Growing Up Bin Laden - Jean P. Sasson [26]
I do have fond memories of my childhood. One early recollection involved teasing about a man having more than one wife. Many times when my father was sitting with his male friends, he would call out for me to come to him. Excited, I would follow the sound of his voice. When I would appear in the room, my father would be smiling at me, before asking, “Omar, how many wives are you going to have?”
Although I was too young to know anything of men and women and marriage, I did know the answer he was seeking. I would hold up four fingers and gleefully shout, “Four! Four! I will have four wives!”
My father and his friends would laugh with delight.
I loved making my father laugh. He laughed so seldom.
Many people found my father to be a genius, particularly when it came to mathematical skills. It was said that his own father was a numerical genius who could add up large columns of numbers in his head.
My father was so well known for this skill that there were times that men would come to our home and ask him to match his wits against a calculator. Sometimes he would agree, and other times not. When he would good-naturedly accept the challenge, I would grow so nervous that I would forget to breathe.
Each time I believed that he would fail the test. Each time I was wrong. We were all staggered that no calculator could equal my father’s remarkable ability, even when presented with the most complicated figures. Father would calculate lengthy and complex figures in his head while his friends struggled to catch up to the maths whiz with their calculators. I’m still amazed and have often wondered how any human being could have such a natural ability.
His phenomenal memory fascinated many who knew him. His favorite book was the Koran, so on occasion he would entertain those who would ask by reciting the Koran word for word. I would stand quietly in the background, often with a Koran in my hand, checking his recitation carefully. My father never missed a word. I can admit now, that as I got older, I was secretly disappointed. For some strange reason, I wanted my father to miss a word here and there. But he never did.
He once confessed that he had mastered the feat during a time of great mental turmoil when he was only ten years old, after his own father had been killed in a plane crash. Whatever the explanation for his rare gift, his champion performances made for many extraordinary moments.
I have bad memories, along with the good. Most inexcusable in my mind is that we were kept as virtual prisoners in our home in Jeddah.
There were many dangers lurking for those who had become involved in that increasingly complex quagmire that had begun with the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan two years before I was born. My father had become such an important figure in the struggle that he had been told that political opponents might kidnap one of his children or even murder members of his family.
Because of such warnings, my father ordered his children to remain inside our home. We were not to be allowed to play outside, even in our own garden. After a few hours of halfhearted play in the hallways, my brothers and I would spend many long hours staring out the apartment windows, longing to join the many children we saw playing on the pavements, riding their bikes or skipping rope.
My father’s piety made him strict in other ways. Although we lived in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, which is one of the hottest and most humid cities in a country that is known for its hot climate, my father would not allow my mother to turn on the air-conditioning that the contractor had built into the apartment building. Neither would he allow her to use the refrigerator that was standing in the kitchen. My father announced, “Islamic beliefs are corrupted by modernization.” Therefore, our food spoiled if we did not eat it on the day it was purchased. If my mother requested milk for her toddlers, my father had it delivered straight from cows kept on his family farm for just such a purpose.
My mother was allowed to cook her meals on a gas stove. And the family