by Joe Bennett
Every run is fiercely cheered. Every umpiring decision is fiercely disputed. Arguments flare like bushfires. Whole teams rush in to shout at each other with unrestrained ferocity. It looks as if fists may swing into faces. Ten seconds later they’re playing and grinning and cheering again.
I amble with feigned casualness to the point on the perimeter where it seems to me most likely that a shot might pierce the field and threaten to run onto the highway. I intend to shimmy along the kerb, swoop on the ball like Jonty Rhodes and casually biff it back over the stumps, whereupon the captains of at least three of the teams will recognize a gifted member of the international brotherhood of cricket and invite me to field for them, there being, as far as I can tell, no limit to the number of players in a team. And having fielded it is only fair that I should be given a chance to bowl. And then, insh’allah, to bat. I’d just love to bat.
I have to wait only a couple of minutes. A hoick clears mid-wicket on the full and deep midwicket on the bounce and is bound for death by traffic. I rise, jog a few paces to my left across the perilous terrain and do my Jonty Rhodes swoop. The ball takes a cruel bounce but I am locked onto it like one of those missiles with nosecam that the Americans just love to biff at enemy bridges. The ball obliges me by taking a second little hop straight into the palm of my left hand, I transfer it to my right, swivel and biff it in to the wicketkeeper with little power because of a rotator cuff damaged years ago by throwing, but with an accuracy that I do my best not to look surprised by. The keeper is wearing sandals, brown trousers rolled to the knee and a yellow t-shirt that says Billabong. He catches the ball and knocks down the planking wicket. It is, all told, and without false modesty, a defter piece of fielding than any I have observed on this wasteland in the last fifteen minutes. And the result? A row. An apocalyptic row.
Though I cannot understand a word of it I fully understand the issue. Can a batsman be run out by a spectator? In an ordinary game, of course not. But in a game as arbitrary as this without boundaries or agreed team numbers or anything approaching formality, who is to say? The answer is that everybody is to say. And say it they do, with ferocious relish, for the best part of a minute, a minute that ends with a tug of war over the bat between the man I’ve run out and what I take to be the captain of the fielding side. The captain is by far the biggest man on either side. The batsman, who has the advantage of holding the handle, wrenches the bat from his grasp but only so as to fling it to the ground in a gesture of theatrical disgust.
‘Very good throwing.’
An Indian youth with matchstick arms and a lot of teeth has come alongside me smiling.
‘Thank you,’ I say, and his smile ratchets up another hundred watts. And I feel as if I’ve just run out Ponting on 99 with a direct hit at a single stump from the boundary on the first day of the Lord’s test.
The game resumes. I wait for a captain to come sidling over and to issue the hoped-for invitation. I wait until it becomes clear it is not going to happen. Then I go. But my day has been brightened by my own admittedly fluky piece of fielding. The value of even trivial athletic success is underestimated. I used to teach PE. The pleasure of seeing a fat or ill-coordinated child learning to perform, say, a forward roll, or a basketball lay-up, never wore off. You could just see them swell with joy.
And as I wander away, I find myself suffused with memories. The mind often works like that, I find, like a filing cabinet. It sits there fat with stuff that goes for years untouched and seemingly forgotten. But something pulls on a tab in that cabinet and up comes a great wad of material, various and arbitrarily preserved, the events that have somehow stuck when millions of similar ones have dissolved to nothing.
Of course my memories of fielding are by and large the ones where I’ve done something good. I recall one particular booming throw from the shadow of the oak trees in Adastra Park, Hassocks. And then with full sensory detail a catch swims into my head. The memory must be thirty-five years old but is as fresh as a rosebud. I was fielding at a suicidally close short leg on the old county ground at Hastings. Seagulls wheeled and screamed in a breezy summer sky and from the open window of a tenement that overlooked the ground came the sound of Acker Bilk’s ‘Stranger on the Shore’. And I found myself swaying to its slow evocative melancholy, inhabited by the music in a way that never happens now. I was awake to everything that was happening around me, to the cricket and the gulls and the sky, but my mind was simultaneously swamped by the song.
The batsman clipped a ball off his pads. He middled it. It was a good shot. Without anything approaching a conscious decision I moved with the shot, was part of the shot, and my hands went to the flight of the ball, which had travelled perhaps ten feet at a speed that would take it to the boundary and everyone looked to the boundary but the ball wasn’t there. I had it. It was snug in my palms. And for a moment I stayed crouched and everyone including the batsman was seeking the ball with their eyes, like television cameras swinging. And then, as one, they realized. They came running to congratulate me and the batsman left and the air was still rich with ‘Stranger on the Shore’. The bowler’s name, I’ve just remembered, was Geoff Cocksworth and he was a lovely gentle guy. I wonder what happened to him.
And here now, deep in Arabia, as the traffic rumbles beside me on the Muslim sabbath and the whoops and yells of a couple of hundred Indian cricketers fade to distance, I wander along with a head full of 1973 to a fish market.
At its entrance an old man sits scrunched and folded in a plastic chair. His knees are drawn up to his chest and his arms are wrapped around those knees like a child’s corpse in an ancient grave. His feet are bare, his toes seemingly prehensile, his skin sallow. His sandals lie at the base of the chair. He wears a stained grey smock and he looks Levantine, or perhaps Iranian, his face the drooping face of a basset hound. And I remark on him only because I realize now that I have seen so few old people here. The population of Dubai is of working age. People come here to work and when they stop work their visa expires and they go somewhere else to get old, which further skews the demographics of this place. Dubai’s population is not just preponderantly male, it is also preponderantly young.
Thousands of fish have died to create this market. Many are dying in front of my eyes, sucking hopelessly at inimical air. And what fish they are. Here’s the mall aquarium on a slab: huge kingfish, a heap of small shark, snapper, mullet, John Dory, sole, numerous species I’ve never seen, and pile after pile of the local cod, a sluggish-looking yellowy brown beast called hamour. I ate hamour the other night. It was creamy, meaty, good.
My white skin gets me a ‘Hello, how are you, sir, where you from, sir?’ at every stall and a soft and fishy handshake that feigns affection then doesn’t let go. Instead it tries to draw me and my fat wallet in to admire the fish, to touch the fish, to buy the fish. Prawns, crabs, shellfish. One especially animated vendor presses crab claws on me and illustrates by gesture that brings smiles from all around that they are startlingly aphrodisiac.
The stallholders are all men, and none of them Arabs. The shoppers are almost all men, only a few of them Arabs. And those few are short women in black, each with a face mask that sits on the nose like a visor on a medieval jouster. These women look like black, beaked shuttlecocks.
You buy your fish whole and take it to a white-tiled area like an industrial lavatory, where knife-wielding geniuses gut, descale and fillet it in seconds, biffing the good bits into one bag and the rest into another. You get both bags if you want them.
Beyond the fish a small fruit and vegetable market offers spuds, bananas, tomatoes, an infinite variety of dates, and Gala apples from New Zealand, each single fruit cradled on a little polystyrene frill. And beyond that there’s a hall of meat, mainly sheep and goat, where great cleavers hack though bone as clean and white as coconut flesh. The muscles of meat are a dull engorged purple and the encircling fat is the colour of old butter. I can stare at meat markets long and long, and I do. What I cannot describe is their v
aguely iron-like smell, a smell of murder and honesty. It’s a smell not allowed in a mall.
Huge hooks of tripe hang from rails like used cleaning rags. And here’s a bin of sheep’s heads, the skulls peeled of their skin and wool but the eyes still wildly staring and looking bright enough to have been seeing this morning. Their last sight would have been the Halal slaughterman who impassively seized them, turned them towards Mecca, invoked his god, and slit their throats in the manner prescribed by Mohammed thirteen hundred years ago.
The main road has an overpass made necessary by the ceaseless traffic. Dubai has grown so fast that its infrastructure is always at the point of bursting. Any new structure – a bridge, a road, a sewage system – is choked to capacity the day it opens.
Coming off the steps on the far side of the overpass I step effectively into downtown Delhi. Hundreds of young Indians throng a scrap of waste ground. They’ve got nothing to do and no money to do it with. They squat and smoke and chat. They touch each other a lot, standing with fingers thoughtlessly interlaced, or with an arm thrown over a mate’s shoulders. They carry chunky outmoded cell phones and they chatter in languages I do not know.
I would like to know them. I would like to talk with these men, to listen to them, to have them tell me a little of their lives. Their lives have been infinitely harder than mine due simply to the accidents of our births. But my good mornings get no reply and I am shy to press myself upon them. I generally find it easy to make contact with strangers, but with these men I am afflicted by a sense of being patronizing. I want a glimpse of their hardship but I don’t plan to do anything about it. The thought holds me back. Instead, I just loiter, smoking, and try to look affable, approachable.
The men flow and mill around me as if I were indistinguishable from the lamp post I’m leaning against. They see me, of course, but they assess me by instant reflex as an inverse untouchable. I am the victim of discrimination because of the colour of my skin. Or so it seems to me. If for one second one of these men makes accidental eye contact, I smile as best I can, but his eyes dart away immediately with a frisson of discomfort, a sense of a rule having been broken. It would be different if we were all four years old. But the world has stamped us.
These are the men who build; who built the Hyatt Hotel, the rhinoplasty clinic, the villa I’m staying in, the hotels where the tourists drink, the offices where the money men work. Critics of Dubai, and there are many of them, like to focus on the plight of these men. They see these men as little better than slaves. They have a point.
On my only previous visit to Dubai, when I stopped over for a few days a decade or so ago, I saw construction workers being shifted around the city in cattle trucks. They travelled standing up, prevented from falling over merely by being crammed in. It was high summer, intolerably hot, forty something degrees. I remember thinking at the time what it must be like to be in the middle of that press of people on that truck bed in that heat. I remember flinching at the thought.
It seems that others flinched too. The trucks were offensive to western eyes, less because of the men’s suffering than because of the visibility of that suffering. It brought an unpleasant fact out from under its rock, reminding the comfortable how their comfort depended on the discomfort of others.
So voices were raised. And Dubai is always keen to quieten raised voices, lest its image be blackened. The ruler banned the cattle trucks. They have since been replaced by cheap metal buses from India, the only non-air-conditioned vehicles in the city. In high summer they must be like ovens. But now that the construction workers are seated on board, they resemble more privileged human beings and their plight is less visually offensive.
Like everyone else, these men have been lured to Dubai by money. Agents come to their villages in Bangladesh or Kerala or anywhere on the Indian subcontinent and promise them better money than they can make at home. They often have to pay a bond up front, a sum of money equivalent to up to six months of wages. More often than not they have to borrow that money from wherever they can, which immediately puts them in thrall to their family or a money-lender or an agent. The money-lender and the agent are sometimes the same person.
When workers arrive many have their passports taken from them by their employers. It is supposed not to happen but it does, and the men are powerless to complain. Sometimes they find they are not paid as much as they’d been promised. Again they are powerless to complain. They are accommodated on the fringe of the city in compounds away from the western eye. Conditions can be appalling, with a dozen men to a tiny room and the lanes between the compounds running with sewage.
Recently the ruler decreed that during the hot months construction workers may not be forced to work during the middle of the day when the heat is a threat to life. The law is often ignored and some still die of heatstroke. They die in accidents too. Figures are hard to obtain but you can be confident that the construction of any mall or hotel whose air-conditioned corridors you tread in pampered ease cost somebody his life. And there are suicides in the compounds. Again the figures are hard to obtain. The dead man’s family inherits any outstanding debt.
I have heard and read such things. I have no doubt they are true. But I do doubt that they are true for all these men. If they were, surely the word would spread even among the terminally poor of India and the supply of labour would shrivel. These men generally earn about twenty-five American dollars a day, which is enough for them to send money home. A stint of a few years can set them up, if not for life, at least for marriage and a start back home. Which is why they come.
The story in the end is the oldest one in the world. Wealth exploits poverty. It always has. It probably always will. All that differs is the degree to which it does so. In every war in human history it’s the rich that have waged the war and the poor who’ve been shot. In the good old days of Merrie England, that we are so fond of romanticizing, every lice-ridden peasant was inescapably in thrall to the lord of the manor. In the heyday of the British Empire colossal wealth was generated from the actual or effective slavery of countless indigenous peoples, and almost as many British subjects – the coal hewers and the loom workers, the Dickensian victims. And still it goes on, everywhere, and seemingly inevitably. The shoes you are wearing now, the underwear, the t-shirt, the jeans, were made by people far poorer than you, working for far less than you would dream of accepting.
And yet, for many of those clothing workers in China, as for many of these construction workers or maids or janitors or carpark attendants in Dubai, their job is the best they can hope for, given the misfortune of their birth, and the way the world is. And that job is a thing they wouldn’t want to lose. It represents a step onto the ladder.
Here among these idling Indians, I’m in the heart of the original Dubai, the little township that Thesiger described before the gaseous expansion of the late twentieth century. It is divided by the Creek. The west side of the Creek is known as Bur Dubai, the east side as Deira. I plunge into Deira.
The place is built without apparent plan. No buildings exist to impress. They exist to house people and businesses. At the same time they shade the narrow alleyways and funnel whatever breeze there might be to cool them. The architecture acknowledges the climate, rather than simply defying it, like a mall. And unlike the vast and daunting show-off bits of Dubai, this is a place for people to go on foot. I wander at random. The writhing intersecting alleyways baffle my sense of direction. And from time to time I come across a you-are-here street map that baffles it further. But I enjoy the energy of the place.
Faces from the Indian subcontinent predominate but there are numerous people I take to be Iranian, plus Africans of all sorts, some in clothing that wouldn’t seem out of place in National Geographic magazine. I see few white people and almost no Arabs.
Porters squat cross-legged on their trolleys, smoking, drinking tea, killing the day. The buildings rise three, four, five storeys. At their base an enterprise – a barber’s shop, an electrical goods sto
re, a bakery, none looking especially prosperous, but all alive. Men do deals on the street, or argue with a benign ferocity that you don’t see on the streets of Great Britain or New Zealand. Men in jeans, men in pyjamas, men in grey one-piece shrouds. Men.
Above the shopfronts, balconies are festooned with washing, ranks of it: cheap cotton working clothes that tell the story of the cramped rented apartments behind those balconies, the apartments that disgorge these people onto these streets. It all feels local, compressed, urban, soiled. I take a seat on a low wall by a scrap of sloping land on which a few youths have contrived a game of cricket. ‘Hello, how are you, where you from,’ says one of the players. I suspect him of wanting to sell me something, probably a fake Rolex. I’ve been offered a dozen in the last half hour. A recent sweep in the city caught two hundred and sixty-two vendors of fake watches and DVDs. It also netted thirty beggars, sixty-nine car washers and fifty-eight unlicensed butchers and fish cleaners. They will all be deported.
‘New Zealand,’ I say.
‘Stephen Fleming, very good batter, very good captain.’ He grins.
I tell him that Stephen Fleming has actually just retired. He already knows. And he knows that Daniel Vettori has taken over the captaincy.
The young man’s name, if I have made out his accent correctly, is Ibrahim. He’s from Peshawar. His native tongue is Pushtu. I ask him to speak to me in Pushtu.
‘What am I saying?’ he asks.
‘Tell me about life in Peshawar.’ It transpires that he feels very strongly about life in Peshawar but the noise he makes doesn’t even seem to divide into syllables.
‘Thank you,’ I say and he offers me chewing gum.
Ibrahim’s twenty, though his passport says twenty-six. ‘I come Dubai five years.’
‘You came five years ago?’
‘I come five years ago. I work my uncle.’
His uncle seems to run some sort of textile business, but Ibrahim is both hard to understand even in English and reluctant to say too much. I don’t know why. It seems to me a mixture of politeness and discomfort. What had begun as a daring and jocular welcome to this wandering white man has become more intimate than he expected and perhaps wanted. His fresh face is transparent in the mix of emotions. He is pleased to be talking to me, or perhaps to be seen to be talking to me, but he is nervous at the same time. A naturally ebullient character, he repeatedly bursts into a smile that is then just as rapidly extinguished by self-consciousness.