Hello Dubai

by Joe Bennett

  In the paper there’s a report on the Dubai marathon, run yesterday. It was sponsored by Standard Chartered Bank and held, inevitably, ‘under the patronage of HH Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, UAE Vice-President, Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai.’ The winner, almost as inevitably, was the world’s best marathon runner, Haile Gebrselassie, who duly took a cheque for a quarter of a million dollars back home to Ethiopia, or wherever it is that he now lives, which I suspect may not be Ethiopia any more. Cheques for a quarter of a million get you out of Ethiopia.

  But there, in a simple sports report, is a microcosmic representation of Dubai’s daytime face. The ruler’s position is constantly bolstered. Western corporate money underlies everything. The best of the best is bought in from wherever. And another brushstroke is added to Dubai’s image. That image makes no effort to reflect the life led in Dubai. It merely paints a way of life that Dubai wants the world to imagine it leads. It’s PR. And it works.

  Feeling much recovered, I collect my car and drive out of Al Ain to the suburb of Hili, where there’s a fun park that doesn’t attract me and an archaeological site that does, or at least mildly. There in the 1960s some Danish archaeologists uncovered a five thousand-year-old tomb. On its lintel there are ancient drawings of a cheetah, an oryx and some people. The cheetah is long since extinct in this region, and the oryx is critically endangered, but people have multiplied exponentially. They’re the temporary local evolutionary success story.

  Inside the graves the Danes also found vessels of clay and soapstone of a design identical to vessels found in both Iran and Iraq. More interestingly still, they found clear evidence of agriculture. These people grew wheat and sorghum, which undermines the tendency in these parts to suggest that before the discovery of oil the UAE was occupied only by Bedouin, those implacable, hawk-eyed, dagger-bearing, fearless nomads of the desert. It wasn’t.

  The suburbs of Al Ain have an ordered quality that’s missing from Dubai. And amid the neat villas and parks and sports stadiums and hospitals, there are so many and such reliable road signs that I find without difficulty the Hili archaeological site with its great iron gates. They are locked. I ring Jim. He and his family are going to visit friends, a married couple, the husband very much an Al Ain local. Would I care to join them?

  The couple live a little way into the desert. Our route takes us past several camel farms, fenced-off areas of sand where a farmer is retained to live on site and tend to the beasts. Their fodder is brought in. Most camels are kept only for the pride of ownership.

  The couple meet us in their front yard where they keep a small menagerie, including a horse and, to my surprise, a couple of dogs. And right by the house, enchantingly, there’s a pen of indigenous gazelles. These are the dhabi after which Abu Dhabi was named. They are quivering delicate creatures, no more than thigh height, with the huge eyes and electric reactions of all deer. They are half tame, and in response to my coos and clucks come hesitantly to the wire fence, butting against it with horns like miniature plaster moulds of themselves. No one is quite sure how many of these exquisite beasts survive. With the big cats long gone their only predator is Man. But he’s an outstanding predator, though, more often than not, an inadvertent one.

  The house is a simple, open-plan, single-storey building of plastered concrete. Carpets on the floor, a scattering of traditional artefacts, a model dhow, a brass coffee pot – though we get tea – an ancient Martini rifle, and a tame pigeon that flutters across on invitation and perches on my shoulder. The carpet is speckled with pigeon shit.

  Said is a gentle, educated man, bespectacled, affable, slim in his dishdash. And he’s worried about the desert. I cannot imagine anyone I saw in the bars last night being worried about the desert. But then neither could I imagine Said in any of the bars I visited last night.

  The problem, says Said, is that so many desert animals have been lost. Those animals spread seed. Without them, the desert just keeps getting bigger. He is the first conservationist I’ve met here, indeed the first person who has expressed any interest in the land beyond the cities. To most people I’ve met, the desert is an inconvenience, or an adventure playground or just real estate in waiting.

  Said is nevertheless proud of the industrialization of his country. Abu Dhabi, he says, is building infrastructure on a magnificent scale. Its vast new ports will lead the world. A huge aluminium smelter is under construction. I have to remember, he says, that the UAE is only thirty-eight years young, a mere baby on the international stage. Things have happened here at a headlong pace and it was inevitable that mistakes would be made. The worst have concerned immigration. There is, says Said, by way of illustration, an island in Abu Dhabi that is populated entirely by Indians.

  He says this sadly, not with racial rancour but as someone who feels that something worth keeping has been lost. It is a sentiment I have been waiting to hear expressed. There are simply too many ex-pats here. They have little stake in the place. They don’t identify with it. They are birds of passage. In the event of war or economic meltdown, they would simply fly away.

  Said is equally unimpressed by the sheikhs of the minor emirates. ‘All they want is more money for themselves,’ he says. ‘But democracy will come.’

  ‘Really?’ I had not expected to hear this.

  ‘Oh yes, it will come.’

  ‘When?’

  ‘Soon,’ he says, ‘quite soon. But you must remember we are young.’ And he stresses that the sheikhs of Abu Dhabi and Dubai have been people of vision and courage. And without such strong leaders the UAE could not have come as far as it has, or as fast.

  I’ve no doubt that he’s right.

  He lets me hold the Martini rifle. It’s British army issue, first used in the 1870s and much loved by the Bedouin. It’s brick solid. When I raise the thing to my shoulder, point it out of the front door and peer down the barrel at the darkening desert, I struggle to hold it steady. Rifles like this once governed the world. The bullets they spat felled fuzzy wuzzies, Zulus, dervishes, rebel sepoys and no doubt many an astonished delicate gazelle.

  After dinner in Al Ain, Jim has work to do. He sends me out into the warm night with the names of a couple of places I might enjoy. The Peach Bar, he tells me, is popular with sexually ambiguous Filipinos.

  ‘Get the right night,’ he says, ‘and it’s a riot.’

  This is the wrong night. The Peach Bar’s dead as meat. A couple of gloomy Indians sit drinking alone and staring at a small and unlit stage where nothing’s happening.

  In an ex-pat hotel bar nearby I meet a Health and Safety officer from Yorkshire. He’s currently tending to the health and safety of a gang of North Koreans building a hospital. ‘They don’t do health and safety in North Korea,’ he says. ‘Hadn’t got a clue, this lot, not a bloody clue. Had to teach them from the bottom up.’ He drops all h’s, pronounces up ‘oop’ and turns the word ‘the’ into a glottal stop.

  ‘And guess how many accidents we’ve had, how many injuries?’

  ‘None,’ I want to say. I don’t, of course. It wouldn’t be playing the game. But I’m struggling to take an interest in North Korean health and safety.

  A guitarist appears on stage and rescues me by attracting my friend’s attention. The guitarist is wearing a young man’s shirt and hair the length of a young man’s hair, but it is grey.

  ‘Where are you from?’ says a woman’s voice behind me.

  Its owner is tall, Chinese and dressed to sell sex. She looks deep into my eyes, and smiles with a thousand teeth.

  ‘New Zealand.’

  ‘Nooseala?’

  ‘New Zealand.’

  ‘What country?’

  ‘Australia,’ I say, because it’s always easier.

  ‘I love Australia,’ she says, and she forces herself to laugh and brushes her hand against my forearm.

  It doesn’t take her long to work out that she is wasting her time. And when I ask her a few questions, she drops out of performance mode with what s
eems like relief. She has been in Al Ain for five years. She is still lonely here. She would love to return to China.

  I tell her I’ve spent a bit of time in China and she tells me where she’s from, and by a fluke I have been there, or at least near enough there, and she asks me more detailed questions than I can answer, and she tells me how much she misses everything, and I think for a moment that she’s going to cry but she is tougher than that. She offers to buy me a drink and then laughs at the reversal of roles.

  Every couple of months she has to leave the UAE to renew her visitor’s visa. I ask her why she doesn’t just pack up and go home. Money, she says. She is no doubt paying off a debt to a pimp, or to some cartel that trades in dreams and poverty and female flesh, but she will not elaborate. I press her gently but she begins to look worried, and I suspect that she suspects I may be someone in authority after all. I back off.

  ‘I like talk you,’ she says as I finish my drink and make to leave. ‘You are nice man.’

  I’m not. I’m a voyeur. I like to peep into lives, to come alongside them as it were, see in through their cabin windows, get a titillating glimpse of their otherness, and then sail safely on.

  And as I steer my little boat of self across the hotel courtyard, I sense that she and the Yorkshireman and the North Korean labourers building a hospital that will never treat them, are of a piece. They are the people who come to boom towns, who migrate to wherever there’s a new place growing, a place that promises work and money, that offers an escape from poverty. That offers hope.

  The UAE, where all the major cities are only an hour’s drive apart, is just one big boom town. All the whores and labourers and the western professionals and the Filipina maids and the Indian middle men have come here in the same way as people once went to the goldfields or west across the States, to prosper or to fall, to take their chances. Each has brought a story with him and adds a chapter to it here. All hope to write a happy ending. Few do. The Chinese girl doesn’t look like doing so.

  It’s midnight. In the two hours since I left it, the Peach Bar has come alive. To get in I have to push past a big black doorman. On the stage inside, now garishly lit, a Filipino transsexual is singing Shirley Bassey. He wears a Dolly Parton wig and a sequinned vest and a denim skirt and the floor at his feet is pulsing with dancers, male dancers and female, brown-skinned and black. And there’s happiness here, happiness I didn’t find in last night’s bars, or in the Chinese whore bar or indeed in any bar I’ve visited in this Islamic world. It’s no-thought-to-tomorrow happiness, don’t-give-a-toss happiness, flinging itself around without restraint, like kids playing football on the beach.

  ‘Darlings,’ exclaims the singer as he ends a song, ‘DARlings,’ and the crowd squeals with delight. They’re poor people most of them, menial people, a long way from home but right now happy. The air is fierce with smoke. A tubby Indian manager presides over a till on which the cash drawer lolls open stuffed with notes. Happiness is good business.

  Crossing waste ground on my way home I stop a fraction of a second before my foot comes down on a black coil. I leap back. My heart rises in my chest. I can hear it beating. The coil doesn’t move. ‘There are no nice ones,’ said Jim. I biff a stone at it. The coil doesn’t move. I edge closer. It is irrigation tubing. I boot it. It skitters across the gravel, rolls, tilts and falls to the ground. I laugh and feel happy under the Arabian stars.

  I turn off the highway. Ahead of me lie a few days in Dubai then the long flight home to the green of New Zealand. Here’s my last chance to get a taste of Thesiger’s desert.

  The road that spears across it towards a blank horizon is new and smooth and black, but its edges are eroded by little fans of blown sand. After every storm this road must have to be found again, dug out.

  On an English language radio station there’s a programme about real estate, that middle-class obsession the world over. Worried property owners ring in to ask questions of an expert. You can hear fear in their voices. There is talk of an eight per cent reduction in Dubai’s population and of house prices having sunk fifty per cent with no bottom in sight. And the callers are worried about a recent decree from the sheikh. What, they want to know, does it actually mean? The expert can’t tell them. A whole edifice of wealth is creaking. I listen to the urgent anxious voices and I look at blank impassive desert and I turn the radio off. Now there’s only the sun hot through the glass and the whirr of the engine and the hiss of rubber on tarmac.

  Up ahead of me in nowhere the figure of a man takes shape. As I approach he steps into the road, waving with both arms. Not frantic, but insistent. I seem to have no choice but to stop. I stop a yard or two short of him. His robe is off-white cotton. He steps forward, pats the bonnet with both hands, comes round to the passenger side, opens the door and gets in.

  I turn to smile at him. He doesn’t smile back. Middle-aged, face of leather, three days short of a shave, he barely even glances at me.

  ‘Salaam aleekum,’ I say, ‘my name’s Joe,’ and I offer a hand. He mutters, takes my hand briefly, distractedly, as though it’s a tedious preliminary to be got out of the way, and then gestures that we drive on. We drive on. He leans forward in the seat, looking eagerly ahead.

  ‘Where we go?’ I say, conceding the language.

  He says nothing. He smells as I would imagine a medieval peasant to smell, of animals, and sweat, and unwashed clothes.

  The road forks. He gestures that we go right. We go right. I’ve become his chauffeur. This is top-quality hitch-hiking.

  We drive through perhaps half a dozen miles of sandy nothing, dotted with the occasional ghaff tree or spindly, leggy shrub, passing a few errant camels loping at the pace of pointlessness. It seems that I’m committed to I don’t know what. Another of God’s dance invitations, perhaps. I’ll just keep driving this silent man into the desert until either the road stops or we get where he wants to go. I check the fuel gauge.

  Suddenly he drums on the hood of the glovebox with the palms of both hands, then grasps my arm. I stop the car. He gets out and shuts the door gently but without speaking. Then he sets off across the sand. A few hundred yards away I can see the tops of rough fencing. I watch him disappear over a ridge, reappear on the next one, then sink once more from view. I put the Nissan into gear and drive on. The tarmac shimmers and dances with heat. I reflect on what’s just happened and soon decide that there is nothing to reflect on. The man just needed a lift.

  A few miles and the road comes to an end in a village with no name and apparently no people. White-walled, flat-roofed bungalows with mirror windows are set around a vast plaza of sand. On the sand a pair of goalposts and a mosque. 4WDs outside the houses. I park and step out into silence. No kids, no pets, no smells, no sounds from the houses. In every yard stand a few date palms. I can feel the warmth of the sand through my flip-flops. A flight of doves whirrs past. The football pitch is marked with the hoof prints of camels. The prints are as long as my foot and twice as broad, and tipped with two prominent toes.

  I pass through a gap between houses and emerge into orange desert, fading with distance to a tawny haze. The crinkle of dunes stretches to the horizon. A quarter of a mile away a crude fence of netting and wire and shade cloth encloses a mob of camels. As I near, I can hear them low, grumble and belch. Some are almost white, some close to black, most the colour of the desert. They crowd to the fence to observe me. Alerted by his camels, a man emerges from a hut inside the camp. When he sees me, he freezes like a cat. I wave, shout ‘hello’. He just stares.

  I veer off over the dunes, go perhaps half a mile into the desert. It is hard walking, my steps up each dune shortened by miniature landslides under each placed foot. On the flatter, seemingly finer-grained down slope, my feet sink and have to be hauled out each time, the grains cascading like table salt. I sit on a dune. The camels, the village are out of sight. This place feels like no place. I take note of where the sun is in the sky.

  Halfway between the calm of Al Ain
and the frenzy of Dubai, this place feels as remote and indifferent as the surface of the moon. Just sky, sun and sand. I sense how I would shrivel here like a raisin. I don’t hear the call that Thesiger heard. I wouldn’t want to take this emptiness on, this perpetual, barren present tense.

  As I trek back to the village I can feel the clock restarting. I get back into my little silver car, my petrol-powered Japanese camel, and I drive it, smooth and cool, to Dubai, where the hands of the clock hurtle, where more has happened in the last thirty years, more buildings built, more changes wrought, than in the whole of its previous history. The highway spears across the sand and the city comes out to meet it and absorbs me and my car without noticing.

  19

  Racing with Wayne

  Before I went away I tried to find out about camel racing. Every tourist brochure refers to it. In a place without much in the way of quaint local stuff to photograph, or indeed much to distinguish it from any tourist destination, camel racing is a splendid novelty draw card, indigenous, apparently traditional, odd. Though it isn’t, as it happens, that traditional. Bedouins raced their camels only at weddings. But in recent times, as the Arab identity of Dubai and the UAE became ever more diluted, the ruling families of Dubai and Abu Dhabi in particular saw the need to foster indigenous activities and pumped a lot of money into it to please their countrymen. But I haven’t been able to find it.

  I found it with ease on my only previous visit. A taxi driver took me out a little into the desert to see the camels training. It was among the more bizarre sights of my life. In crippling heat a string of camels thundered across sand. They ran with their necks stretched out, as if reaching for tit-bits. They didn’t gallop as horses gallop but they reached an impressive speed. And strapped to their humps were little children. They held on with one hand and with the other they whacked the camel.

  Behind the camels came a motorcade of owners and trainers in the inevitable 4WDs, throwing up a dust storm that billowed and floated behind them like a terrestrial con trail.