Read Online Jean P Sasson - [Princess 02] by Princess Sultana's Daughters (pdf) - Free Book Online Page B

cradled in my womb.
    Maha confessed that the early trauma she had endured on the occasion of her parents' long separation had further eroded her trust in men. "What was so wrong with Father that we had to flee from his presence?" she asked.
    I knew that Maha was speaking of the time Kareem had tried to take a second wife. Not wishing to share my wifely status with another woman, I had fled the kingdom, fetching my children from summer camp in the Emirates and taking them with me to the French countryside. France, with its humane people who shelter those in distress, had seemed the perfect spot to protect my young while I negotiated for those long months with my husband over his scheme to wed another woman.
    How I had tried to shield my children from the trauma of my own failing marriage and our separation from Kareem!
    What folly! As a parent, I know now that it is preposterous to believe that even minor parental conflict does not interfere with the emotional well-being of a child. Hearing Maha say that my actions had increased her mental pain, allowing abnormal thoughts to creep into her consciousness, caused me more anguish than any previous agony I have known. I had a moment of renewed anger at my husband, remembering the distress he had brought upon our three children.
    Maha confessed that even after Kareem and I had patched over our differences and brought our family together again, our continuing strife had pierced the safety of the cocoon in which my children dwelled.
    When I prodded my daughter about her relationship with Aisha, Maha confided that she had not known women could love women and men could love men, such a possibility had never entered her mind, until the day Aisha showed her some magazines she had taken from her father's study. The magazines had displayed photograph after photograph of beautiful women in acts of female love. At first the photographs were a novelty, but later Maha came to see them as beautiful, sensing that the love between women was more tender and caring than the aggressive, possessive love of man for woman.
    There were other disturbing revelations.
    Aisha, a girl who had experimented with many social taboos before knowing my daughter, thought nothing of spying on her father's sexual misdeeds. The girl had made a small peephole in the study adjoining her father's bedroom. There, she and my daughter had watched as Aisha's father deflowered one young virgin after another. Maha claimed that the cries of those young girls had closed her mind to wanting a relationship with a man. 
    She told me an unbelievable tale that I would brush aside as fabrication had my own daughter not witnessed the event.
    Maha said that on one particular Thursday evening Aisha had telephoned her, urging her to come over quickly. Maha said that Kareem and I were out, so she'd had one of our drivers deliver her to Aisha's home.
    Aisha's father had gathered together seven young girls. Maha did not know if he had wed the girls or if they were concubines.
    My daughter watched as those young girls were made to prance naked around the room, each with a large peacock feather stuck up her backside. With these feathers, the girls were forced to fan and tickle the face of Aisha's father. Over the course of a long night, the father had performed sex with five of the seven girls.
    Afterward, Maha and Aisha had stolen a feather and played together on Aisha's bed, giggling and tickling each other's bodies. It was then that Aisha showed Maha the pleasure women could have with one another.
    Ashamed of her love for Aisha, Maha cried in my arms, sobbing that she wanted to be a happy, well-
    adjusted girl with a productive life. She cried out, "Why am I different from Amani? We came from the same seed, but we have blossomed into different plants!" She screamed, "Amani is a beautiful rose! I am a prickly cactus."
    Ignorant of the ways of God, I could not answer my child. I held her in my arms and comforted her with the thought that the