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The Lost Art of Lingering
What Riyadh’s Istiraha Culture Taught Me About Community There are many things I miss about Riyadh. The wide roads. The familiar skyline. The call to prayer echoing across neighborhoods. But when people ask what I miss most, my answer always surprises them. It isn’t a place. It’s a rhythm. One of my favorite rhythms of life in Riyadh revolved around weekends at the istiraha. Looking back, I don’t think I miss the istiraha itself. I miss belonging to a culture that expected people to linger. There was no carefully planned two-hour schedule. No one checking the time after coffee. No awkward moment when everyone wondered whether it was time to…
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The Lockdown Chronicles (Part 3): The Lonely Hallway and the Chorus of Cries
The adrenaline of a home birth makes you feel invincible—until it wears off. Then, reality hits. Heavy. Sudden. Cold. After that surreal car ride—with my newborn in towels and my eldest son holding the placenta in a bucket—we reached the Emergency Room. I was wheeled through sliding doors into a world that felt alien. Everything was masked and sterile. The silence wasn’t peaceful; it was tense. The Separation Almost immediately, the doctors found my baby’s blood sugar was low. Before I could even process that he was finally here, he was gone. Straight to the NICU. My own body began to buckle under the trauma. My blood pressure spiked, and…
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The Lockdown Chronicles (Part 2): Six Computers and a Car Ride
If you ask me what it was like to be pregnant during the peak of 2020… I have to be honest. I don’t really remember it. Not clearly, anyway. The months blur together into one long, exhausting hum. When you are managing an indoor plastic playground, rationing eggs, worrying about family across the ocean, and trying to keep eight children sane during a lockdown—your brain simply switches into survival mode. There was no sitting quietly, holding my belly, or journaling about the pregnancy. My body was just… doing its job. It was quietly growing a life, while everything else around me felt loud, frantic, and overwhelming. The Madrasati Chaos By…
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The Lockdown Chronicles (Part 1): “Shollu Fi Rihalikum” and the Great Egg Hunt
In late 2019, as whispers of a strange new virus started making the news, I was busy doing something I had waited years to do: I was relearning how to drive in Saudi Arabia. By December, I had passed my test. By early January 2020, I was holding my official driver’s license. I felt a surge of freedom. The open roads of Riyadh were finally mine. And then, just a few weeks later, the entire world stopped. Lockdown. My brand new driver’s license stayed tucked in my wallet, useless. Malls closed. Parks closed. The roads I was so excited to drive on were suddenly empty, heavily guarded by police checkpoints.…
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From Surabaya to Riyadh: The Barakah of the Empty Hours
Foreshadowing of a Future Sixteen years before I ever called the UAE my home, I sat in the Dubai airport for a transit flight. I didn’t know it then, but sitting in that terminal was a quiet foreshadowing of my future. I was just a young girl leaving the lush familiarity of Surabaya, Indonesia, bound for Saudi Arabia. I was making Hijrah.Following a man. And honestly… I was terrified. The Sea of Black and the Souq I arrived in Riyadh in March. The weather was mild, almost gentle—completely hiding the fierce desert summer waiting ahead. But while the weather was soft, the culture shock was not. I remember walking into…
