The Abaya Chronicles

Farah looked out from the second-floor windows of the well-appointed Abu Dhabi villa. The 60-year-old woman watched as her grandchildren came out through the front door of the residence across the street and walked through the gates---the lone opening in the whitewashed wall surrounding the home. The three young boys got into a black Lincoln SUV with tinted windows, and off they went with one of the family’s drivers to a private school less than a mile away. That was life now for many Emirati women the age of Farah Abdullah al Matari. Watching and waiting. And being waited on. Farah was sick of it. *** Walking slowly to the oversized television set in the women’s majlis, Farah signaled to one of the Filipino maids to turn on the 42-inch television set and play a taped version of Freej, a popular cartoon show about four old Dubai women who gossip about others in their neighborhood. The comedic offering provided such a delight for Farah because it reminded her of the times when she lived in a close-knit freej (neighborhood) in the area near the ruler’s palace in the desert island town of Abu Dhabi. As a child of the 1950s, Farah and her friends would spend hours playing in the sand-filled, would-be streets of Abu Dhabi. They would pass many of the older women, all wearing the traditional burqas, gold masks that partially covered their faces. Um Ahmed and Um Khalid were considered the friendliest and funniest of the bunch, and Farah and her friends loved to sit and listen to them as the pair described the comings and goings of everyone in the neighborhood of mud huts and barasti, dwellings made of palm wood and fronds. “Um Hamdan wants to marry off that no-good son of hers to my lovely niece Khadija,” complained Um Ahmed to a group of women sitting with her one day under a ghaf tree as Farah and a friend, Amna, listened nearby. “My brother and his wife should say ‘No,’ but they see gold in the air.” Um Khalid---so named because she was a mother (um) and her oldest son was named Khalid---kept nodding her head in agreement with Um Ahmed. “That Hamdan boy has spent time in Dubai with some older woman and his mother knows that,” said Um Khalid. “But now she wants her son to have a real bride and your niece Khadija is available, and your older brother really does like the smell of a gold dowry for her from Um Hamdan and her family.” “It has always been that way with my brother,” said Um Ahmed. “He’d sell his wife for a piece of gold.” “Which wife?” asked Um Khalid as the women and their friends started laughing, as did the youngsters Farah and Amna. *** As a child, Farah always wondered how a woman felt if she were just one of the wives of a man. Under Islam, a man can have up to four wives but he is expected to treat them equally. Farah’s mother, Reem, was the second of two wives of her father, Abdullah Issa al Matari, who made his living as a trader. He often would be away for months at a time, moving about the emirates by camel or boat. Abdullah would trade items made by Abu Dhabi women for other goods or foodstuffs that he would sell or barter with Bedouins or those he met along the way. When he was in Abu Dhabi, Abdullah spent hours sharing coffee with friends and sitting at the ruler’s majlis, a meeting room where one could make requests or issue complaints to the ruler of the emirate. He also devoted hours to negotiating with those working in the souks, the outside markets, to buy hand-crafted wares for his trading work. Both of Abdullah’s wives lived in barasti literally just yards away from each other and he took turns staying at one or the other of these modest dwellings. Farah yearned for her father to give up his senior wife, who had never been too nice to the offspring of the second union. Farah was determined that, when she became of age to wed, she would be a first wife---and the only one forever. She got her wish to be a first wife when, at age 15, she married Mansour Ali al Bader. She continued to be known as Farah Abdulla al Matari, as women in the Emirates use their maiden names. As for the vow that she would be the only wife---well, that ended in the 1980s. Farah often remarked that she could write a book about being the wife of a successful businessman who came home one night after more than 20 years of marriage to announce he had taken a second wife, a 27-year-old Lebanese physician he met while on business in Beirut. Farah still remembers the day soon thereafter when Mansour brought that bride, Esra, into their home in Abu Dhabi, the town that had become the capital of the United Arab Emirates after seven emirates had banded together to form a country in 1971. After a week of receiving the silent treatment from Farah and her four angry children, wife Number Two insisted that Mansour rent her an apartment overlooking the Gulf. That is where she still resides---with two twenty-something sons who wear Western clothing and spend a lot of time hanging out at malls. Esra works part-time on the staff of a medical center but spends most of her time at an art gallery in which she has an interest---not just in the art, but reportedly in the handsome Saudi owner. Farah knows she has the makings of a good book, if only she could actually write it. But her early education was limited to learning to read parts of the Quran. In her late 40s, she took English classes at the Women’s Institute and became quite proficient in speaking the language, although her writing was still quite limited in both English and her first language, Arabic. Perhaps, she thought, maybe one of her granddaughters could interview her and write a best seller. Mansour had suffered a fatal heart attack when he was in his early 60s. Under societal norms, a widow, especially the senior one, usually moved into the household of her eldest son and his family. In the past, before the discovery of oil had made Abu Dhabians wealthy, the son then supported his mother or spinster sisters who would have had no source of income. Farah, though, had exhibited a bit of an entrepreneurial spirit in her younger days. When the town began to blossom into modernity after the oil discoveries and Mansour began buying small shops and other businesses, she insisted on becoming a “sleeping” partner in some of them. Until the city took over the taxi companies, she also owned a number of cabs operated by Pakistani drivers and she still derived monthly income from selling out to the new entity. Her investments in real estate, including several fancy high-rise apartment buildings on the Corniche, had put her into the millionaire ranks. The last thing she needed was an inheritance from Mansour, whom she officially had divorced shortly before his unexpected passing. To satisfy the wishes of her children, though, she and her unmarried daughter, Hessa, agreed to move to a newly-constructed villa across the street from the home of Farah’s older son, Khalid, and his wife, Ayesha, in the Mushrif section of the city. That would make her offspring happy and would still keep her out of the household of her daughter-in-law.