But a brother should know true things, and Ali and I never spoke about anything important for long.
“Kifak? Kif ommak wabbuk?” How are you? How’s your mother? Your father? he’d ask, rolling pickled carrot and chilies into the pita.
“Alhamdulilah,” I said, the only response possible—the “Praise God” that subsumes all states and feelings. Say more if you’d like, but the whole range of human emotion can be contained in its lilt. “Kif a’iltak?” How’s your family?
“Alhamdulilah.”
And I’d grin, and wish I had the words to say more, and wander off into the night two dollars lighter.
And when that wasn’t enough, when I felt those connections were far too flimsy to hitch me to the real city, I pretended I was in paradise. I pulled a towel from the door handle of my drunkenly designed bathroom—a miniature shower stall alone in a large room—and spent two shawarmas-worth on a five-minute cab to the beach. It was winter where my friends lived.
It was hot, and I had found enough change on the nightstand to cover the ride. The walk was never pleasant anyway, across pedestrian intersections where eight-lane roads merged. It was safe enough at the crosswalks; cars followed all the rules because the city was built for them.
“Everything is two aspects. You know, everything is two sides,” the driver said on the way.
I blinked.
A woman passed at the crosswalk. “Take this lady now, I say to her ‘Habibi, go.’ Yes?” That habibi is the ubiquitous corsage upon the already well-dressed Arabic language. “This is the best word. My heart is clear.” But, he said, “this is the worst word, the bad word also.” Habibi could be used to cajole, to deceive, to misrepresent the speaker with an unclear heart.
“You’re confused,” he laughed.
I swore I wasn’t, not enough to give up. While the oppressive heat of the summer months barred most activity but pressing elevator buttons, winter in the Gulf had space for thought. We navigated each other’s accents, his turning p’s into f ’s and losing v’s among the frontal vowels, dusted with Arabic where nothing else would do. (Kharban, he said, to describe a bad person. The word means something like “ruined,” but sounds so much more like it means it.)
He was like the Madonna of cab drivers, only one name written on the screen that beeped and spoke when we topped the speed limit: LIAQUATH. It means “light,” he said.
He picked up his phone from the console. “This is a mobile, yes? This is the good thing, if you use for the good thing, this is the best thing. If you use this for bad, this is the worst thing. It’s depend on you.”
I nodded. The aspect was a function of our intention and our action; no object was innately good or bad. We passed new glass towers germinating along the Corniche road.
A person, though, could be just kharban. “Listen. I’m from Pakistan, from Peshawar. I do something bad. Listen, listen: then you not think Pakistan is bad, you only think this man is bad. Yes?”
“Yes.”
“If I say this country is bad, then myself I am bad.” The important thing, said Liaquath, was that we mean what we say. Then, at least the words are good.
As I moved to slide out of the car, Liaquath soliloquized at someone out the window. Habibi, he said, followed by something in Pashto.
“Was that a good habibi or bad habibi?”
“You know,” he said with a wink.
THE SAND IS DREDGED UP from the Gulf floor and plopped along the Corniche beach, too fine and too pure. There is no seaweed or rocks, no driftwood along the coast. Marina Mall sits on the breakwater across a stretch of oversalted water that can’t circulate, adorned with a huge Emirati flag waving from what was once the world’s largest flagpole. (It is now the fourth largest; in this department, the Emirates has faltered in keeping up with the Al Sauds.)
All he needed was the genie’s robes and Liaquath would have made the perfect cabbie-guru—a stock figure in his uniform.
I hailed a cab the next day, and lo—there was Liaquath, in the flesh, in the exact same of Abu Dhabi’s ten thousand gray cabs.
“Wa—huh?!” I asked.
He didn’t look at all surprised.
These accidents were the happiest magic, unplanned, like all the best things in the Emirates. Halfway down the Al Ain Truck Road to the oasis city at the Omani border, runoff from a wastewater treatment plant collects against the highway. The freshwater pool now attracts thousands of pink flamingos—just passing through like the rest of us—on their migratory circle from Russia around Azerbaijan, toward Iran. Clinging to their legs for hundreds of miles, little passengers have fallen off into the pool. There are now tiny shrimp in the heart of the desert.
BEFORE 1961 ABU DHABI didn’t have a single paved road. Then: unfathomable wealth. Instantly there were resources for the rulers’ aspirations and, as if selected from a catalog, cities sprang up in the Emirates from absolute nothing.
In this new nation without citizens, starting from scratch is the national pastime. For those of us lured to the Gulf, not tricked, we could be anyone we wanted.
It even gave me options.
I answered calls from India, from Senegal, from every emirate asking if I wanted something or if I had something. With language getting in the way, I wasn’t ever sure of a single answer I gave until they asked, “Sanjay?”
No, I’d say. This isn’t Sanjay.
Twice a week for my entire life in the Emirates, I answered calls for Sanjay. This still isn’t him, I’d say. Some days, I could hardly persuade them that they had the wrong number. It wasn’t a wrong number after all, just wrong timing—in a past life, those ten digits were his. He was in the finance business, it seemed, or he tended to leave our phone number somewhere bankers could find it. Sometimes, the caller never knew they had the wrong man. To this day, I retain contacts at almost every bank in Arabia.
IN THE EARLY DAYS of my employment, one conversation began like many. I was assisting the university’s Procurement Department in a job that felt very Middle Eastern: I called vendors, delinquent in their side of whatever bargain, and begged them to make good. Chairs, ping-pong tables, laboratory equipment—no tracking numbers here, just tracking people.
“What is your good name?” said a man who introduced himself as Rafiq, on the other end of the line.
“Adam.”
“Aarif ?”
“Adam.”
“Aarif ?”
“A . . . dam.”
He took a moment to process this. “Aarif.”
“Yes,” I said. And then we attempted to do business.
Certainty and inflexibility tend to close doors in this part of the world, the Westerner’s term for the geographical cloud that has settled unintelligibly wide over the region. It implies the freedom we have within it—the haziness of borders, names, everything—and that the men from the subcontinent do not. In many cases, it was irrelevant who I was; by asserting less, I could learn more. I could converse in symbolic gesture. And I could find out what happened to the storage cabinets from mid-August.
And I wondered if there was anything so certain about myself that I could not deny it to strangers with a touch of accent, new clothes, better posture.
Really, I was only taking a page out of the city’s book. Abu Dhabi itself expands onto landfill, surpassing the past boundaries of the island it is built upon. In the last forty years, the city has increased its surface area by a sixth—the Sheraton Corniche, once beachfront, is now almost a thousand feet from the water. It’s a common practice from Battery Park City in New York to Hong Kong—Masha’s hometown Boston has more than doubled in size since its founding in 1640—and every time it reflects a kind of enterprising audacity, of man asserting himself over the wild. The process is called land reclamation, as if this is how it once was, even though the new territory was never anything but sea or swamp. It is reclaimed so that we begin to forget what was old and what was new, what was “authentic” and what was an adaptation. And it works. Soon, after
those decades of construction, there is no difference. I never knew what the beach would have looked like with driftwood. The old limits are erased by the ebb of the new high tide.
IN ONE OF THE BARBERSHOPS near Saloon Tarek and Saloon Wave Beach and Shahrezad Fadl Gents Saloon (subscribers to a kind of nationwide typo), the Sri Lankan barber was insistent about my sideburns.
“I’ll give you the style.”
“No, thank you. Just neatened up a bit.”
“It’s the style.”
“Please, just the most normal trim.”
“You don’t want the style?”
“No. . . .” I felt guilty that I wasn’t giving him a proper canvas for his talents, but I felt freer as something simple, vague. “I’m American,” I said, hoping that might count as an excuse.
He shrugged like a cashier watching me buy the world’s tackiest wedding ring. But he couldn’t hold back. In ten minutes, I saw South Asian artistry plastered to my face. The hair on my head was chopped short against the heat, and my sideburns tapered, curving ever so daintily, into little peaks.
I never got another haircut in the country. The more my hair grew curlier and long, the more it betrayed my foreign roots.
When I put the phone down and walked the eight-lane Abu Dhabi roads, I became something more rigid. This is the up- and downside of “American,” the loudest branding label in the world: pointy sideburns or no, my hair and face and clothes walked ten steps ahead of me, and always spoke first. That was the limit on what I could be; in brief moments of possible connection, there was baggage. It was too hard to start fresh because nothing was ever fresh.
I struggled with that. Emiratis did, too. On a small street behind our apartment that wound around a juice shop, I sat on the curb with Khulood, a fellow administrator at the university. I felt tighter with her than I did with any other Emirati women, if only because we’d talked the most. And it always seemed easier to talk to Emirati women than Emirati men.
We held juices named for the Burj al-Arab, the sail-shaped ultraluxury hotel in Dubai that wears a helipad like a sailor’s cap. Khulood was from Dubai, and whenever she told people so, she saw hands beginning to outstretch—envy and need and a rare brush with riches. When she was abroad, she felt like she was a sounding board for ignorance, and instantly a potential patron to everyone’s dreams.
“So I came up with Mirchi,” Khulood said. “Mirchi is off of the coast of Yemen. It is an island.”
“Um,” I said. “It is?”
“No!” Her head flew back as she laughed at me, and she teased her headscarf forward. “So when people would ask Where are you from? I’d say, ‘I’m from Mirchi.’ Oh, Mirchi, where is that? I’m like, ‘It’s an island in Yemen.’ And that’s just how the conversation ends.”
I’d always wanted to do that. Too curious to see reactions to what I actually was, I had never let my imagination run so wild. But how wonderful, to be blank!
“It was great from there on. No conversations, no more questions.”
I EASILY BECAME SOMEONE both fixed and disconnected. I experimented with identities that were vague enough to take root in something I didn’t understand. And at first it didn’t bother me—it was all so American, I thought, to be this kind of self-made man.
Once, the ballet came to Abu Dhabi. Ten minutes by gray taxi down the waterfront boulevard, I went to see them at the Emirates Palace. The towering blonde freshman Oleg arranged tickets for two dozen students and staff from a Russian contact at a good price. In classic Russian fashion, the man had sold five hundred more tickets than there were seats in the Emirates Palace Auditorium. In classic Middle Eastern fashion, there was always another way in.
And as always in the Emirates, there were extra seats despite it all. Around the other side of the theater, I fell into line behind one of Their Highnesses in the black and gold overrobe as they glided across the red carpet. I babbled nonsense into my phone and stayed close. I came back out to Oleg’s door, from the inside, and began to usher our group in by the handful.
“Let’s go, there isn’t time!”
The women at the door looked confused and upset—one Russian, one Arab under a headscarf—but they wouldn’t block the way. The Russian’s eyes narrowed. I started saying things in Arabic.
“Yalla, ista‘ajilu!”
The women scowled at me as the students began to play along, squeezing past. “Who are they? Do you speak Russian?”
“Arabi, English, Russki, whichever,” I said. I spoke no Russian. Oleg filed in with some others.
“Kharasho—” I said to him, and interrupted myself like I had more Russian words to say. In the short moments the women tried to figure out what kind of an asshole I was, more students passed through.
The confusion tactic is a beautiful one, more commonly used on the defensive than as such a brazen sortie, but desperate times had called. I turned to the Arab woman, to say a few words in a different language.
“They are very important guests of the sheikh. This isn’t good,” I said.
“Which sheikh?” she asked.
But then they had all gone in and found places, and I looked hurriedly at my phone and said Oh! and disappeared back among the gold-colored seats.
I don’t know what it was about the Emirates Palace that made it feel like the perfect playground for these kinds of shenanigans. Maybe it was its name—a “seven star” luxury hotel that was not, in fact, a royal residence. (The Presidential Palace was under construction down the road.) Maybe it was the magical look of all that gold, gold, gold, and diamonds that made reality melt away, and made me feel like we could all start from scratch.
Every so often, that was where I played second trumpet in the now-dissolved UAE Philharmonic Orchestra. After a concert, we carried our instruments up from the auditorium to the central café that serves a fifteen-dollar old-fashioned and cappuccinos peppered with gold leaf (that tastes exactly like you’d expect hammered-thin soft metals to taste). Luscious leather couches facing glass cases of French patisserie. A South African trio jammed, under a six-days-a-week contract, until eleven. It was against the rules for a fourth to join in, especially brass, but I took the hotel employee’s begrudging shrug as something else.
“Blame me,” I said. “If anyone makes trouble, just tell them to blame me.”
“I can’t,” he said, eying my trumpet.
“But we never talked,” I said.
“Who are you?”
I looked back at the rows of macarons and mille-feuilles. No one who knew me was looking. “I’m Sanjay.”
Onyx on piano was happy to let me play a few choruses over “Mannenberg,” a South African tune I half-remembered from high school, and I took off like no one was listening. I knew the key, but I didn’t know the chord changes underneath—the harmonic framework of the song, its house rules for improvisation. This is like knowing words in a language without grammar, like furnishing a house without knowing the floor plan.
I danced over the rules until a wrong note would tell me that I’d broken one, and then I’d float again. It was shallow, and I couldn’t refer to the deepest roots of the piece because I didn’t know them, but—it was something. It might have been the freest I ever felt in that country on the beach—and it was all forbidden.
There like anywhere, I could violate the rules by not understanding or by deliberately ignoring them. In the airport, an ad for Swiss watches said: “To break the rules, you must first master them.” But you cannot master the rules of the Emirates, and we existed in a state of constant bending. The chord changes of the country, the cultural-religious-historical roots that still hold sway, are hard to find, and so I felt like we were just skimming the surface, ready to drift off into nothingness. We were, to a point. But if I loved the place—which, damn it, I was starting to if only because I was beginning to know it, and which is different from wanting to live there—then I would rejoice with the truth when I found it, and hope for the best until then.
IN
TINY BURSTS, the country revealed itself. One Friday morning, I packed into a van of Americans at dawn for the Al Wathba Camel Racetrack. It was the first day of camel-racing season.
Think of all the glamour, the maquillage, the frenzied betting and crowds screaming, the graceful galloping of horse races: It’s none of that. Some thousand gangly camels run dozens at a time in back-to-back races around a horseshoe track nearly five miles long. Owners shadow their entries in crammed white Land Cruisers from an internal track, paved that season for the very first time. While the driver speeds ahead in what looks from the inside like rush hour in the desert, the owner clicks a remote control that triggers the camel’s whip.
Oh right—they’re ridden by robots.
Little boxes in hats cling to the speeding camels just behind the hump, spinning whips on command. It’s a great improvement: in the middle of the desert thirty miles east of Abu Dhabi, camel breeders emancipated child jockeys in favor of their no-frills droid replacements.
Handlers pull the camels through as the starting gate shoots up, some animals still losing their way, turning against the tide and racing back toward home. Others somehow escape the track and, foaming at the mouth from exertion, charge unsuspecting bystanders looking through camera lenses.
Still, the radio reception is no great sheikhs, as we punned when drunk or tired, and owners must be nearly within earshot of their camels to use their whip remotes.
Of course, I wanted to be part of the action. So did Nils, my friend and colleague, who—because the world is small and loves jokes—was Masha’s former classmate at her 120-kid high school in Boston.
It took but a friendly “Can we?” and a hand on the door handle to be invited in to race around with an owner and his driver. Our first hosts were consistently in second-to-last place and drove in a serious, subdued silence, but after one lap, Nils and I managed to land seats in the media van.
The Abu Dhabi Bar Mitzvah Page 3