Hello Dubai

by Joe Bennett

  Outside the building an open courtyard. Around the courtyard a mass of sofas and armchairs, indoor furniture lugged outside and arranged for an audience that has yet to materialize. Inside the square stand two lines of young Arab men at right angles to each other. The young men are immaculately arrayed in red and white headcloths, snowy white dishdashes and gleaming leather sandals. In the space between them four other young men are leading a chant. They carry microphones and move with a lurching dance step while wailing repetitively into the microphones to a background of recorded music set very loud. The two lines act as choruses, picking up the chant at prescribed places, swaying their heads, and beating time with their camel sticks. They chant and sway with gusto.

  The audience begins to emerge from the building behind. All of them Arab, all of them men, most of them older than the chanters. They too have camel sticks, whippy peeled stems a couple of feet long, which they absent-mindedly swing in time with the chanting. The sticks look too clean and new ever to have whacked a camel.

  The older men stand around in knots or sit on the sofas to watch the dancing. A television crew arrives by van and rigs up shoulder-toted cameras and walks straight into the midst of things to get close-ups of the action with the licence granted to camera crews everywhere by a world in thrall to television. The cameramen are Indian. Press photographers, who are also Indian, arrive. And servants with refreshments, trays of drinks and sweetmeats. For the first time I see one of those vast toucan-billed coffee pots being put to use.

  An imperious sheikhly figure cuts across the square in my direction. I am on the pavement, several yards back from the nearest sofa. He smiles and beckons me inside the square, shakes my hand – his skin is soft as chamois leather – and invites me with a gesture to sit. ‘Shukran,’ I say. He smiles and sits beside me, then with the subtlest movement summons a servant. A youth comes trotting across and I get a tiny cup of cardamom coffee from the beak of the giant brass pot.

  My host is clearly a significant figure. His shift across the square brings others as if by slow magnetic attraction. As each approaches he stands to shake hands. I feel obliged to do the same which disconcerts the new arrivals. I leave the decision whether to acknowledge me to them. Some shake my hand and mutter a greeting before moving on with relief to the man I now think of as the sheikh. Others walk on past. I sit back down. Another approaches. I stand back up.

  The chanting, stopped for a while, restarts, with renewed vigour. The chanters and dancers are evidently enjoying themselves, belting the stuff out with hypnotic intensity. This is no display of Morris dancing.

  A boy of a similar age to my wadi companion wanders out onto the square and rocks merrily about, imitating the lead chanter. Everyone smiles at his antics. A servant collects my coffee cup and pours me a glass of sticky, lemonish tea. I am now on the edge of but clearly distinct from, indeed alien to, a group of about thirty Arab men, most of them fifty years old and more, who chatter and laugh with easy familiarity.

  I am increasingly confident that this is the male half of a wedding party. And though I have been invited to be part of it – the first example I have witnessed of the traditional Arab hospitality that I’ve read about – I feel like a gatecrasher in my western clothes and my ignorance of everything. I would like to stay, to see what happens, but it would be wrong to stay. The sheikh has played his part by inviting me in; now I must play mine by leaving. I stash my tea glass discreetly under the seat, hover near the sheikh until he notices me, and thank him. He smiles and says, ‘You are welcome.’ I turn and head off up the darkening corniche of Ras al Khaimah, the music still blaring.

  It was an important do, so much is clear. The prominent location, the large numbers in immaculate dress, the numerous servants, the abundant refreshments, and the attentions of the media, all suggest that this was a wedding involving a significant local family. But more than that I can only guess. The chanting and dancing seemed as old as the mountains, and you could see from the older men’s reactions that it came from their roots. I saw one man who must have been eighty, hollow-eyed and helped into a chair by a youth. But once sitting, his toes bounced with the music and he watched the dance intently. What must he have seen in eighty years? I wonder what he makes of RAK Dream Tours and its synthetic fort.

  At the reception desk in the Nakheel the same tubby Indian is on duty with his derelict spectacles. When I collect my key he makes no reference to the damage inflicted on my bathroom. I take the clanking lift with an Aussie. He’s here, he tells me, to train pilots. As the lift stops at his floor, I ask him what he thinks of Ras al Khaimah. ‘Mate,’ he says, ‘not much.’

  My bathroom’s been fixed. They’ve even managed to find a replacement toilet seat with similar stains to the original. I shower with elaborate caution, gripping a pipe that runs up the wall and soaping myself with one hand. When I step out of the tub I grasp the rim with both hands. In the mirror I catch a glimpse of my naked self, hunched like Montgomery Burns in The Simpsons.

  There’s karaoke advertised in the bar of the Nakheel Hotel this evening. It consists of two Filipina girls running to fat. They wear matching leather bustiers and denim skirts and in the inch-wide gap between skirt and bustier they have matching bulges of flesh. That flesh is the colour of new honey. They jig side by side on a tiny stage, singing along competently but without commitment, to Abba and the Eagles. I recognize every song. The girls smile with parodic rapture, the performance equivalent of a tourist poster. As so often here I find myself speculating on the story of their lives. Born in the teeming squalid barrios of Manila, perhaps, or on one of the fish-eating, fruit-laden outer islands, they have found their way, after only half a dozen years of adulthood, to a low and smoky bar in a mess of a town in a Muslim land, singing to a gathering of the glum who pay them no attention.

  The bar manager is a busy little Indian man in a regulation white shirt with a regulation little pumpkin gut pushing at the buttons. He rarely moves far from the till. But the true spirit of the place is enshrined in the two girls behind the bar, sisters by the look of them, tall and blonde and unmistakably Russian. Only from Russia do you get that pallor, that severity, that hard-bitten pugnacity that seems to sing of potato vodka, harsh weather and adversity. Even the women tennis players from Russia retain that look, despite having escaped to the circus of global sport and the swaddling wealth that comes with it.

  Neither sister smiles or makes any pretence of caring, and their manner echoes that of the customers. Seated at the semicircular bar, reading from left to right, are a huge black African in a brown robe topped with a fur vest, a couple of full regalia Emiratis plotting in low voices over vodka, a morose Eastern European with acne scars like the surface of the moon who keeps eyeing me then looking away, two Indian men with a bottle of South African wine and, to my surprise, an Arab woman. She wears the full abaya and headscarf but no facial veil and is alone in looking cheerful as she drinks bottled Heineken with her man. Or at least with a man. Completing the merry gathering is an elderly solitary Arab in grey. When the leader of Hamas appears on television, the man leaves his bar stool to turn up the volume. I can’t tell you what the Hamas leader has to say, but I can tell you that he’s passionate about it. He drowns ‘Hotel California’.

  The wall behind the bar is pinned with banknotes from the world. An American dollar bill has been autographed in black marker pen. O.B. Laden, it says.

  16

  Pretty Flamingo

  The drive south out of Ras could not be described as prepossessing. It’s that halfway world again, where what used to be hasn’t quite gone and what will be hasn’t quite come. What used to be is a coastline of long sandy beaches backing onto scrubby desert. What will be is a continuous urban world housing wealthy ex-pats and even wealthier Arabs. The future is exemplified by the sudden eruptions of ornate villas with tall walls round them and no road to them, or by the shopping mall where I stop to buy a sandwich.

  Inside the Spinneys supermarket the shelv
es are stocked to overflowing with the bright mendacious packaging of commerce. The aisles are wide, the air is cool, the whole is as clean as an operating theatre, and it’s almost empty.

  A billboard the size of a house fronts the empty supermarket car park. ‘Live Your Dream’ it says in massive cursive script, a phrase that is not translated into any other language. Beneath the words is a picture of a white woman in a white dress on a white horse on a beach of white sand. A second picture shows two men snorkelling. But the ads don’t seem to be working. The dream isn’t pulling them in. The vast warren of villas and apartments between the shops and the private beach seems barely occupied.

  A little further along I stop at a beach, a remnant of what was. The warm sea laps like a cat. The beach is long, gently arcing, sandy as any adman could wish, and thick with trash. Plastic bags, plastic bottles, broken flip-flops, shampoo tubes, noodle bowls, used car tyres to fit any make or model, and a prodigious quantity of glass – much of it, I presume, biffed cheerfully from the windows of passing cars to burst into flesh-slicing shards. All of which may explain why I see no one snorkelling. And if you want to get hold of the white woman who galloped her white horse here at dawn, her hair blown by the wind and her white dress billowing behind her, I suggest you ring the equine vet.

  A little further south I find a sign to the Al Salama slaughterhouse. One side of the sign shows cartoon camels and goats looking vigorous and cheerful. The other side shows them swinging as carcases. But it’s Friday and the pens are empty and the place is shut.

  Surprisingly soon there looms on my right the familiar shape of a dead Russian freight plane. I’m back in Umm al Quwain, little more than an hour from Dubai. The UAE really is tiny. For old time’s sake I drop in on the Barracuda Beach Resort. Mid morning on the Muslim sabbath and the liquor store is thrumming as before, with the car park holding a million bucks’ worth of cars. Two of the cars have Saudi numberplates.

  On the other side of a chain-link fence, a crowd of Indian families has gathered under an awning to listen to an Indian man in a suit. I stop to eavesdrop a while. The man is animated. He is a motivational speaker. He is explaining in English how to become rich. He is expounding the five golden rules of investment. He is telling them the secret of success. What I don’t understand is why he is bothering to do so. What is he doing on his day off shouting into a microphone before a small crowd when he could be lounging on his three hundred-foot yacht in the Caribbean, drinking a cocktail from a golden beaker as he recuperates from a frenzied bout of no-holds-barred sex? Unless, that is, he is just trying to suck people in.

  I hang around a while in the hope of seeing the audience snatch the cutlery from the table, advance en masse towards the little podium he’s speaking from, and fork him to death. But no such luck. They are either too gullible or too nice.

  Umm al Quwain has caught a dose of Symbolic Roundabout Syndrome. As well as the standard issue coffee-pot and bird-of-prey roundabouts it’s got a dhow roundabout, a fort roundabout and an especially fetching shark roundabout. I had intended to drive on to Sharjah but decide on a whim to stop here for the night.

  At reception in the Flamingo Beach Resort I ask what the nightly rate is.

  ‘Six hundred dirhams,’ says the receptionist.

  ‘Thanks,’ I say, ‘but that’s rather more than I am prepared to pay.’

  ‘Three hundred dirhams,’ he says.

  Either this is the celebrated haggling in operation, in which case I seem to have a gift for it, or the Flamingo Beach Resort is desperate for custom.

  It looks quite recently built. It has a central garden with lawns and banks of flowers, and concrete fish ponds spanned by decorative wooden bridges, but it seems to have fallen into the always hungry gulf between aspiration and achievement. It aspires to be a playground for the rich and white. But the only visible guests are a couple of Indian families sitting fully clothed on the little private beach and a single fat Russian male with a face like a punctured rugby ball. He dives repeatedly and heavily into the swimming pool. In traditional Russian style he is wearing a pair of Speedos so tiny they threaten to disappear up the dread crack of his arse.

  The outdoor cafeteria is deserted. Hooded crows ransack a wastebin. The Flamingo Beach Resort, it seems, is indeed desperate for custom – or perhaps I’ve struck a slack period. The promotional brochure in my room paints a markedly different picture of the place.

  I dump my bag and head out into the area marked on my map as the old town. Most of the old bits of it are crumbling, uninhabited and uninhabitable. The rest is a warren of concrete hovels. The whole area smells of cooking and drains and bodies. It’s the smell of urban poverty that you can find in most places in the world.

  The locals are all from the Indian subcontinent. They squat outside the Bangladesh Cultural and Social Centre, or gather in knots in foetid alleyways and stare dispassionately as I pick my way between the puddles. But if I smile at them and say hello, they smile back with shy charm.

  The alleys terminate in rows of despairing shops: Al Taweil Water Supply, Ulmar Mohd Bakery, Wall Street Exchange, Star Laundry, Najah Pipe Fitter and Key Maker, Al Nasr Typing Centre, all of them tiny, dusty-windowed, overstocked and under-patronized.

  On the edge of this old town I find a restored fort, the place of birth of the sheikh who died so recently in London. Outside it stand a couple of cannon and a tank. It’s now, of course, in accordance with best practice, a museum, but in 1929 the fort was still very much the ruler’s palace, and it was then that it witnessed – and here I am quoting from the official website – ‘the martyrdom of H. H. Sheikh Hamad Bin Ibrahim Al Mualla in 1929, the 8th ruler of Al Mualla family in Umm Al Quwain.’

  It’s an illustrative story, and according to the website it ran as follows, though I should warn you that the writer is no champion of spelling, punctuation or syntax (and he’s also caught a nasty dose of brackets):

  One day, while H. H. Sheikh Hamad was taking his supper, (others said he was sick), in the presence of his cousins, as usual in the room adjoining the tower, entered two of his guards- his nephews-; Abdul Rahman and Saeed (Al Abd) to greet him and to take supper with him (some people said that he was fasting). However, Saeed was carrying a gun, suddenly, he shot his uncle. Then they held his body up to inform the people of Umm Al Quwain that Sheikh Hamad was dead and that by tomorrow people of Umm Al Quwain would know their new ruler.

  At that time, the people of Umm Al Quwain were furious and upset, so they were alerted and mobilized under the leadership of H.H. Sheikh Ahmed Bin Rashid Al Mulla and supprted by his cousins in order to control the situation, Abdul Rahman and Saeed were seeking shelter inside the fort. As the fort was high, it was easy for them to impose their domination upon the situation outside. After the matter had thoroughly been discussed, it was agreed to destroy the fort completely by a cannon, Saeed and Abdul Raman were able to see a vast area around them, so they saw that some people were towing the cannon towards the fort. Saeed Al Abd shot Hilal (one of those who were towing the cannon) in his leg.

  After deep thinking on the matter, the wise and powerful men of Umm Al Quwain made up their mind to dig a moat around the fort. After that they filled the moat of palm leaves and put on fire, as soon as fire was put up, it burnt Abdul Rahman and Saeed, so people of Umm Al Quwain got rid of both of them and suceeded to keep peace and stability in the Emirate. This incident shows how the citizens of Umm Al Quwain were faithful to their leader and to what extent they loved him.

  All of which is just far enough back in time to be quaint, exotic and enjoyable for us museum-goers, the hooded crows of history. But the account leaves rather a lot out. And what it leaves out, for reasons that may become clear, is the part played by outsiders behind the scenes, in particular and inevitably, the British.

  The martyr of this story, Sheikh Hamad, was no innocent. Indeed he could be said to have got what was coming to him, for he had acquired the throne of Umm al Quwain half a dozen years earlier by as
sassinating his cousin. In this he was supported by Abu Dhabi, which, in the endless complexities of local politics, was keen to gain more influence in Umm al Quwain.

  More crucially, Sheikh Hamad didn’t like the British. Whereas the cousin he’d murdered did.

  The British bided their time. Then, when the opportunity arose in 1929, they connived with the rulers of Sharjah to engineer the coup described above. Sheikh Ahmed who, as you may recall, mobilized the wise and powerful men of Umm al Quwain to dig a moat and set it on fire, and who subsequently became ruler to universal delight, was an anglophile. He once described the British Agent in the Gulf as being always right and having special gifts from God. Hardly surprising, really, since he owed his position to him.

  Ahmed ruled for fifty-two years. In 1981 his son succeeded him. It was this son who recently died in London. Britain may have withdrawn from the Gulf but her legacy lives on.

  The fort-museum, at which I am as usual the only visitor, doesn’t fascinate me greatly despite such splendid items on display as Umm al Quwain’s first driving licence. But I am intrigued by a small storeroom where, and again I am quoting from the king of brackets, ‘bags of dates are put aside for a certain time, affected by humidity and high temperature, dates turn to liquid gathering into a designated hole, this liquid is called locally (Dibs and sometimes Sih).’ I know what Dibs (or Sih) sounds like to me and it suggests that perhaps the Barracuda isn’t practising a trade entirely new to this region.

  I cross waste ground beyond the fort where Indian youths play cricket as badly and happily as ever, and arrive, mirabile dictu, at a corniche. This one’s busier than most I’ve seen, perhaps because it’s Friday. No one swims but there are plenty of families about, most of them Indian, squatting on the sand or on the grassed areas above, just idling in the mild weather.