BAHRAINI WOMEN

Dearest Friends,

One thing I was beginning to realize was that I am not adverse to prying.  In fact, I am quite nosy!  I wanted to know how couples met, where people grew up and went to school, what made them tick, and how they had become who they were today.  Correction: I didn't just want to know.  I needed to know!  I guess I'd always been that way to a certain extent, but being in a place where their backgrounds were so very different from my own had kicked it up a few notches, and sent my curiosity to a whole new level.

The Guest Palace

The three women who piqued my curiosity most were the women I worked with.  First there was M., my boss, and owner of both the shop and salon.  As I mentioned before, she was from a branch of the wealthy ruling family, was married to a second or third cousin and had a couple of kids, however the husband was never around.  One of my friends had been a stewardess before she married and went to work for B&R.  When she was still flying, she got invited to some of the sheikh's parties, and had met the mysterious husband.  She was fairly certain he was gay, and spent most of his time in America, which I could fully understand.  What I couldn't understand was why my boss, who was a strong, smart, college-educated woman who had travelled the world, was willing to settle for that arrangement.

Her business partner S. managed the salon for her, and may have been a cousin as well.  I can't remember for certain.  She too was married to a man who lived elsewhere, and had a baby boy whom she rarely saw.  That I really couldn't understand.  It turns out she had been very unhappy in her marriage right from the beginning, and the only way she could get out was to leave her son to be raised by her husband and his mother.  "But, why?"  "You don't understand.  That's just the way it works here."

Then there was young R., M's little sister.  Like M., she had been sent to the University of Beirut, but midway through her studies the civil war broke out, and they were forced to shut the school down.  The students were then divided up and sent to various universities around the world.  Where did R. end up?  The University of Texas, right here in Austin.  My own alma mater!  Not only that, she happened to be living in an apartment down on Riverside -- party central!  It was pretty hard to keep a straight face sometimes, when M. would tell me that R. wouldn't be home over this or that break, because she had some exams she had to take, or a project she had to work on.  Yeah right!

When they did manage to drag her home, she'd come help out in the shop, and I always enjoyed visiting with her.  I couldn't imagine how difficult it must have been for her, to swing back and forth between that world and this one, where the men and women in her family could not be in the swimming pool at the same time, at their own house!  And where she could try on the cute little tennis outfits that her sister sold there in her shop, but she could not wear them, even on their own private tennis courts.  Instead she had to wear one that covered her knees.  I didn't think there was any way that she would ever come back to Bahrain full-time, after having been given that taste of freedom, but, eventually, she did.

I guess it's true.  Being a princess isn't quite what it's cracked up to be, is it?