Nine Parts of Desire by Geraldine Brooks

gatherings. But she hadn’t considered him a likely suitor. At university he had been active in Islamic groups, risking prison for his opinions at a time when the government was keeping fundamentalists on a tight leash. “I always knew he would only marry a veiled girl,” Sahar said. It was after he had seen her, veiled, at a family party, that he had told her parents he would like to propose.
    Like many young Egyptian professionals, Sahar’s fiance hadn’t found a well-paying post in Egypt. Instead, he had agreed to take a job in Saudi Arabia and would have to work there for several months before he could support a bride. Before her betrothal, Sahar’s application to Harvard had been accepted; she could have used the delay to take the place in graduate school that she had been offered. Instead, she turned it down. It wouldn’t be appropriate, she explained, for a devout Muslim woman to live alone in an American city. Her new plan was to look into Islamic studies at one of Saudi Arabia’s segregated women’s schools.
    Before her fiance left for Saudi Arabia, Sahar’s family threw a lavish engagement party. Sahar sat on a flower-decked throne and received the gifts of jewelry from her husband-to-be that would become part of her dowry. “My aunt wanted me to take off hijab for the party,” she said later. “She said, ‘You want to look lovely for your engagement.’ “ Sahar stuck to her guns and sat on her throne with her hair wrapped away in a white satin scarf.
    But it soon seemed Sahar’s scarves wouldn’t be enough to satisfy her betrothed. Within weeks of arriving in Saudi Arabia’s austerely religious atmosphere, he was on the phone to Sahar, suggesting she lengthen her mid-calf dresses to floor length and put on socks to cover her sandaled toes. “I told him I’m not ready for that yet. I toldhim I want to go slowly, to be sure of what I’m doing,” she said. ‘Tve seen other women who go straight into gloves and face veils, and a few months later find they can’t stand it. I don’t want to put something on that I’m going to want to take off.” As the months passed, I began to wonder whether her fiance was drifting into a fundamentalism too narrow to admit Sahar’s broad mind, no matter how correctly veiled.
    Meanwhile, under her shapeless clothes, she started to gain weight. The elevator in our apartment building was so ancient it belonged in the Egyptian museum. It malfunctioned just about as often as it functioned. Sahar began to find the six flights of stairs an increasing trial. Sweating, she would sink into the chair by her desk and beg me to turn on the air conditioner, even on the mildest mornings. Because her coverings made her feel the heat, she no longer enjoyed walking with me when we’d go out reporting. She quickly became too out of shape to cover more than a block without gasping. She seemed to be growing old before my eyes.
    Calls from Saudi Arabia invariably brought bad news. The medical center that had hired her fiance had no patients. He would have to wait and see if business improved before he could set a wedding date. When it didn’t, he began to search for a better job. But months had passed and he hadn’t found one.
    There were other disappointments. Once, a few months before she adopted hijab, Sahar had brought a videotape of her best friend’s wedding to show me. It was a typical upper-crust Egyptian extravaganza, held at the Nile Hilton. Dancers pranced with candelabra on their heads, drummers and pipers provided the din. Everybody dressed to excess. Sahar told me she’d spent£60—a civil servant’s monthly salary—getting her hair done. She watched the tape with her lips parted and eyes shining. Her expression reminded me of my five-year-old niece when I read her a fairy story. I couldn’t believe that this serious, Harvard-bound woman admired this ostentatious display. But she did. “God willing, I’ll have a wedding just like that,” she said.
    But it