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this?” Saeed asked, and when I told him, he became thoughtful. This was a gracious and respectable family, after all. Khaled is a good boy; only the most serious of reasons could make them change their minds. I watched Saeed rub his hooked nose, and I guessed that the very same thoughts were filling his head: What could it be? Does the old man consider his family better than mine? I wanted to know. But to go to Diab Al-Mutawa as the father of the proposed groom and ask him outright would have been mortifying. Saeed knew this and announced, “Well, my friend, I will wait a few days and then go see the old man. He won’t tell me right away, of course. But I’ll talk to him in a most clever way.” He tapped his forehead with his index finger, and a spark of shrewdness lit his eyes. “I will suck the information out of him without his realizing it. Leave it to me. I’ll unravel the riddle.”
    Mattar sighed, and I nodded. That’s what the Neely is for: it is a place where we can share common enjoyment and camaraderie, take pleasure in one another’s good-humored nonsense and take a man’s stand whenever it is called for without being asked. We recognize that we are all saddled with pressures—work, family—and this makes the gatherings at the Neely vital for our serenity.

    There’s a light-blue Audi parked outside the house. The engine is on; Mustafa, my right-hand man at the company, dozes behind the wheel. I’m puzzled that he’s here on a Friday. It’s the one day that my whole family assembles for lunch. As Badr and I draw closer, I spot the fifty or so threads of hair on the top of Mustafa’s head standing and quivering from the force of the air blowing out of the air conditioner. Mustafa straightens up in his seat as soon as I knock on the window, flattening the hairs to his scalp before rolling down the window.
    â€œWhy are you sitting out here?” I ask, squinting at him under the dazzle of the whitewashed sky.
    He jumps out of the car and rubs the creases out of his shirt before answering. “Well, bey , I didn’t want to disturb you on a Friday, but I couldn’t wait until tomorrow to give you this news.” I instruct Badr to go on ahead and to notify the family that Mustafa will be having lunch with us. But Mustafa insists he does not want to inconvenience us. “My wife would never forgive me,” he says. “She has cooked molokhia .” In this muggy heat, I can almost smell the slimy green broth these Egyptians can’t get enough of. My instruction to Badr is the expected etiquette, as is Mustafa’s refusal to enter our house, the private sanctuary in which his employer resides with his wife and unmarried children. So we head to the men’s majlis .
    It’s a one-story structure to the right of the main house. There’s a large sitting room that opens onto an even larger dining room. There’sa kitchen and a bathroom, and next to it a row of sinks for the guests. Once a week, I receive visitors who arrive after the evening prayer to socialize and exchange news. Between the house and the majlis there is a lawn with a marble fountain in the middle, dry for the moment because the water is still turned off. Two weeks on, and the plumber still hasn’t finished his work. My kandora is glued to my back as we walk over the grass. One of the cooks scurries past us, hugging four bottles of water. How many times have I told him to serve limboo , chilled lime juice with lots of sugar, when it’s hot? It’s the best way to get heat out of the body. I want to call him and scold him, but that would mean another minute under the sun. So I quicken my pace, and Mustafa does the same.
    We walk up the three steps to the heavy teak door. The foyer is round, with colored glass fitted into the ceiling. Light shines through them, and Mustafa’s face turns a luminous green. I indicate that he should wait