by Joe Bennett
Stephen is more forthcoming than the Scouser on the subject of the Islamic calendar. It is based on lunar months, which are shorter than Christian months, so the date of the new year shifts back a bit each year. But apparently the local authorities are not above nudging it neatly onto a weekend so as to minimize disruption to business.
I know Stephen from university. After he graduated he crewed for a few years on rich people’s yachts. He tells me how he loved being on watch on nights like this, calm nights with a moon. He’d sit on deck and stare up into the multitude of stars. And in the great rocking silence of a huge ocean he would sink into a reverie, a Wordsworth-like communion with a pointlessly spinning globe. And with it would come a sense of cruel beauty, allied to a sort of consoling indifference. The speech surprises me. I’d never thought Stephen was given to that sort of thing, though on reflection, I expect we all are in one way or another.
Stephen tells me how, many years ago, on just such a night in the vastness of the Indian Ocean, he was alone on deck and sunk in reverie when, whoompha, something struck him in the back. He jumped more than he has ever jumped before or since. Instinct relayed mighty immediate messages of terror through his body. The shock, he says, must have come close to killing him. On the deck beside him lay a flying fish.
We sit a long while in the sweet, luxurious evening. Stephen gives me some rudimentary lessons in astronomy, pointing out a couple of planets. Planets shine continuously, he says, while stars only twinkle. ‘See there,’ he says, ‘that one’s a planet, whereas that one next to it, that’s a star.’
‘Ah yes,’ I say, though I can see no difference. I think I may be looking at the wrong bits.
Sprinklers pop up audibly on the golf course to ready it for tomorrow’s traffic. Our Myanmari waitress keeps us supplied with European beer. On the first evening of the Islamic year 1430, the Christmas lights twinkle in the date palms. The Indian chef cooks Italian dishes. The tubby ex-pat golfers and their families sit and laugh under a sickle moon. Dean Martin sings, ‘Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow.’ It is 9 p.m. and twenty degrees. And we are sitting above desert.
‘Welcome to Dubai,’ says Stephen.
‘Cheers,’ I say. We chink glasses. And I wonder to myself, quite cheerfully, whether I am going to be able to make any sense of this tangled place.
2
I Love You, I Respect You
The Arabian peninsula lies between Africa and Asia. It’s bounded by the Red Sea to the west, and to the north-east by the Arabian Gulf. The little rhino horn of land that protrudes into the eastern end of the Gulf is the United Arab Emirates. It consists of seven emirates, one of which is Dubai. And the Emirate of Dubai consists of the city of Dubai and a small chunk of desert.
If you drive west along the coast from Dubai you’ll pass through Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait before fetching up in Iraq. Directly across the Gulf from Dubai is Iran. In other words, Dubai is close to a lot of oil and even more volatility.
The rhino horn comes to a tip at the Straits of Hormuz, beyond which lie the Arabian Sea and the Indian Ocean. Carry on down the other side of the horn and you’ll reach Oman, Yemen, the Red Sea, Egypt and eventually the Suez Canal.
Dubai sits on the Creek, a saltwater inlet that stretches inland a few miles before subsiding into salt marsh and, astonishingly, a flock of flamingos, as pink as teenage nail varnish. Beyond the flamingos lies desert – or at least it did until Dubai began to swell. A lot of the desert’s gone. I fear the flamingos may follow it, but it’s the non-flamingo end of the Creek that matters for the city. Without the Creek this place would never have been settled. From the very beginning the Creek has provided safe harbour for sea-going vessels and the sea has provided fish and trade.
Down by the Creek at ten in the morning, in this most futuristic of cities I meet a scene that’s ancient. Moored at the wharf are a mass of chunky ramshackle wooden boats that look as old as Christ. These are dhows, big four-square blunt things. Each has an elaborate painted superstructure in a fetching state of decay. Their squat and bulbous hulls remind me of the dumpy galleons in which Europeans set sail during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to grab what they could of a new world.
Accommodation for the crew consists of ragged hammocks. The railings are hung with even more ragged washing. It’s a scene of picturesque poverty, ripe for the tourist camera, but it clearly isn’t laid on for the tourist. It’s business. The dhow is a small-scale trading vessel doing what’s been done up and down the gulf for thousands of years.
The decks of the dhows are heaped with stuff, arbitrary stuff in arbitrary heaps. And the wharf is heaped with even more stuff, tons of it, all higgledy-piggledy. I can walk up and touch it: huge boxes of blanched cashew kernels from India, Best Brand Tamarinds, ten-inch oval plates from the Better Home Company of China, pallets of car batteries, fish traps, air-con units, Taiwanese tablecloths, fridges in cardboard boxes, all of them stacked any old how. Someone must know what’s where but it looks bewildering to me.
People abound, a few of them actively loading or unloading stuff. But most just squat on their haunches smoking, playing cards, arguing, mending a sandal, drinking milky tea from polystyrene cups, eating rice and scraps with their fingers, or simply looking vaguely into an unfocussed distance and just being. All the people look poor. None of them looks remotely Arab. Most are from the vast Indian subcontinent: Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Pakistan, India. They are small, skinny, dark people, wearing cotton smocks or loose two-piece pyjamas or t-shirts and dirty jeans. And all of them are men. It’s a place of shouting and idling, a place of small-scale human business. I buy a cup of Lipton’s tea, sweetened with both condensed milk and sugar, and sit a while under a palm in the room-temperature air, just watching, and feeling that I like all this.
A parakeet swoops between trees, a scream of luminous green, like lime juice brightly lit. Ants are busy at my feet, more industrious than the wharf but with a similar air of random activity held within an overall order. On the coarse grass of a berm there’s a patch of vomit in which the ants take great interest. And alighting to take an intense interest in the ants is, to my surprise and delight, a hoopoe.
I know the hoopoe from the bird books I read as a kid. It was supposed to visit the UK but I doubted it. This bird was too exotic for the cloudy north. With its weird crest it belonged somewhere they worshipped odd gods. And here it is now, smaller than I expected, but every bit as bizarre. Its wings are zebra striped, its bill long and curved, but the bird is rendered distinctive by its crest. It resembles the bony protrusion on the heads of the first flying creatures, those nightmare dinosaurs with wings of skin and beaks of teeth. At the same time, that crest seems the distilled essence of Egypt, of a piece with hieroglyphs and the sort of neck-thrust dancing that some people perform regrettably at discos. Or used to anyway. I haven’t danced in decades.
A man comes by pushing a bike. He is five foot tall, swarthy, fat as the Michelin logo and wearing pyjamas. The low-slung crotch of his pyjama trousers would arouse admiration in any skateboarder. He looks perhaps forty years old. The bike looks older. The hoopoe understandably takes fright.
As I wander down the Creek the place smartens with money. Here’s a cliff of glass, the Dubai Chamber of Commerce and Industry. It’s everything the wharf is not: modern, rectilinear, impenetrable, air-conditioned, wealthy, security-guarded and daunting. And here are dhows that are dhows no longer. They’ve been refurbished, prinked and polished, permanently moored and turned into restaurants for tourists. Parodic authenticity, the hallmark of tourism the world over.
I pass swanky hotels with big cars pulling up in the porte-cochere and doormen in uniform rushing to their sides. The doormen are Indian, the cars European and the people who get out of them mostly Arab. The Arab men all wear the long white surgical gown known as the dishdash.
It’s evocative garb. I am immediately reminded of London in the Seventies, when a sudden spike in the oil price made Arabs
into lords of the world. The white gowns moved about Mayfair in Rolls Royces and bought everything from whores to skyscrapers with what seemed like imperious disdain. I remember there was resentment and a sort of sulky dread. Britain was slumped in terminal decline and a three-day week and it seemed that the order of the world was changing.
Beside the Creek a few tourists promenade, looking bored, looking not to have quite found the joy they expected to find when they planned this jaunt. Nevertheless they are storing in their cameras a mass of pixellated images, to be administered to friends at a later date, like soporific drugs.
And it’s a pretty enough urban scene that the friends will be bored by, with the Creek glittering in the sun and the air benign, and poverty out of sight, and food and drink available at little cafes on the prom, at one of which I take a seat. Two men are playing chess. One coughs with a bubbling insistence that sounds terminal. An Indian fills a bucket from a standpipe. He has the deep-sunk eyes of a brigand and skin so dark it shines. His t-shirt says ‘Desert Car Wash’. I had expected to get through life without seeing the phrase ‘Desert Car Wash’.
Coffee was the signature drink of the Bedouin Arabs. When Thesiger made camp for the night, his companions would always brew coffee. Strong and bitter stuff, apparently, served in a huge elaborate pot and tiny cups. I’ve already seen such a pot in a souvenir shop. It had a spout like a toucan’s bill. But drinkable coffee has proved hard to find. I order one now and get a plastic beaker of what I can only describe as a brown. Thin and warmish, it makes up for its lack of coffee flavour with sugar. A cat inspects me from a wall with that fixed stare they affect. Like every cat I have seen so far in this city it looks skinny and scared.
An Arab approaches in full regalia – sandals, dishdash, head cloth. As he mounts the steps to the little terrace he grabs at his crotch. He grabs meatily and unabashedly. His eye meets mine. He grins and grabs his crotch once more, whether to relieve irritation or just for the pleasant sensation, I can’t tell. He smiles, broadly. ‘You want tea?’ he says. I have already given up on the brown.
‘Thank you,’ I say and the man calls like an emperor for two teas and sits on the plastic chair opposite mine. He takes off his sandals, folds one foot under himself, gives his crotch another affectionate mauling, and grins. His teeth are terrible. Broad and white at the business end, they narrow towards the gums, corroded by brown rot, so each tooth resembles an off-white miniature spade with a rotten wooden handle. ‘My name Abdullah,’ he proclaims.
‘Joe,’ I say.
‘John,’ he says as we shake hands.
‘Joe,’ I say.
‘John,’ he says.
‘I’m pleased to meet you,’ I say.
‘John,’ he says, giving me another unimpeded view of those teeth. ‘I see you. I respect you. I love you.’ And he lays his hand on my arm and beams.
By means of some simple questions several times repeated and rephrased I discover that Abdullah is from the Yemen. He has a wife and four children.
‘I working very good,’ he says with evident pride.
‘Working,’ he repeats when he sees me looking puzzled. He places his hands on the table to indicate a length of about a foot, then he thrusts his pelvis back and forth so that the chair legs rasp on the concrete. ‘Working good, good,’ and when I catch on and congratulate him, he is delighted and tells me once again that he loves me.
‘Where you are sitting?’ says Abdullah.
It’s clearly a question, but I suspect that the obvious answer isn’t the one he’s looking for. I resort to my puzzled look.
‘Where are you sitting? You are sitting in hotel?’ he says.
‘Ah, I see. No, I am sitting with friends.’
‘I am sitting in Sharjah.’
Sharjah is the emirate next door to Dubai.
I ask him about his work. He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t work, but he has plenty to tell me about a local prostitute.
‘Too expensive. No good. She want dinner. She want room. She want present. She want thousand dirham. I working very good,’ and he slaps his hands together to illustrate a brisk sexual efficiency. ‘All over. One hundred dirham. All over. You got telephone?’
I don’t, but he gives me his number. ‘You lonely you call me. How my English?’
‘Your English is very good,’ I say. Were he a pupil I would give him top marks for gusto.
‘No book. No writing. Oh no no no, no writing. I talking, see, talking everybody,’ and he spreads wide his arms to embrace the linguistic world.
In Yemen, he tells me, he chews a lot of khat, the mildly narcotic leaf that is apparently a way of life there. Perhaps that explains his teeth. He misses khat in Dubai. Dubai has similar drug laws to Singapore. Here he has to smoke cigarettes. I offer him a Rothmans but he waves it away with theatrical disgust. ‘Hot hot hot,’ he exclaims, ‘My God no,’ and he extracts a packet of Pine cigarettes which I’ve never seen before. He doesn’t offer me one.
When conversation dries up, in other words when he is confident that he has communicated to me all the things that I need to know about his life and in particular about his sexual potency and his forthright treatment of prostitutes, and he has learned of me only the wrong name and my current sitting position, I tell him I must be on my way. We shake hands, he repeats his love for me, I tell him I have enjoyed meeting him, which I have, and I get up to leave.
He gets up to leave too. He puts his arm in mine. I don’t think he’s paid for the teas.
As we stroll like lovers beside the Creek, he waves and says hi to a western man who does not wave or say hi back.
‘I speak that man many time,’ he says. ‘Many many time. Pah! Now where going?’
I have no idea where we’re going. I’ve planned only to wander. I know this won’t be a satisfactory answer. ‘The gold souk,’ I say because I have seen it marked on a map.
‘Long long way,’ he says with alarm. He stops, grips my arm, points down the road, gives me some incomprehensible directions which I make no effort to comprehend, says, ‘I love you, I respect you’ with more apparent sincerity than I have ever heard from anyone but drunks, and certainly with more than I feel I’ve earned, releases my arm and leaves.
Having mentioned the gold souk to Abdullah, I feel that I may as well try to find it. And in the warren of buildings and businesses stretching back from the Creek, it takes some finding.
When Thesiger came briefly to Dubai after one of his desert treks he found a sleepy place of twenty-five thousand or so inhabitants. But it was already a place of trade and it was already cosmopolitan. ‘Behind the diversity of houses which lined the waterfront were the souks, covered passageways, where merchants sat in the gloom, cross-legged in narrow alcoves among their piled merchandise. The souks were crowded with many races – pallid Arab townsmen; armed Bedu, quick-eyed and imperious; Negro slaves; Baluchis, Persians and Indians.’
An entrance arch says ‘Dubai, City of Gold.’ As in Thesiger’s day it’s a covered passageway and as in Thesiger’s day it is crowded with many races. But that’s about it for similarities to Thesiger’s day. For in the rush to modernize over the last forty years or so, Dubai demolished most of its souks. But then the tourists started to arrive, and tourists like to shop. And they particularly like to shop in traditional markets. So Dubai rebuilt its souks.
For some reason most of the windows sport a sign in English saying ‘German Spoken Here’. Every shop is a jeweller’s shop. Every shop seems to have identical stock. And the cumulative effect of all that gold is numbing.
In one of the little shops all four of the assistants say ‘Good morning, sir.’ All four are Indian and all four have moustaches. I ask them how business is.
‘Very good,’ says one. His colleagues nod and smile.
‘Better than last year?’
‘Oh no, sir, no, sir, very worse.’
‘Do you think it will pick up again.’
‘Oh yes, sir, yes, sir, definitely.’<
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I finger a delicate golden crucifix on a chain. There are hundreds of designs to choose from.
‘You want cross, sir? Very nice cross.’
‘Where do you get your stock from? Is it made here in Dubai?’
‘Italy, sir, most from Italy. Very good jewellery, Italy.’
Suddenly all four assistants look up. I follow their eyes. A girl is passing. She is perhaps nineteen and has the honeyed skin of the Mediterranean. She wears sunglasses, a halter top that makes much of her breasts, and a tiny pair of hot pants, white and tight, cradling the taut little rounds of the buttocks. Thesiger saw nothing like that.
3
Just Walking the Dog
I wake early. Stephen’s house is silent. I cannot even hear air conditioning, though the place is the same temperature as when I went to bed. Buddy the dog is delighted to see someone up so soon. He brings me a rubber bone to biff. ‘Come on, Buddy,’ I say, ‘we’re going out.’ It’s what I do at home.
Hung in the hallway I find one of those spring-loaded retractable leads, and we emerge from the baronial front door into Arabian Ranches. The street’s as quiet and windless as the house, the air as mild as an English spring. A slight mist hangs like stage smoke. The berms are planted with shrubs and other tuberous or wispy things, all immaculately trimmed and thriving, it seems, on just sand and irrigation. The dog fossicks down drives and wraps the lead deftly around lamp posts.
The large detached houses loom sandy-grey in the half-light. Garage doors stand open, partly because there is no need to lock them but mainly because they are too full of vehicles to close. The vehicles spill out onto the hard standing, three or four per house, big vehicles, flashy vehicles, vehicles that cost a lot. Every house has a four-wheel drive. Many have two. About one in four is a Range Rover, that most squirearchical of cars, the car for the owner of acres who doesn’t have to work those acres, or for the owner of a suburban house who likes to appear to own acres. I suspect the Range Rover owners of being British. They’ve made their money here in the desert but they trumpet it in the vehicular language of home.