dreams, shards of conflicting convictions and desries, I continued to exist as he drove away.

He could have stayed.

But he didn't.

Yet still I was fixed.

When love is true, it surpasses the practical, and exists in everything.

The Book, My Book: Last Chapter

Poem from Anna to Khaleel on her wedding night:

How did I not know I thirsted?

If I had known how parched my soul was before you loved me I'd have cursed it!

My lips are cracked like the wadi bed from dry.

The drought of your kisses; should anyone touch as dust they will crumble.

Only the rain can kiss the desolate dust of my body and my soul not die.

Some say true love is just a mirage men stumble towards in the burning, searing sun of discontent.

If love of one is a figment of my imagination, if love is a lie in my mind's eye:

Let my veins shrink to dirt!

If love in its true form is a mirage, still I say of men to seek it!

For all else is surely desert.

The BOOK: Chapter 1 pt. III

see this post:http://howtolivelikeanomaniprincess.blogspot.com/2010/03/book-chapter-1.html

and this post: http://howtolivelikeanomaniprincess.blogspot.com/2010/08/book-chapter-1-pt-ii.html
***before reading part III of Chapter I see above***

"We’re just leaving Mohamed here?” I asked as we got into the 4x4.

“Don’t worry,” Khaleel assured us, “they are just waiting from some paperwork from Bank Muscat. The bank is on a break right now, but in the evening Mohamed will be out.”

I felt bad. A man was sitting in jail right now because he had tried to drive us from Abu Dhabi to Muscat. Even IF he was a man that thought women over the age of 25 were like cartons of milk with expiry dates, he was still sitting there waiting for the right paperwork because of agreeing to help us.

Khaleel had lied to my mother about our distance from Muscat because he intended to drive differently than he had been driving previous. He would now drive like "an Omani."

Because we were insanely late and his shift for work was due to begin at four.

Poor Khalil was fading. He'd been up since six a.m. the day previous, had worked his shift, and then had driven straight to UAE to come get us, and now he was due to work another shift again with no rest because of the delay in the border mix-up, both Mohamed's, and our own exit stamp misadventure. Which, I reminded him, was his fault.

Due to my perverse jitteriness Audrey had taken away my Red Bull rights. I was pouting, she was guarding the blue and red cans like a mother hen.

We delved back into the silence we had immearsed ourselves in pre-dawn hours in Emirates.

Flashback to UAE:

Khalil had arrived, but unlike Mohamed, he had never been to Abu Dhabi before. He was unfamiliar with the roads, being an Omani's 'Omani', so he didn't even know the main street in Abu Dhabi, Hamdan, which was the one we were own.

The closest he managed to find to our apartment building was Al Mariah Mall. Communicating soully by text message and nigh out of credit and afraid to lose him again, I said I would run down to meet him. It was 2 a.m. . I left Audrey with our very helpful Philipino roomates. It was a twenty-minute walk away, but a seven minute sprint.

Weaing niqab [face veil for Muslim women] and abaya I flew in the night, wings of chiffon edges with silver trailing behind me like some ethereal moth [or bat, Khalil would add if he were the author] soaring across the sleepy city streets.

I arrived at Al Mariah and texted him, looking for him. I had only ever seen him in his camel-coloured khaki uniform before, and it had been five years since we'd last seen eachother. And I wasn't sure if he would know me, even if I wasn't wearing niqab.

But he did.

It was my height that gave me away.

He was wearing black and white checked knee-length surf shorts and a red t-shirt, and he had grown into his height so he wasn't skinny at all like I remembered him. I had remembered him with skinny legs. But his face was the same.

We walked towards eachother in dazed, surreal kind of way across the parking lot, haltingly, unsure of the strangeness of the night, as meeting again was something neither of us had really ever expected the last time we'd said goodbye, and 'how are you'.

"Khalil?" I said, missing the correct spot in my throat to pronounce his name from.

"Anastasia," he smiled, using the name my mother calls me by, glad he right about who I was. Honestly, there were no other women out at this time of night dressed in niqabs and abayas.

We stood there dumbly, me in niqab, the elastic digging into my nose, and him looking more North American than me. Unlike most people, even though he knew I was Muslim right away from my hesitancy to make eye contact and no offer to shake hands, he didn't ask me of how that had come to be.

"Do you know how long it's been?" He asked.

"Five years," I mumbled. We were looking in eachothers' eye, remembering our childhoods.
"I'm Muslim," I broke the spell.

He looked around, and motioned towards the white 4x4 he'd borrowed to come and get us in. "You'll have to show me where you're friend is at," he said. "I don't know where to go."

I got in on the passenger side beside him, only because I needed to give him directions by pointing on where to turn.

We pulled up at the apartment building, and I got out to support Audrey to the vehicle, her being propped up by one of the Philipino girls until I took lead, and the Philipino guys kindly loaded our baggage into the fold of the 4x4. We handed our groceries off to them, and thanked them for their unending kindness, and waved goodbye as we pulled away from the city that had nearly swallowed us in its seedy underworld. I had nearly drowned in the marina bay, and Audrey had nearly died of weeks of illness.

We were not sad to go.

Khalil was a bit shy and nervous around both Audrey and I. The awkwardness between Khalil had been a five years thing so that was nothing new, and he didn't like talking English in front of people he didn't feel wholly comfortable with. He'd told me before, so that I'd known.

We drove in silence but with English music playing on the radio.

"Soooooo....." I started. "My mother didn't tell you we were Muslim did she?" I inched off my niqab. Khalil had seen me a a bikini before so my face really wasn't much of a shocker to him. I didn't do it for him, but I did it because I knew I would be seeing my mother for the first time since I had become a Muslim and I didn't want niqab [the face veil] to be the issue. Most of the Omanis she associated with had told her niqab was a tribal thing and not part of our religion at all. If I wore it from Abu Dhabi to Oman, I knew there would have been no taking it off in Muscat. I didn't want her to see my conversion as something rebellious to be different and to seem "exotic" like my father had accused me of.

Khalil shook his head from the front seat and looked back at me from the mirror above the dash. "She gave me your picture." I knew this already. Five years ago, despite how much it had embarassed me, she had distributed my photographs from my vacation in Oman to all the security guys who had worked for Petroleum Development Oman Co. [i.e PDO]. Seeing that this didn't seem to shock me, he clarified. "She gave me pictures of you at your Christmas, last year."

I'd been Muslim and covering my hair for five years now. Christmas last year was an all family event. Most Muslim women don't cover their hair in front of their male family members. Christmas photos were sans headscarf.

Our eyes met in the dashboard and I looked away in embarrassment, knowing then something else.

"My mother didn't tell you I was married, did she?"

Khaleel kept driving as if I hadn't said anything, and then replied softly in the negative. "He's the Saudi?"

"Yes," I said.

Khaleel kept his eyes on the road and didn't say anymore.

We drove in more silence.

'Awkward,' Audrey mouthed to me in the dark somewhere in wadi before Al Ain.

Somewhere in the silence, and in the dark, the radio was subtly changed to Qu'ran. Audrey and I noted the switch.

'Do you think he still has feelings for me?' I mouthed to Audrey in the grey, stuffy air.

She gave me, a 'like duh' face.

We faced to each or own individual sides, Khaleel forward, Audrey to the left, myself to the right, and stared out the window at the stars and the sky.

"What is the Arabic word for stars?" Audrey asked Khaleel in an attempt to make conversation.

He didn't answer. He was listening to Qu'ran.

I knew somehow my voice would have an effect.

"Ya Khaleel! Audrey wants to ask you something."

He reached to turn the voume dial down, and looked at me.

"What?"

"What is the Arabic word for 'stars'?" I repeated Audrey's question.

"Najma." Khaleel went back to driving.

More silence. Quiter Qu'ran, but more silence.

We drove through Al Ain and back into the darkness of the desert. Audrey probably wished it were light out, because she'd never seen sand like that from Al Ain to Al Bahrimi in Oman before. Bored, she buzzed down her window, and stuck her hand out into the warm night air. She started making waves with her fingers, and eventually Khaleel cracked a smile at her childlike enthusasiam for the air currents ability to lift her hand as her fingers curled. The ice was broken. The awkwardness had thawed to only 'mildly uncomfortable'.

I was glad. At heart, Audrey is a sweet goof, with a mind that recalls 'Grey's Anatomy' [book, not program], and a spirit for loyalty and fun unbeknownst to the majority of human beings that populate this planet, myself included.

Back to the drive from border jail house to Muscat, Audrey was plumetting into coma-tose again in the midday sun, as in Abu Dhabi the night pervious, as if the drugs in her system were stored in her body fat, and were being burned off anew to effect her again.

For some reason, pervsersely I think, Khaleel and I were both hoping she would fall asleep, so that we could talk freely, and that the awkwardness would be a different kind than his lack of confidence in grasping the English language.

We drove in silence while Audrey drifted in and out of whatever it was that was in her system.

Dust of the earth sticks to the heart, making it thick. It colours a man's dreams, the planes of the places he has been. Mouldable and weak as clay, wet and quick and cold as oil, or rough and hard and hot as diamonds, desolation decides him, as sure as the luxuries of other places on this earth spoil him, and coddle him, and make him feel bigger than he is.

The dust of Oman was red on the road from Al Bahrimi. It stuck to the sides of the white SUV as Khaleel drove, colouring the paint so that it never had another colour. It followed us, on thehorizon, and in a billowing cloud behind, making the sky seem more blue in its suspense.

Audrey finally nodded off. Khaleel was himself exhausted.

I was still high as a kite in that blue sky, sailing on the current of sureal-ness perpetuated by seeing a familiar landscape, the red mountains I never thought I'd witness again, and last time, never had hoped to.

In the backseat, my hand snaked for Audrey's thigh, where our Red Bull stash was parentally hedged in security.

Successfully, I wriggled two cans free from Audrey's warmth, and handed one up to Khaleel, who took it, and cracked it: without sound- or vigour. We drank to our mutual silence.

One of us stared out the window at the blunted diamond-edged mountains and tacky, tourist-trapped out Roundabouts with cement horse statues and plastic looking coffee pots/collasal insence burners, and the other kept both eyes fixed on the reminscent road curving ahead.

Omani driver that he was, we did so interchangibly. Every now and then Khaleel had the bad habit of swaying centerline while going nigh 160 miles per hour.

From the backseat now, there was not much that I could do about the centerline driving bit but grit my teeth and hold the seat edge. And as there wasn't that much traffic on the roads until we got into Seeb near the Airport, there was even less I could say about it.

Every now and then Khaleel met my eyes in the rear veiw mirror, and then glanced back at Audrey.

She didn't move, and was out cold.

After a while, Khaleel started, in his normal voice, "So how long will you stay in Oman?"

He is an outgoing person, full of jokes, not really the shy quiet one, at least not in Arabic. And had never been with me in English.

"We're supposed to stay six months."

"And your husband is going to be in your city?"

"Yes, he can't travel until he gets citizenship."

Silence.

"Why don't you move here?" Khaleel suggested suddenly. "Saudi is close. Your husband can visit you once a month."

Silence.

"Um..." I kind of laughed, not knowing where he was going with that. "....That wouldn't work for us. I kinda would like to see my husband more than once a month."

Silence.

Khaleel gave me a weird look over the steering wheel.

...Because I was staying in Oman for six months without seeing my husband.

We left that where it was.

"He could work here. You could get a job. I could be friends with him and you could be friends with my wife." His voice sounded hopeful in too-cheery way.

Awkward.

My turn to give him a strange a look.

"My mother said you had a girlfriend..."

He gave me another weird kind of look, and then kind of choked, and laughed, the way someone sad does.

"No..." he drove. "I don't have a girlfriend."

So either my mother had lied, or Khaleel was lying. I was betting on my mother.

Silence. We drove some more. 'Driving is good' I remember thinking.

He continued to regard me in the rearview mirror. After a while he said, "You told me you didn't have a boyfriend."

I paused. "I... didn't." Sure of myself I continued. "And my mother never told you I was married did she?" I looked away. Then I looked back to him as he drove, sipping on his Red Bull. "I never had a boyfriend. But when I became Muslim, shortly after, I got married. Faisal was never my boyfriend, but I knew 'about' him when we were in school together."

Khalil wouldn't look to me. "You never wrote me back." His hands squeezed the steering wheel.

"Huh?" I was confused. "When did you write me? An email?" I'd always had his email address, it was just, we'd never used it.

"I wrote you four letters," he said. "You never wrote me back." Still not looking at me.

I'd never got them. "I never got them."

Silence.

"I gave them to your mother."

Well, that was it then, his fault.

As before, when he'd told her that he liked me.

I started to ask what he had written in the letters, but...

"Too bad I am sleeping," Audrey gurgled half-coherently, sitting up suddenly, shaking Khaleel and I, and making us aware of our body language, that we were straining towards eachother from the partition of front & back seat. "If I wasn't sleeping I wouldn't have missed that lady with the hat!" Audrey's head rolled back again and she passed out cold.

Khaleel and I looked out the window to regard what she had been babbling about and saw an Omani woman walking on the side of the road carrying a basket piled high with firwood on her head. 'The lady with the hat'.

The two of us met eacother's eyes in mirror and burst out laughing.

[to be continued]

The BOOK: Chapter 1 pt II

CHAPTER I CONTINUATION from THE BORDER JAIL

[for those interested, this part http://howtolivelikeanomaniprincess.blogspot.com/2010/03/book-chapter-1.html came before the following:]

Part before missing but available via linkage above.......

Nothing to do with his arrest and subsequent overnight jail stay was elaborated on. So we politely chatted with Mohamed about life, Oman, and ourselves.

And my mother phoned Mohamed then, asking: Where the hell are you and where are my girls?!

Mohamed handed the phone off to me. As high as I was on caffeine I attempted to describe to my mother that we had entered the country illegally accidently and had to drive over the UAE border twice, and that we were now trying to bail Mohamed out of jail. I guess what I said didn’t make sense, because she asked to speak to someone who didn’t sound like they were high on drugs.

I gave the phone to Audrey, who just shook her head wordlessly and handed the phone out in the direction of the ROP Captain and Khaleel.

Khaleel took it and glared at us.

He and my mother had a long conversation where he promised to drive safely and not over a certain speed, and that he’d get us home by 3 o’clock. He also said we were a lot closer to Muscat than we were. He didn’t go into us entering the country without exit stamps from UAE or that Mohamed was sitting in a jail while we made small talk. Khaleel was always one for the omission of insignificant details that could get him into trouble.
Key points of a man’s character to remember are such.

They hung up, with my mother warning him she was a bear protecting her cubs. She had always liked Khaleel though.

Mohamed chatted with us and somehow mentioned that women expire at age twenty-five, i.e are no good for marriage then, because they get too fat. I just scoffed. Audrey was righteously offended, nearing the “doomed age” herself. Since I was already married, it didn’t sting because I would never be labeled an old maid. So Mohamed tried to dig himself out of the hole he was shoveling, exclaiming he meant only Arab women.

“So much better!” Audrey had exclaimed, and then lectured him on women getting fat because they had babies and weren’t allowed to walk anywhere by themselves.

Somewhere along the line on the discussion involving marriage, and our subsequent ages, and marrying in Canada and the average age for that, I made an obvious mention of my husband, Faisal, and how he’d taken care of me when I’d first converted to Islam. At the mention of my marriage, Mohamed turned to Khalil, and gave him a ‘You are an IDIOT’ look that was apparent to us all.

Mohamed almost put his head in his hands and started laughing but instead kicked his knee out and sat back, shaking his head at Khaleel with a smirk, like ‘I spent the night in jail so that you could pick up a married chick’ but it all seemed surpassingly ironic to him, and the ROP had by then brought us some hot dogs for our lunch, and with food Khaleel and I escaped from having delve any further into the misconceptions fostered by my mother.

Realizing it was lunchtime already, Khaleel pulled out his mobile, checked the time, and freaked. But he waited until we finished eating, and then he said something to Mohamed in Arabic, shook hands with the social Captain, and we got up to leave, the two cousins bidding each other adieu with a hug.

“We’re just leaving Mohamed here?” I asked as we got into the 4x4.

“Don’t worry,” Khaleel assured us, “they are just waiting from some paperwork from Bank Muscat. The bank is on a break right now, but in the evening Mohamed will be out.”

I felt bad for Mohamed. We drove away and left him in the border jail because Khalil was already late for work and my mother was freaking.

[to be continued]

The Book, My Book: Chapter Three

[part missing]

'I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you,' the words rang through my head, like a needle through my heart, sealing it shut with an overwhelming flow of blood.

I saw flashes of light, purple, blue, black. I put the phone down gently, and wavered oddly in that hotel room in Mutrah.

I was hyperventilating, choking and sobbing. Audrey later recalls I was trying to sip water but my hands were shaking so bad it was spilling all down the front of me. She went downstairs to let me absorb the shock.

How could he?! I wanted to pick up the phone and yell back into the reciever "it is my life too! Don't try and protect me! I am not a child! This isn't what I want?!!!!!" But I couldn't. Mohamed couldn't tell me anything more. That is all that they let my husba---

I had no husband! I was all alone, I'd lost my family, my friends...

"Allah don't take him too!" I begged, "don't take him to!" I collapsed on top of the bed. I wanted to die. I rolled and writhed and wanted to tear my heart out from my chest as it beat.

"Don't take away my choice!" I swore angrily at Faisal. "Let me wait! Let me hope! There is no perfect Ummah either, no Islamic country? Should I just STOP hoping? Should I stop caring?! Should I stop believing because of that?! Don't take away my choice!

Oh Allah! Ya Rub, don't take away my choice!" Somehow I was switching between speaking to my ex-Saudi husband and the Creator of mankind. "Ya Rubb [my Lord]! It hurts, it hurts so bad. Please take me, please take me now, before I commit a sin. I can't, I can't-"

I was rolling around, in my abaya with its sleeves cut up, hair wild and eyes wide and sore. I buried my head in my knees and did not know for a long time that there was a hand upon my back, and a hand cupping the water bottle to my mouth.

"It is not fair!" I choked, "not fair!"

I looked up hoping to see Allah or the Angel of Death beside me, comforting me, but instead I saw Khaleel, but was the child instead of the woman, that knew him all those years ago.

I buried my head in his hand, the little girl who'd been bitten by a scorpian. This time the scorpian was my mother, but...

He was there, Khaleel, until my madness subsided. Audrey was downstairs with Masoud and they were driving around the Corniche and Old Muscat, Masoud trying to comfort Audrey. Our world's were so bleak.

We had lost our homes so many times over that we were losing ourselves.

"You are my home," I had told Faisal, the first time I had realized I truly loved him.

"I'm not your home. I am a dark dirty place," his voice echoed back at me accusingly from the jail cell, haunted. "And it's all your fault. Because of you I'm here. You're a demon."

He'd once called me his angel. "I love him!" I loved Faisal. The love would rip me apart.

I trembled in Khaleel's arms, and he brought my head under his chin. I clung on for dear life.

I had caused Faisal to lose everything. His country, his family, and now his freedom. I was a demon. I just wanted to save someone. I couldn't save my mother, I couldn't save Sheikha, I couldn't save Audrey, and I couldn't save Faisal. I couldn't even save myself.

Khaleel combed his hands through my hair and somehow he did not hurt me, even though I have an amazingly sensitive scalp. I guess one could have tortured me that night though, and I'd have welcomed it, anything to distract me from the pain of my withering heart.

I swear the heart can break. The blood comes in gulps and gasps between laboured breathing, as if seized in twisting itself into knots while it pulls itself in different directions to break free of the weak body that houses it, the powerless body, the helpless soul...

"It's not your fault," Khaleel was saying as I stared up at him in wonder, wanting to be a baby again, wanting to be reborn, or to have never have been born, or to die. "You have to get up. We'll get something to eat." He patted my head and stood.

Reality flooded back and I realized I was not wearing my head scarf. I dove under the covers of the bed and used the sheets as a garment. I glared up at him out from the stiff sheet accusitorily.

"How did you get in here?!" I demanded, but the force of my own voice made me fall back onto the bed weakly.

Khaleel wanted to go help me but restrained himself.

"We wanted to go get groceries. Audrey gave me the key to come get you. I heard you crying through the door..."

And he'd come in. Because Khaleel couldn't take me crying.

"Faisal... He's in jail... They threw him in [the Saudis]... And he divorced me... He doesn't want me to wait and... says it's my fault, and..."

Khaleel's eyes flashed with anger, he pulled me up, reached for an abaya of mine slung over a chair, threw it over my shoulders and tucked my arms into it. I played helpless rag doll in my devastation, words echoeing in my head, me blaming myself for what happened to Faisal, and hating him too for blaming me too, because I....

"We're going for a drive. And to forget. And you'll eat." His hands were on both my shoulders and my knees gave out but he held me up. Khaleel held me, and I could tell that he wanted to kiss me, as I was detached and floating away from myself looking down on him, and he was living in a different reality than the one we both occupied. We both were. Khaleel shook us both back. "We don't have enough time for that," he said, as much to me as to himself.

He went outside the hotel room and waited at the door while I put on my scarf and with a trembling hand applied my lipstick evenly. My death mask. My war paint.

Khaleel waited at the door for me and we went down the hallway and the elevator together. The men at the front desk regarded us 'man and woman' with suspicion, but in this one instance, Khaleel figured our reputations didn't matter. There were worse things in the world tonight, and we were going to outrun them.

Masoud and Audrey met us, and Masoud got out from the driver's seat to let Khaleel in. Audrey was already buckled in, in the back. I shook as I climbed in, lifting the folds of my abaya as if I were a parcel. Masoud looked magnanimously piteously back at me, and I reached for the seatbelt, ashamed.

Khaleel started to pull out, but noting my attempt to put the seatbelt on while struggling with the folds of the butterfly winged chiffon of my Dubai designer abaya, he stopped suddenly, and Audrey and I, our bodies lurched forward and our heads slammed into the boys' seats.

"No seatbelts tonight," he warned me. He paused one moment to turn up the MP3 player, music bled our ears, pounding worse than my heartbeat, so that I forgot I had a heartbeat. Audrey and I glanced over at eachother, until I slowly, bravely, met Khaleel's reckless gaze. We could only make out the gleam of eachother's eyes in the dappled streetlamps of the Corniche, but we met eachother with the tips of our dead smiles invertered to the corners of our eyes, so that no one could read our gazes but us. We recognized the others' likeness.

He did not pull forward until I let the belt slip back into its nest.

With a whiz, and then a zip, it 'click'ed.

And then we were gone out into the night.

The Book: Chapter 9;

[part missing]

I couldn't believe it.

Audrey and Celeste sat at the foot of my bed while I played my music so loud I couldn't hear either of them, but I am sure they were trying to comfort me somehow.

Celeste, who had a migraine, cringed as she inched the volume on her CD player down.

I was sprawled on my camping mat-come-bed with pictures of him all around me, wearing one of Celeste's floral dresses and my pearl necklace, makeup done to perfection and tissues with mascara edging on them rolled into balls pushed aside neatly by Audrey, who sat patting my foot awkwardly, strange one that she was that rejected physical human contact in almost every other situation.

"He told you he couldn't marry you so you have only yourself to blame for hoping, though I'll agree he's a jerk," Celeste tried to provoke me. She knew baiting was the keenest, wisest, tried-tested-and-true way to get me out of bed to eat something. If I was angry then I'd be hungry. Depressed as I was, I hadn't eaten for almost a week.

I just stared at her blankly. How had I become so pathetic?

"If he loved you," Celeste continued, getting up, "he'd marry you."

She left.

"Ignore her," Audrey patted me again. I glared at her. "She's just like that--- and we all know why. But you knew there was no hope. And still you kept hoping. You knew the family would force him to marry someday.

Some people fit into boxes, and you are not one of them. Some people can go in and out of the box, but you, you can't fit in the box, not in any box. And Khaleel? He can't get out of the box. You two kids were doomed from the start. And he hates your lipstick. And he's a jerk."

I wanted to agree. But I knew a different Khaleel than they did.

"He saved me Audrey. When no one else is there, he always is."

She nodded. "He'll always save you. But he can't marry you. And he can't save you from yourself. Celeste is right about that."

That was the truth of it really, the bottom line. But try telling that to a serriously depressed person now, why don't you?

"But I love him!" I whined. "He's a coward, a cheater, a liar..." I pat her shoulder back pointedly and made the following allowance, "...but only to you.

And an idiot, but I love him."

She sat back. "He was your knight in shining armor. That's why you say that. All girls have a rescue fantasy, even one as bullshit tough as you."

I laughed.

"Yeah, true. But Khaleel was never exactly a Knight-in-shining-armor kind of guy."

Audrey giggled with me. "More like holes-in-his-shorts and rubber flip-flops?"

I looked pained for a second, and she knew she'd made a mistake. "Khaleel looked damn sexy in those shorts."

She patted me on my foot again. "Only you would think so." As an afterhtought. "He has a nice neck though. Too bad I wanna smack him in the back of the head until that neck snaps."

Khaleel had wronged Audrey more than he'd ever wronged me.

"He's a coward and an idiot," I allowed. "He didn't deserve me. But... he was the first one who said that..." I drifted back into melancholy.

About the fact that he was a coward and an idiot, Audrey philisophized, pulling my floral dress back over my thighs as I twisted around at the mat to pick up one of my drawings Khaleel had given back to me: "Sometimes heroes really are." She nooded her head at me, as I stood, the both of us began to clean up the room while rocking out to the CD player's bad Mariah Carey CD.

"Sometimes your knight in shining armor is an Omani guy with a nice neck, sexy torn shorts, and a vivid fear of his family, who happens to act like an idiot at times," I admitted, realizing the Khaleel that I loved so avidly, never really existed, at least not to anybody but me. He'd still saved me. Nothing he'd done since could take away that fact.

Audrey patted me again."Yes, yes he is. Sometimes," she began, "...your knight in shining armor is really just a retard wrapped in tin foil."

We laughed. It was the first time we had laughed in a really, really long time. I was sad she was going.

The BOOK: Chapter 5, The Lipstick Incident

[Part missing]

Driving towards Qurayat, Audrey was up in the front pasenger seat with Masoud while he drove. And Khaleel and Majnoon were in the backseat with me, Khaleel trying to sleep and Majnoon, Celeste and I gabbing about Mandhi and how we three love to eat it, and our differing techniques for consumption.

But I was seated beside Khaleel, not Celeste.

I don't know how the shift had happened, but it had. We had split off into couples. Not real couples mind you, but from that one day I had taken off drifing with Khaleel as a joke, the two of us racing Masoud in a manner to horrify Audrey through the quiet streets of Muscat a few hours before Fajr, I had become rider to his roller.

He had my pillow tucked under his head, and as per usual whenever Celeste, Majnoon and I launched into endless chat, he'd get grumpy and slide off into sleep (or glaring) because his English wasn't quite as rapid-fire as ours. And I had started to compensate for this. It is my natural urge as the former social-butterfly/perenial party hostess to make sure everyone is engaged and involved and having a goodtime.

It was a long drive and somewhere along the line there was one of those military-cum-ROP roadblocks. You know, the ones where the truck with the mounted machine gun and two guys in camo sit in the sun roasting while an Omani man takes your ids and then passes you onward (unless you have tinted windows)? Anyways. the line up from the random highway checkpoint was so long that I had to replace my lipstick (on my lips) around four times. Between eating pretzels and gulping Al Rawabi mango and Vimto, it comes off. Reaching for my handbag the fourth time, tucked as it was between Khaleel and I's rather compacted-together bodies, he peeled open one brown eye and shook his head as if to warn, 'don't you dare do that again.'

Ha! I scoffed, holding up the lipstick and the open handbag, using the mirror on the inner fold of the open handbag to dramatically begin to line my lips with delicious sandblasted coral coloured gushy lipstick paste.

Khaleel's hand shot out lightning-quick and snatched the handbag right out of my hands! He took it, and held it over his head, touching the roof of the vehicle.

I knit my brows and unbuckled my seatbelt.

"You look pretty without makeup," Khaleel purred, while I arched my back, ready for catfight.

I pounced on him, clambering over Majnoon and Celeste in the process and kicking Audrey in the front seat in the head to get my make-up.

As Masoud drove Khaleel unrolled the window and started tossing things out as we went, concealer, eyeshadows, and a few of Audrey's Mother's expensive makeup brushes. I tried to pull his arm out from the window but it was made of steel. I pounded his stupid chest with two small helpless girly fists and then jumped across Majnoon and Celeste to the other side of the vehicle where Khaleel couldn't catch me.

There, mirror-less, I reapplied my lipstick with dramatic flourish.

To Khaleel: "The make up you just through out the window belongs to Audrey not me, soooooooooooo....." I tucked the lipstick safely into the pocket of my jeans.

Khaleel snaked across the floor with his arm and caught my ankle in an iron-grip, pulling me so hard and so quick across the back of the 4x4 that I got carpet burn, and he retrieved the lipstick with little effort.

It flew out the window and disapeared into the sandy-mountain-rocky lanscape behind us.

My mouth was open as wide as the window. So was everyone else's in the vehicle. Except maybe Masoud's, since he doesn't support the wearing of makeup by women anyway.

I think everyone was just more or less shocked by the fact the Khaleel and I had touched eachother and wrestled like children. Except maybe Majnoon, who knew Khaleel's way of joking better than I did. But Majnoon was upset that Khaleeli had thrown my belongings out the window and gave his friend a look of "what the hell?!"

Khaleel settled back into MY pillow, sniggling his shoulders into it, while my mouth still hung open.

"What?" he softly barked at Majnoon, clsoing his eyes smugly. "She looks beautiful without makeup."

Majnoon just shook his head.

"I have to pee," announced Audrey, rubbing her head because I had kicked her in the head, but still so shocked by the last episode expressed between Khaleel and I that she had quite forgotten she had been kicked in the head short moments ago.

"There's a bathroom," Masoud remarked pulling over our circus.

Celeste was smirking at Khaleel and Majnoon and Audrey got out of the car. Masoud was jamming out to 'Madonna' and I turned to Khaleel.

"I can't believe you just did that!"

He opened one eye, looked at me, amused, and closed it again.

I really didn't know what to do.

Majnoon reemerged to the car with Audrey. They settled back in and we drove in rather uneventful quiet until we reached our destination.

Getting out, after camp was set, Majnoon came to me with a small package. He'd got it when we were stopped at the last gas station/convenience store to buy "laham" ie coal and for Audrey to use the bathroom. I opened it slowly and found inside the package the brightest, most frightfully red lipstick I have TO THIS DAY ever comprehended. Majnoon did so in full vantage of Khaleel, who regarded the gesture aptly.

Khaleel opened his mouth to say something but Celeste interjected, "I don't see a ring on her finger."

Khaleel closed his mouth, and Majnoon, before going over back to joking with Khaleel, smiled at me.

"Wear it until he gives you your wedding, hmmm Majnoonah? Then he can throw out all your makeup as he likes to, ha!"

And with that Majnoon went back to slicing pieces of squid while wearing latex gloves with Khaleel, watching a movie on Masoud's laptop, and we girls carried camping chairs to the cliff edge, set out the spread for our barbecue, and practiced the throwing of fishing lines tied to styrofoam. Celeste was a master, Audrey a natural, and I snagged my abaya on two attempts.

I went to the car to pout and didn't know why I was upset.

Khaleel came to see what was up and everybody else was busy so they didn't notice. He had removed the latex glove stained with squid ink.

He leaned against the car while my feet were dangling out and the rest of me was pouting within.

"Why are you not cooking with Audrey and Cela?" he asked me.

I didn't answer for a long time. Then I started... "You don't.... like me.... to wear makeup????"

Khaleel shook his head and smiled softly, this look people don't see because it is only between us, a side of him that he hides from the world most of the time, behind jokes, and being a jerk.

"No," he scratched his stubble. "You look good with no make up."

"But you like makeup?!" I defended. He did. He had pointed to the wedding makeup advert. in his football rag only a few days ago saying such.

"I do," he said, "But not all the time."

"Not on me... in public?" I swallow, leaning slightly out of the vehicle to inquire.

Khaleel throws his hands up in the air. "Do what you want!" and stalks away.

I blink, and get out of the car.

[more to come].


didn't realize then