I Am Pilgrim(38)

The boy – saying only that the worshippers were highly educated – told his mother nothing of the lectures he attended most nights at the mosque. It was men’s business, the imam said, and a man could speak freely only if he knew it would not be repeated.

And while the boy took those first steps into violent politics with what turned out to be a cell of the Muslim Brotherhood, the rest of the fleet was sailing in the opposite direction. Unlike most people in Bahrain, the family didn’t have a TV, but the girls’ exposure to pop culture increased every day – at school, in malls, on billboards – and as with every other country in the region, popular culture didn’t mean Arabic.

The growing Americanization of his sisters caused escalating arguments between the boy and his mother until one night she spoke to him hard and straight. She told him Bahrain was their only future and she wanted the girls to fit in, to find the love of friends – she wanted that for all her kids – and if it meant rejecting everything about the way they had lived in Saudi then she would not cry one tear for something that had brought them so much misery.

She said loneliness was a razor that cut a heart to shreds, that a child had a right to dream and that if the girls didn’t strive to be happy now they never would. She told it to him with insight and honesty, and why shouldn’t she? She might as well have been talking about herself. He had never heard his mother so on fire and he realized that while to the outside world she was still a Muslim, at the heart of her – feeling abandoned by God – she really worshipped only life and her children now. Deeply troubled, he reminded her that Allah was watching them and made his way to bed.

After he fell asleep, his mother went to the girls’ room, woke them quietly and put her arms around their shoulders. She told them she knew they were growing towards a different light but they could no longer offend their brother in his own house. The music had to stop and, when they left the house for school, they would wear the veil.

The girls were like their mother, in looks and temperament, and they both started objecting. She silenced them and told them it was because their brother loved them and he was only trying to discharge the huge responsibility he felt towards their father. She looked at their faces, pleading with her to change her mind, and she almost smiled – she was about to share a secret with her girls, and she had never done that with anyone except her own mother.

‘I need your help,’ she said. ‘There’s something I have to raise with him that’s very important – he’ll never agree if he thinks you are being corrupted.’

The two girls forgot their protests, wondering what on earth their mother was planning to broach.

‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said. ‘It’s not just the house, your grandfather isn’t young – what happens if he dies and the money stops?’ She let the grim ramifications sink in before she told them: ‘I have applied for a job.’

Of all the lessons the girls would learn as young Muslim women, the one their mother demonstrated that night was the most important: to take command, to realize that the only stairway to heaven is the one you build yourself on earth. They stared at her in wonder. A job?!

She told them she’d heard about the opening from one of the mothers at their school and had phoned the company weeks ago. She had been on the point of giving up, but a letter had arrived that day asking her to come for an interview. She explained she had said nothing to their brother in case she wasn’t hired – let’s be honest, she said, it was almost certain she wouldn’t get it, not on her first try – as there was no point in having an argument without anything to gain. Beyond those simple facts she would tell them nothing, insisting that it was late and they get to sleep.

By morning the girls had thrown their support behind their mother in the only way they knew how – the posters were down, the stacks of magazines were stuffed in garbage bags and all their music and make-up was hidden away.

On the day of the interview, with the kids at school, their mother gathered what little savings she had and, following a carefully thought-out plan, went to a small boutique in one of the best malls and bought a good knock-off of a Louis Vuitton handbag and a pair of Gucci sunglasses.

In the public washroom she swapped out her handbag, dropped the old one in the trash and removed her veil. She was determined to give herself every advantage, including the one commented on by her son a few months earlier. Overcoming a lifetime of modesty wasn’t easy, though, and even with the sunglasses in place she still couldn’t work up the courage to look at herself in the mirror.