Blink

They call it the cradle of islam. a land covered by a white sand that hides vast reserves of black oil. A country where wealth is measured by the number of palaces a man owns. A kingdom ruled without a constitution, by a king and a thousand princes who hold all the positions of power. A society that guards dark secrets covered up with rubies and diamonds and black veils. A world stuck in time like a fairy tale gone awry.The country is Saudi Arabia and it is heaven and it is hell, depending on the name of your father. Depending on your loyalty to the religion. But mostly depending on whether you were born male or female. Miriam was born the latter, the daughter of a prince named Salman bin Fahd, and today the sounds of hell floated through the palace, mocking the thousand or so female guests who'd gathered for her friend Sita's wedding. Miriam swept the purple velvet drape to one side and gazed through the window to the courtyard. The marble palace had been completed just last year and was easily the grandest of her father's residences. She hadn't visited all of them, but she didn't need to. Prince Salman bin Fahd had four wives, and he'd built each of them three palaces, two in Riyadh, and one in Jiddah. All four wives had identical dwellings in each location, as was the common practice, although to say his wives had the palaces was misleading. Father had the palaces, and he had wives to put in each. This, Salman's thirteenth palace, he'd built solely for special events such as today's, the wedding of his friend Hatam. Outside, the sun glinted off a spewing fountain in the center of a large pond. Bright red petals from two hundred dozen roses flown in from Holland blanketed the water. Evidently the groom, Hatam bin Hazat, had heard that his young new bride liked red roses. Upon seeing the extravagant display two days earlier, Sita vowed never to look on another red rose in her life. Dozens of Filipino servants crossed the lawn, carrying silver trays stacked high with every imaginable kind of food prepared by eighteen chefs brought in from Egypt. Roast almond duck, curried beef rolled in lamb flanks, liver-stuffed lobster-Miriam had never seen such an extravagant display of food. And this for the women only. As at all Saudi weddings, the men would never actually see the women. Custom required two separate ceremonies for the simple reason that women attended weddings unveiled. The true path of Islam forbade a man from seeing the face of a woman unless she was a family member or tied very closely to his family. Sounds of music and drums and gaiety drifted through the window, but really they were the sounds of death. Miriam once told her mother that a Saudi woman dies three times during her span on earth. She dies on the day of her first menses, when she is forced to don the black veil and slip into obscurity; she dies on the day of her wedding, when she is given as a possession to a stranger; and, most mercifully, she dies when she finally gives up her ghost. The statement had earned her a slap. Best be a good woman and accept your fate. The women in Miriam's life had always said that. The whole world seemed to say that. Miriam had studied in America for three months one summer, and she found that even the Americans said that, not about themselves, of course, but about foreign women. Best be a good woman and accept your fate. Not in so many words, of course, but those few who took the time to hear her stories just attributed the horrors to cultural differences. What Saudis called social pressure, Americans called political correctness, and questioning another's cultural practices was clearly not politically correct. Perhaps if the Americans knew Saudi history better, they would rise up in outrage and wave that flag of human rights they took up now and then. But after her brief exposure to the Americans, she doubted they wanted to hear the truth. MiriaDekker, Ted is the author of 'Blink' with ISBN 9780849943713 and ISBN 084994371X.