CHAPTER 2
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ABU DHABI
I’M SANJAY
IT WAS HOT. Cresting a hundred degrees in the evening steam, the air grabbed at my legs and chest, fogged camera lenses, and matted hair. Fire shot from the walls when I tested the first outlet of my new apartment, and I wandered my new neighborhood on Electra Street while I waited for the cheery electrician. As one old fable goes, a man is promised all the land he can walk in one day. If it were an Emirati story, the man would have won about half a block in the heat, and traded it for a glass of tea.
Soon enough, two Bangladeshi men came to replace the fuse. As soon as I could turn the lights on again, I turned them off and went to sleep.
Fresh off the plane from California in 2010, I was a program coordinator for New York University Abu Dhabi. My title meant nothing, and my employer’s name looked like a paradox. Two incongruent place names pushed together without so much as a hyphen, bridging every cultural and temporal and physical divide with a flash of smart branding. Purple. Everything was purple.
“I coordinate programs,” I’d explain to anyone who asked, a half joke that left neither one of us more enlightened. It worked in Arabic, too. And then I would return to coordinating, or playing hooky, on the campus that claimed the essences of two cities and felt almost absolutely like neither.
I’d never been anywhere in the Middle East, outside of family visits to Jerusalem and a two-week jaunt to Morocco. I had studied the worlds that might be unlocked by Arabic, but they had never been real.
And still, I was the guide to prospective faculty on tours to the refulgent Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque, the world’s eighth largest (besting their Omani neighbors in one of the region’s favorite kinds of keeping-up-with-the-Joneses). There is room for ten thousand inside and thirty thousand in the courtyard and the nation’s founding father rests nearby in a quietly locked mausoleum. It was magnificent, almost always. A blend of Mughal and Moorish styles, selected from the palate of Everything Available. The white marble foyer with green vines inlaid, marble flowers—this was a Quranic interpretation of paradise. The white ceilings and towering pillars laced with gold: milk and honey. Here, the ninety-nine names of God upon the wall that faces Mecca, with a blank spot for the name we cannot know until the end of time.
If it seemed like I knew anything, the American professors would ask, casually, “So, you’re Muslim?” And I’d tell them the truth, hoping they’d laugh. Mosque tours from the unbar-mitzvahed Jewish boy.
Look, I’d say, the largest handwoven carpet in the world (two billion stitches!) shipped in a thousand pieces from Iran. And look, the largest chandelier on planet Earth. Immense, fruit-colored Swarovski baubles fixed to a kind of golden hat rack, dangling from one of eighty-two domes like Christmas decorations awaiting a tree. From Germany.
Other days, I might accompany someone like the university president’s young cousin “dune bashing,” off-roading in a heavy SUV on soft desert sand until I threw up, and then to an intercontinental buffet at an uncountably starred hotel with infinity pools onto the waterway at the city’s edge.
Months passed quickly. I wore suits to work, partly because it made me feel like I was doing something, and partly because it made other people think so, too.
Nights vanished like college evenings in a quiet neighborhood. Inside, I often forgot which side of the globe we were on, and I remembered only by smelling curry. It came, always, from a magical restaurant called Canopy, and I cultivated an easy addiction alongside Jake, a giant poet tutoring English, and with my neighbors Dan and Jordan, a couple from New Jersey and Atlanta via Brooklyn, university employees all.
Not once did the saints of delivery judge me for my four packets of onion kulcha and chicken tikka masala—not the day after raita and jalfrezi, not the day after exactly the same. Some weeks, I called six times.
For five dollars, the bag arrives at the door, delivered with gentleness and warm smiles that, even before opening, remind the deliveree of where he is not. These were among the rare moments of glee I felt in the UAE. When anyone simply unplugged from Abu Dhabi, Canopy remained.
On those nights, we watched TV shows from our native land. American Gladiators. Wipeout. All easy-to-digest slapstick with American budgets. But they were not shows I’d known before. Abu Dhabi became this to me: memories of my country that weren’t mine, and celestial Indian food.
SUNDAY MORNING AND THE START of a new work week found me taking old business cards, restaurant coupons, and pharmacy memberships out of my wallet like someone checking into prison. You won’t need these in here.
The vacuum of my all-white apartment in our hyperclean new building rarely sparked memories of home. I had shipped over a piano keyboard whose keys I tickled the way a kid doodles in class (both because I was distracted and because I wanted to be)—but when I turned it on, a smell conjured my childhood labors in the kitchen, mixing cookie dough with an overheating beater. This time it was the scent of fizzled electronics and smoke: the keyboard adaptor was not dual voltage. Some things are not so easily transformed.
Luckily, my address on Electra Street was no joke: down the kilometer-long block of Abu Dhabi’s enormous grid, on the stretch between Old Airport Road and New Airport Road (Second and Fourth Streets), there were no less than fifteen shops selling appliances, miscellaneous electronics, cables. In the shadow of sprouting skyscrapers, they sat next to one another amicably, selling exactly the same things. But without fail if they couldn’t help, they’d send me one store to the left, then across the street, and on forever. An unsuccessful shopkeep would rarely let me leave without at least a spot of hope.
And there is almost always hope in the land of the miscellaneous: People who do a little of everything are quite flexible. If they don’t have a cable, they’ll make it out of wire and pieces; if they don’t know how to fix something, they’ll try.
Mumkin. In Arabic, the word maybe also means “possible.”
I learned to haggle in the UAE even with reality’s most intransigent features. Nothing was quite so certain as it was to the West—not even time. With a soft tone, you might push someone else to perceive it a little more like you do.
“I’m forty-five minutes away,” the man stated. Fact. Distance. Time.
“Could you make it thirty?” I asked. A friend told me to say that—she’d been here far longer than I had.
The man came in fifteen. Everything was mumkin.
I felt a bit like I’d unlocked a secret of the universe, like Lucy Pevensie, who discovered a wardrobe that led to a land of lions and witches, or Arthur Dent, who learned that flying was learning to throw oneself at the ground and miss. The grammar of Arabia came one step further out of the shadows.
Time may be the first thing to grow fuzzy in that latitude where there is not much difference between the seasons. When I landed in Abu Dhabi, the announcement to turn off electronic devices came ten minutes earlier in Arabic than it did in English. There was less urgency in each minute.
When I accepted that another’s logic simply wouldn’t follow the rules I knew, my anger could fade toward those who had been breaking them. In my state of—call it peninsulation—the island took on its own logic.
INSULATION DOES MANY THINGS, especially in the blinding heat of a hot island off an equally hot peninsula. Most emerge from the tumble dry of Abu Dhabi immigration and find their matches—American with American, Indian with Indian—like paired socks. It is a melting pot where nothing ever melts. In this uniquely modern frontier town, we had all come for some piece of the riches.
After two decades of scouting, oil was struck at sea in 1958. Now the UAE claims reserves of ninety-eight billion barrels, enough at current rates to last a neat century. Almost all of it is to be tapped from the emirate of Abu Dhabi, 8 percent of the world’s black gold under a footprint the size of West Virginia.
Censuses are fuzzy, but high birth rates and unprecedented immigration have multiplied the UAE population abou
t fortyfold since independence in 1971 (the world’s population has only doubled). And yet, a sense of belonging is not forthcoming in the UAE, where the jobs are, but where 85 percent of the bulging resident society are not and will never become citizens. Perhaps that’s what makes it feel so free for some—a summer fling with no expectations, no commitment; for others, it is a more pointed reminder that they are subjects, fully beholden to the whims of the monarchy. Either way, the UAE has no path to citizenship for its foreign labor force, and so we reach out for the communities that remind us of home.
While we reach out laterally for comfort, the country stacks us into neatly color-coded strata. We were stratified nationally here, and stratified by the shades of our skin: Construction recruiters fill Workers City apartments fourteen to a room with men from the Indian subcontinent (a moniker all too consonant with their role as a subclass); from Southeast Asia come maids (Sri Lanka, Indonesia) and the hospitality industry’s front office (Philippines); East Africans do security; Arabs from Lebanon and Egypt handle security as well, own restaurants, and mingle more fluidly, but remain a step apart. Businesses pull from each of these, but white-collar jobs are filled overwhelmingly with Europeans and Americans, and within each business a microcosm of the social order is noticeable, as if described by lines of invisible ink.
At the top of it all, there are Emiratis, the spontaneous kings of their own land. As a nation, they are self-made; as individuals, they are largely reliant on the national trust.
When we sought connection within these castes, the structure made it so that we were even more likely to grab on to likenesses of ourselves. The university, though it would organize itself by many of the same principles, began with different premises. It piled students and most of its employees (but not the drivers or subcontracted security or lower-level staff) into what was then the tallest residential building in the city. Insofar as we knew who our floormates were, we were offered the chance to connect.
My dearest friend Iman was an NYU grad from Pakistan, half-Venezuelan and fully too kind and honest to keep her head above the flow of office drama and bureaucratic bullshit. We spent most evenings with Gila, a half-Iranian, half-Mauritian mother of two, raised in London and Paris, with more spirit for nightlife than I could ever muster. We went to Ladies’ Nights with the Kenyan and Dominican contingents. We made pancakes and drained bottles of Bailey’s into our coffee with Jake, the six-foot-six-inch poet from Erie, kitty-corner from me across Pennsylvania, and a travel partner to places we knew nothing about. Later, I’d escape the Emirates with Neal from Iowa, a fellow member of the tribe—that is to say, the Jewish one—which had never mattered much to me except as permission to make jokes of a certain kind.
On the university’s opening day, when the inaugural class arrived from six continents, I met tree-tall Oleg from Kaliningrad, a little Russian exclave separated from the motherland by the Baltic States.
Newly isolated (by varying levels of choice) from what we knew, we formed young relationships in a young country. They hatched as in high school: some de facto friendships from sufficiently shared schedules, others more deliberate—at times, one became the other.
Jake and I ordered from Canopy and drank vodka tonics on long lunch breaks on slow days, which were many. We breezed through the side entrance and out the side exit of African and Eastern wine and spirits, never once needing the alcohol license by which non-Muslim residents are permitted the purchase of 20 percent of their monthly salary in alcohol. (“You must be of legal drinking age and a non-Muslim to visit the African + Eastern website.”) We hauled the loot that clanked in black bags past the storefront with equally black windows, down Seventh Street, named Sheikh Zayed the First Street but called Khalidiya Street until it crossed the ten smooth lanes of Airport Road and became Electra. Up the elevators home. The grid of modern Islamic architecture below could not have been anywhere else we’d ever lived, but it was easy then to forget every reason we had come here.
EARLY OCTOBER AND IT IS ninety-three degrees by the pool. The beaches along the Corniche are lapped with warm, salty seawater, overprotected from the counterclockwise current of the Gulf by the breakwater and the 1,050-acre Al Lulu Island that men made by scooping up the ocean floor. It looks beautiful—seven miles of untouched shoreline, some facing jet skis at the Abu Dhabi skyline from a flattering distance, some opening onto the turquoise strait. But access, since 2009, is by private boat only.
I’m almost comfortable, but I’m restless. I’m too comfortable. I notice myself growing accustomed to the last-minute grocery deliveries—a bottle of Coke, an egg, two tomatoes—that materialized from the store one elevator ride and fifteen steps away. I am ready for Mustafa to come and ask for dry cleaning, to whisk it away and return it folded and hung. Over sixteen months, I would never know where this magic was done.
The culture of the Emirates is so defined by its stratification that one draw for white Westerners is the instant shift in social standing awarded just for showing up. In the evenings, whether from a smelly taxi or a blacked-out Maserati, we guests arriving at hotels (the homes of many high-end restaurants and bottomless brunch spots, of bars and nightclubs and a large share of the things to do) are sorted immediately by the style of our costume—coveralls, jeans, suit, kandura—and the color of our skin. “Good evening, sir,” the African doorman says to me, with something just short of a wink. He knew me well—hundreds of me had already arrived at Le Royal Meridian that night.
This is the comfort, for some: families, working mothers and fathers, emigrants from places where no amount of long hours ever earned anything close to a wink from the doorman. But I haven’t earned the sirs—not when I show up in matted Jewfro and a T-shirt. And I know that if I’m getting it for free, just like the free cheeses at the trendy café by the conference center, someone else isn’t.
Even at the very top, life could seem compartmentalized, preordained, immobile. The United Arab Emirates is one of the world’s two elective monarchies; the other is Malaysia. Every five years, the Supreme Council (the rulers of each of the seven emirates) picks the president (who will also hold the offices of supreme commander of the Armed Forces, and chairman of both the Supreme Petroleum Council and the Supreme Council itself) and the vice president from among their own.
Historically, the president has always been the ruler of Abu Dhabi, the capital, and the vice president has always been the ruler of Dubai, both hereditary posts. Even for the living sheikhs I could see in the pictures along the highway, in the banks, the supermarket, behind the front desk of every hotel—there would be no movement outside those frames.
Despite all the metaphors about shifting sands, deserts are a place of supreme consistency.
BUT . . . AND YET . . . THERE WAS SOMETHING I felt close to, thrillingly, for the first time. I had not expected Lawrence’s Arabia when I deplaned in this desert—but I felt like we had made it to his foyer. Here were planted the stories to follow. The four-fifths of us sweating without citizenship were exactly what made the whole national enterprise feel rootless, but looking closely, it was exactly this coalition of rainbow passports that brought the Gulf to absurd life unlike anywhere else in the world. The curries at Canopy brought me over the sea to the South. Cabbies from the hill behind Tora Bora gave hints of their homes in the White Mountains. Endless falafel and fresh hummus by delivery whisked me over Arabia Deserta, across the Great Carrot, to sketches of Damascus.
The hodgepodge was a grip on the otherwise frictionless city. I loved everything that was confusing—for in that confusion there was something to look for, something to dig around. I loved the haggling that gave us “Lawrences without-a-cause” something to fight for. I loved the addresses for the 2.5 million residents in Abu Dhabi, as landmark based as my grandmother’s directions. There were no street numbers and official road names were hardly used: instead of 1500 Rashid bin Sa’iid Al Maktoum Street, you’d ask for the road formerly known as Airport Road behind Domino’s Pizza. This seemed
the greatest hope against a fading heritage—listen to any cab driver: he not only speaks of the past, he drives you right through it. After I left, the roads were renamed and numbered, but it hasn’t stuck. “The cabbies still use the old names,” Gila wrote me later, “so it’s useless having new addresses!”
While I lived on Electra Street, our new skyscraper Sama Tower began to develop landmark status among the taxi community. I once heard ominously that it was built atop a graveyard (unmarked as they typically are according to Islamic tradition). At fifty stories, named from Arabic for “sky” or “heaven,” Sama was very briefly the tallest residential building in the city. Soon, something else sprouted higher on man-made land.
Out its back entrance to Foodlands falafel, across from the New Muslim Center and behind the New Medical Center in the infinite web of parking lots that act like side streets within the city’s oversized grid, I met Ali from Daraa, a midsize city an hour south of Damascus. Sometimes I went for a sandwich and to say hi, other times I went to say hi and have a sandwich.
“Ya, Ali!”
“Adam! Kifak Adam?”
After months of that, I felt like we knew each other. My age exactly with black hair and a white uniform, Ali had bright eyes and a smile that could cook rotisserie. He manned the falafel and shawarma nightly, shaving chicken or lamb from the spinning poles according to customer demand: regular, or the chili-spiced meat collage called “Mexiki.”
He greeted me with such loyalty that I thought of him like an old friend, and felt guilty when I had been too absent. Arabic makes it easy—if a young man isn’t akhi, my brother, he is habibi, my dear, like every friend or foe, man, woman, and child across the Arab world. At Foodlands, our Arabic moments felt like connections, the beginning of something, his first language to my second. It wasn’t the novelty of practicing a school subject on anyone who understood, like discussing pressing options with Mustafa the dry-cleaning deliverer in his fourth language. That just let me feel far away.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 2