Now men are not allowed at girl parties, so this is when the burkas come off and the girls finally get a chance to really show their stuff. As I said, I am not sure what is worn under those burkas but tonight gave me a bit of a hint. The women would show up, fully veiled and immediately shed their black armour and out would come hair, bright clothes and jewelry. I sat there looking around and realized that although I had talked to these women dozens of times, I couldn’t recognize any of them. I poked one of my housemates and asked her to identify everybody.
I was amazed. With all that cover, you assume that these girls are shy. They are not shy. The music was turned up and the tables where moved aside to that everyone could jump up and give a quasi-bellydancing type dance. How could these woman possibly go back under when they seemed so happy to strut their stuff?
The room got hot and one of the woman expertly opened up the windows without so much as letting the curtains fall open for a second. I realized that even the windows in this country are designed for modesty. They have a special window at the top above eye level so that you can open them without the risk of anyone peeking in. As we were in the sitting room, most of the windows were fogged (like a shower door) so that you couldn’t see details inside.
I got into a conversation with a female Yemenese coworker who spoke of her travels in Egypt. What did she wear there, I asked. She said that she wore jeans, short sleeves and didn’t cover her hair. I asked her if she preferred it and she said that she did. I asked her then why she wore the veil in Yemen and she didn’t even seem to understand the question. It would be shameful, I suppose.
Anyway, after about an hour of this and practicing my limited Arabic, I got bored and grabbed my roommate’s hand and proceeded to read her palm. About halfway through I realized that the entire room was watching me, fascinated. Once I was done with Becky about twenty pairs of hands were shoved in my face and I spent the next two hours reading palms. Fortunetelling is probably another thing that isn’t exactly encouraged in Islam, so I made a big deal of the fact that only Allah knows the future. They agreed with me and demanded to know who their future husbands anyway.
Now I don’t really believe in palm reading and stuff (although I do have an interesting theory regarding Tarot and AI that I will share with you if you would like) but I must say that I saw patterns that I had never seen on a western hand. My skills at reading is basically limited to the information in a 50 cent booklet picked up at the candy isle of a grocery store that I didn’t even bother to read all the way through. Basically, you have three lines on your palm—the head line, the heart line and the life line, going from the top to bottom. Head line is your career, your life line is your heath and wellbeing and the heart line is your relationships. If it is a deep line the attribute is strong, if it has a lot of little branches you tend to get distracted in that area. The only other thing that I can do is to see how the heart and life lines connect and tell you how attached you are to your family.
But a lot of these girls had love and life lines that ran parallel to each other, even sometimes meshing. One woman had no love line, which I had never seen before. If you look at your own palm chances are that the two lines will form a ‘V’. This was interesting to me as intermarriage (especially between cousins) is very common here, and often a marriage will basically leave you in the same house with only a new roommate and a loss of your virginity as a difference. This would explain why the life line and the love line run together. To a lot of these woman, love and life/family are the same thing. What good is a love line when you husband is probably going to be picked for you by his parents? Most of the women had a strong head line (career) which would suddenly break off. This generally means that they have a lot of talent which is unused. In a society of housewives, is that surprising? (Anyway, as I said, I don’t believe that crap.)
Anyway, I was saved by the arrival of dinner (yummy!) and then we took off. It took me five minutes to find my burka. (I had to wear a long black robe, although I didn’t cover my hair, because I was wearing a Samoan dress with *gasp* no sleeves.) Took me a good ten minutes to find my burka from all the others. My roommate helped me look and asked me what it looked like. I told her it was black. (Ask a stupid question…)
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