by Joe Bennett
When I’m cycling back late in the evening, and pedalling with a vigour that is not entirely unrelated to my discourse with Mr Wii, a Jeep pulls up alongside me. Two of my fellow party-goers want to give me and the bike a lift. They are insistent.
The woman of the couple is wearing a skimpy leopard-skin dress to show off her boob job. Despite the dress she is, by her own confession, hopelessly sentimental about animals. So sentimental indeed that in response to an appeal last year she flew to Borneo to work as a volunteer in a camp for orphaned orangutans. She lasted a week.
‘So I don’t suppose I need to ask how it was.’
‘I’ll tell you exactly how it was,’ she says. ‘It was fucking shit.’
21
’Bye Dubai
Last week was the third anniversary of Sheikh Mohammed’s accession. The local business paper marked the event by printing a special bumper twenty-four-page lift-out super souvenir colour supplement. They called it Tribute to a Visionary.
It consisted of pictures of the Sheikh and opinions about the Sheikh. The pictures varied – Mohammed in a hard hat, in a top hat, in traditional costume, in Shanghai, at a construction site, a playground, Ascot. The opinions didn’t vary at all. Everyone liked the Sheikh a lot. The chairman of Emaar Properties, the company that built Arabian Ranches, called him ‘a great example of a successful leader’. The Secretary General of the Dubai Executive Council said, ‘He has established new standards of good governance and wise leadership.’ Yahya Lootah of Lootah Real Estate, and there’s a name to revel in, said, ‘We are blessed to have Sheikh Mohammed at the helm.’ And the director of Sheikh Mohammed’s office at the Ruler’s Court let us know, endearingly, that ‘Sheikh Mohammed always provides happy surprises that make each and every one of us proud of him.’
Now, there are three possibilities with this publication. One is that it’s all true. The second is that it’s the most blatant piece of up-sucking, lickspittle puffery since Stalin died. The third is that it’s a bit of both. And I’d go for number three.
There seems little doubt from what I’ve read and heard that Sheikh Mohammed is a good man. But it would take a very good man indeed to read that sort of thing about himself all the time and not be affected by it. History abounds in leaders who have come to believe flatterers. Africa abounds in them still.
The only two defences that our species has found against such leaders are democracy and a free press. Democracy and a free press are the first things that any would-be tyrant abolishes. Dubai’s got neither. It is not a democracy. And neither, for all its protestations to the contrary, does it have a free press. To recognize that truth you have only to imagine a Fleet Street supplement celebrating three years of any British prime minister. Dubai is an autocracy with censorship.
Autocracies, though, get things done. That’s their great advantage. Right now, for example, Dubai is building a metro system. Some of it will run underground, the rest on stilts. The trains will be driverless. The project will cost about fifteen billion dollars. It will make a big difference. It will be wonderful. And it has happened because the Sheikh said it would happen. Nothing has been allowed to stand in its way; no resource management acts, no piddling planning laws, no ratepayer protests, nothing.
The simple fact is that had Dubai not been autocratically led – and well led, far better led than many of its neighbours – it could never have come so far so fast. It owes its success to its ruling family. And that ruling family owes its position, historically, to the colonial patronage of Britain. Whether democracy will come one day, I have no idea. Meanwhile I just hope Sheikh Mohammed can keep his head amid the flattery.
Autocracies are common, but Dubai is unique. What makes it unique is the nature of its population. Only around five per cent of its denizens are citizens. The rest are guests, sixty per cent or more from the Indian subcontinent, the remainder from every country on earth. Almost all of them are here of their own free will. Every one of them is on a visa. And every one of them can be hoofed out on a whim. They have no comeback.
The streets of Dubai must be among the safest in the world. This is not because of a vast police presence, nor is it because there are no criminals in Dubai. Organized crime has found Dubai a convenient base. But the streets are safe because petty criminals can be instantaneously and irrevocably got rid of. The two hundred and sixty-two vendors of fake watches that I mentioned earlier, along with the thirty beggars, sixty-nine car washers and fifty-eight unlicensed butchers and fish cleaners, were deported. Gone. Never to return. It makes for safe streets, though I doubt that the fish cleaners were much of a threat to life.
The only people who can’t be deported are the Emirati citizens. But very few of them take to crime because most of them do very nicely, thank you.
I doubt that any country in history has housed as high a proportion of foreigners as Dubai does. That makes it odd. But I am not sure that it deserves to be hated, as it clearly is hated by many.
It is certain that some of its workers are duped and exploited. It is also true that there is no great system of legal protection to which the exploited have recourse. But you will find exploitation in any city in the world and you will find greater exploitation, and greater poverty and greater injustice in hundreds of third world cities, the cities that many of Dubai’s workers came from. Which is why many of them choose to stay. Home is worse. And I suspect, in the end, that what makes some people hate this place is that it brings the third world into view of the first world. If African, Indian, Chinese and Filipino poverty stays in Africa, India, China and the Philippines then it is more seemly, and easier to ignore, than if it comes to live in an ostensibly first-world city alongside western businesses and western tourists. To say that is not to defend the exploitation. It is merely to try to explain the reaction to it.
But it doesn’t explain the hatred expressed by such writers as Simon Jenkins who, if you recall, wrote that Dubai is ‘the last word in iconic overkill, a festival of egotism with humanity denied.’ I’m not sure what he means by this. Does he simply dislike the skyscrapers? Does he loathe Dubai just because it’s new, rich and cocky?
Dubai is indeed new, rich and cocky. With its seven-star Burj and its world’s tallest building and its ski slope in a mall, it has deliberately drawn attention to itself. It has strutted and boasted as a marketing ploy. But that isn’t the nub of Dubai. The nub of Dubai has always been, and continues to be, trade. Dubai isn’t a playground. It’s a port, a hub, a place where people come to do business and make money. Exactly the same is true of New York, or of Shanghai, or of Simon Jenkins’s London. Cities exist to do business. It’s how they become cities. The rest is fiddle-de-dee.
Architectural show-offery has not made Dubai what it is, and neither has tourism or oil. Indeed, oil now accounts for less than five per cent of Dubai’s GDP. As I have tried to show, Dubai has used such oil as it had to create something else, and it is a something else that business has flocked to. In the end, if you hate Dubai it is because you hate the nature of global business. You hate the advertising and the executives and the consumption and the manipulation and the ruthless self-interest of the corporate world. None of which is unique to Dubai. Dubai’s leaders merely built a city to accommodate it. They built a place to do business. And the people came.
In my trip round the rest of the UAE one fact stood out everywhere. The smaller emirates had been more selfishly led than Dubai. They had not thought ahead like Dubai. They now envied Dubai, and they were all in their own way trying to get a slice of the action that Dubai had created.
I choose to spend my last day in Deira, where the streets teem and where, if I were to live in Dubai, I would make my home. Though I won’t be coming to live in Dubai.
I watch a Muslim baker in a shop the size of a wardrobe. He squats on a shelf at shoulder level to pedestrians. With swift dexterity he takes a blob of dough and shapes it over a mould to the size of a kiddies’ tricycle wheel, then lowers it into a cylindrical oven
at his feet. At the same time he fishes into the oven with a giant toasting fork and flicks out the cooked loaves. They land unerringly on a shelf behind a pane of glass where another man collects them, bags them and sells them ten at a time, hot.
‘I’d like one, please,’ I say.
The man offers me a bag.
‘No, one bread,’ and I hold up a single explanatory finger. He fishes one out of the bag and waves away my offered money. On the street, I tear off gouts of the warm bread as I walk. It’s tough, bland, simple. The last time I ate bread like this was in Xinjiang, the most westerly province of China, which a millennium and a half ago was the most easterly province of the Arabian Empire. And it remains Muslim. Islam’s a durable faith.
A butcher’s shop nearby is little larger than the bakery, perhaps three metres by two, hung thick with carcasses on hooks. And in among them, like a fat child in a meat forest, stands the butcher, swarthy and sweaty, with forearms like legs of lamb. I watch him unhook a mighty yellow haunch, hack twice, three times through a joint, strip the flesh from the bone, cube it with the same vast cleaver, barely looking at what he does; then reach across, pluck two kidneys from a pile, dice them in seconds, sweep the whole lot from the block to a bag, and pass it to the customer. He takes the money with bloodied hands. When he notices me still watching he suddenly swings the cleaver round his head as if in some tribal dance, then grins with golden teeth.
The barber’s got a David Niven moustache and a dapper self-assurance. His menu of services includes earwax and blackhead removal. I have a haircut and shave, the haircut with tiny chattering scissors, the shave with a cut-throat. He tenses the skin between finger and thumb before each deft unhesitating stroke of the blade. When I scratch an itch on my nose, he dabs the spot with a tissue soaked in eau de cologne. I feel pampered by a craftsman. He’s from Gujarat. His grandfather established the business here in 1955. The shop back then had no electricity. Now he and his four brothers each have a shop of their own here.
‘So this is home for you then?’
‘Oh no no no, sir,’ says the barber, pausing with his cut-throat in mid-air above my throat, ‘my home is Gujarat, sir.’ And everything about that story and that exchange, from the grandfather to the sir, seems to me to encapsulate something true about Dubai. He finishes me off with a scalp massage and perfume.
I leave the barber’s smelling nicer than usual and feeling braced. And five minutes later, when I’m watching a ragged game of cricket on the standard makeshift pitch, a wish comes true. Perhaps it’s because of the perfume.
‘You are bowling?’ asks a chubby Pakistani, and he offers me the ball. Over his pyjamas he wears a thick quilted vest. On his chin, a wispy beard. On his head a little embroidered cap. His manner is charming, his teeth terrible. Greeny-brown stumps, they are all but gone with rot. His name is Zachariah.
‘Are you sure? I am not very good. Too old.’
He grins. ‘You are very good.’
It is hard to bowl in flip-flops. I would like to kick them off as most of the other bowlers do but I know my feet couldn’t cope with the gravel. I bowl off a couple of shuffling paces. The tennis ball is wound round with red insulation tape to make it resemble the real thing. The batsman, who is dressed like a shop assistant and probably is one, takes the standard mighty swing. He makes clean contact and the ball strikes the window of a dry goods store on the first bounce.
‘Very good,’ says Zachariah. ‘You are very good bowler.’ His tone betrays no hint of irony.
An astonishingly skinny Indian youth biffs the ball back to me. It strikes a lump of rubble and shoots off sideways. Zachariah trots cheerfully after it.
I have to wait for a woman in a turquoise sari to cross the pitch from cover point to straightish midwicket before bowling again. The batsman repeats his extravagant and only shot, misses, and the ball strikes the lower of the two concrete blocks.
‘Howzat,’ scream twenty young men. Several of them are playing in a neighbouring game. You take your joys where you can.
Shop boy flails the air with momentary annoyance, then grins and offers me the bat. I pretend to hesitate.
Its handle is held together with tape and oddments of string. Its bottom corner is worn away from repeated thumping against gravel. I take guard.
Zachariah is keen to bowl at me. He runs in at high speed, bare foot, his green pyjamas flapping, stops dead at the rock that denotes the bowling crease and then simply throws the ball. I play it defensively with a straight bat, sending it back towards mid-off along the ground. There is silence. I’d like to think it is awe. I know it isn’t. This simply isn’t batting as they know batting. As far as they are concerned, it’s just not cricket.
Zachariah comes down the pitch. ‘You are having very good health and fitness,’ he says.
‘Thank you,’ I say.
I clip Zachariah’s next throw neatly off my legs, through the other match and against the wall of a mosque. This shot draws the attention of the players in the other game. One of them picks up the ball, deserts his team and insists on bowling at me. I have novelty value. He runs in like Shoaib Akhtar. But I have struck a vein of form. The ball flies high and beautiful over long on. I feel the surge of joy that only a well-hit shot can bring. Now half a dozen lads squabble over the ball in their eagerness to have a crack at this bald white man.
Then shouting. Shouting of a different tone. Gruff. Bitter. A policeman has appeared at third man in his olive uniform and beret. He wears stripes on his sleeve and a gun on his belt. He is waving an angry authoritarian arm. The games stop. The Indians stare sullenly at their shoes and mill around. The cop shouts again, makes dismissive gestures, and the lads begin resentfully, sulkily, to disperse. The wicketkeeper kicks over the concrete block stumps. They fall with a puff of dust.
I hand Zachariah the bat. He takes it without smiling. ‘I am sorry,’ he says as he moves away.
I don’t know why the cop intervened. I go on my way hating him. And not because I was batting rather well. Or at least not just because of that.
Endnote
1. Renamed the Burj Khalifa in January 2010.