That Other Me

by Maha Gargash

  The decay is deeper than I’d anticipated. I’m not sure whether I should continue. What if the tooth cracks? I can’t see, because the patient’s mouth is full of water. “Suction!” Ghada holds the pipe in the boy’s mouth at an awkward angle. She leans over as if being pulled with a rope and keeps her head turned away. I turn off the drill and instruct the boy to rinse. Sliding my chair back, I snap at Ghada, “I can’t work like this. You’re supposed to be assisting me, not drifting to the other unit to gossip. You need to be near me.” I pay no attention to her reluctance as she takes a tiny step closer. “Anyway, I need your opinion. I’ve drilled two millimeters, I think. Should I continue?”

  When she, too, can’t decide, we call the professor, who reaches for the spoon excavator and scoops out a gooey decay. “Switch to low speed on the handpiece till all the decay is gone,” he instructs.

  The pitch of the buzz is lower and Ghada edges away again to chat with our neighbors, this time providing a detailed review of a new cake recipe she came upon. There are so many other students like her, bringing the noise and chaos of Cairo’s streets wherever they go. “Maybe you would be a little more useful,” I call out to her just as she finishes listing the ingredients, “if you start giving our young patient here a bit of information on hygiene. If we don’t educate them, they’ll just keep coming back. Why don’t you demonstrate how he should brush his teeth after every meal?”

  “I don’t think he’s in the mood to hear anything I have to say,” says Ghada, strolling back. “Look at the agony in his face.”

  The boy mumbles and I pull the suction out of his mouth. He says, “I don’t have a toothbrush.”

  “There you go,” says Ghada, raising an eyebrow as if she’d just won an argument. “There’s no point talking about something he doesn’t have, is there? Anyway, there’s no time for advice. You should get this filling finished quickly so it’s not a completely wasted afternoon.” Ghada pulls an amalgam capsule from the drawer and hops off to mix it in the machine.

  The session is drawing to a close. Students pack up and start shuffling out, turning over their used dental tools to the attendants at the sterilization area and handing in their patient files to the clinic manager. I can’t see Adel, but Ghada is on her way back with a light skip in her stride. She sings, too. I shake my head at her unseemly conduct; what patient would trust a dentist who sings? She empties the capsule into a glass bowl before loading the amalgam carrier and handing it to me.

  After dispatching and condensing eight loads, I pause to examine my work. It’s neat and professional. Now I only need the professor to tell me so. I am about to look up and call him when I sense a heavy breath behind me. I swivel around and drop the amalgam carrier, startled to find the bullying farmer from the waiting room staring at me with hard eyes. He must have slunk into the clinic when no one was looking. Ghada scurries to the corner with a squeal when he starts waving his arms and yelling, “You said it wouldn’t be long. That was over an hour ago!” He looks ready to strike.

  I am frozen in my seat. I want to scan the room and find the professor so that he can rush over and pull the farmer away by the collar, but I don’t dare move. A crowd gathers around us with bewildering speed. All the students still in the clinic leave their befuddled patients behind, their mouths filled with instruments, to bunch around my unit. Two of the male students stand on one side of the farmer and try to wheedle him into calming down, but the farmer is raging like an injured bull, accusing me of lying to him. A third student twists the farmer’s arm in an attempt to force him back, but the farmer whacks him down, and I hear a thud and a clang.

  I am still in my chair and gripping the handles so tightly I’ve lost sensation in all my fingers, when someone pushes through. I blink repeatedly when I realize that it is Adel. He grabs the farmer’s mouth and squeezes with all his might. And the walls catapult the echo of the bully’s wail. Defeated by the pain of a rotten tooth, he is dragged out by the guard.

  It happens so quickly. I’m hardly aware of the professor as he assures me that the danger is over. A girl flaps the air in front of my face to cool me, and another dabs her handkerchief, which smells like an old kitchen, to my forehead. “We are exposed to violence,” Ghada says, who, having decided it’s safe, jumps out from her corner.

  “But there is security—two guards at the door. Where were they?” someone says.

  “Two is not enough. We must send a petition to the dean demanding that he increase the number of guards in the waiting room to prevent something like this from happening again,” Ghada goes on. Encouraged by the wave of heated agreement around her, she continues, “We need more security in this place!”

  The professor has had enough. He barks at the students to get back to their patients and finish. Gazing at their reluctant retreat, I look for Adel. But he’s disappeared.

  10

  MAJED

  It happened again. A dream from which I awoke shivering. This time there were no women, only my brother, Hareb. His ghitra was folded in the old style, a messy heap on his head. He wasn’t wearing his kandora, just an undershirt that was stained with mud, and a wizar, gathered between his legs and looped into a knot at the waist. He looked exactly as he had all those years back when he worked in the palm grove, using the farming tools of an ancient age: a knife with a blunted blade for trimming the palm tree’s fibrous trunk and a yirz, an ax with a small, sharp head, for breaking rocky bits in the soil. He looked as though he were about to loop a jute rope around a palm-tree trunk and strap it around his torso so it would hold his weight while he climbed up to prune the tree’s crown. I can’t remember anything he said in the dream, only the expression of deep disappointment in his eyes.

  Why did I dream of Hareb in those days before we had money, when the extended family lived together in my father’s house in Ras Al-Khaimah? Stuck in traffic, this is the question that occupies me. I tap on the steering wheel and mutter a curse at the long row of cars in front of me. I’m convinced that the traffic lights at the intersection have been programmed to stay red three times longer than green. There is roadwork on the two other routes from my house in Al-Wuheida to the office. So, 9:45 a.m. and here I am, stuck on a road jammed with cars heading to too many busy destinations: Deira’s souk on the right, Sharjah on the left, and, straight ahead, the other side of the creek, Bur Dubai. Even though it’s past the morning rush hour, this junction remains packed.

  “Move slowly.” That’s what Hareb used to say. “Weigh everything from every angle before jumping in.” I’d always nodded out of respect toward my older brother, even though I did not agree. His advice would have been solid if this were a sluggish city, but Dubai has proven to be anything but that. It’s 1995, and I wonder what he would have made of the new hotels, shopping malls, public gardens, and water parks, the mushrooming office complexes and apartment blocks, the influx of expatriates in an anxious rush to find wealth or security or both. It seems that it all happened after his death seven years ago, the explosion of world-class sporting events—tennis, golf, snooker, motorboat racing—as well as the exhibitions and back-to-back trade fairs that bring a steady flow of people from all corners of the world. Hareb caught a whiff of it, but he did not live long enough to witness this new and sudden escalation.

  There is an overpass at one end of Al-Maktoum Bridge, and plans for more at various points in the city. Sometimes I get lost on the sprouting new routes. Ahmad told me the other day that there was talk of an ambitious plan for six-lane highways to ease the flow of cars as the city expands. When he noticed my vexed expression, he added, “But it’s good, Father. It means there will be more people coming here, bringing more opportunity.”

  “What do you need opportunity for?” I said in a voice curt with annoyance. “I’ve done all the work; you’re all set.” As I think about it now, it seems like something that an old man, reluctant to embrace change, would say. I slide my sunglasses down to the tip of my nose and scrutinize my reflection in the rearvie
w mirror. It’s a hard face, one that looks much firmer than its sixty-three years. Three deep lines appear on my forehead when I lift my eyebrows, but otherwise the skin is thick and full-blooded, with none of the scratches of old age. My eyes are brooding, that darkest shade of brown rimmed with a couple of barely visible rings of blue, which I inspect to see if they have eaten up more of my irises. I can’t remember them in Hareb’s eyes. But then his were much lighter, the color of the thick mountain honey of the sidr tree. His daughter, Mariam, has those same eyes, clear and spirited. When she was a girl, they sparkled with a million expressions. Then she grew up, and whenever she sets them on me they are heavy with blame.

  There’s a photograph of my brother and me, taken at my father’s farm. We stood posed the best way we knew how, stiff as the palm-tree trunks surrounding us, in front of the gushing water pump that was emptying groundwater into the cement reservoir. There’s a date on the back, and as I try to remember it, my gaze drifts to the other drivers sealed behind their rolled-up windows, jaded and staring ahead with the air-conditioning blasting at high on their faces. If honking were not against the law, they would certainly make noise.

  Why can’t I remember the date? I was the one who jotted it down, after all, since Hareb learned to write much later. Was it 1959, or later, once Hareb had created his company in Dubai? The light turns green and a taxi driver tries to squeeze in front of me. I don’t let him, and when he keeps trying to nose in I honk, keeping my palm pressed on the horn. The blare jolts the other drivers. They must suppose there’s a medical emergency, because they steer their cars to the side to make way for me. The light switches to red. I pass through anyway.

  I circle the Clocktower roundabout, still puzzling over the date. Was it just before the water pump broke? I know that was in 1963, because that’s the year my father sent Hareb all the way to Dubai to fix it.

  My brother had paid a fee of two rupees to join fifteen other passengers in the back of an outmoded Ford Model T truck, miraculously kept in service through the innovation of its owner. Hareb settled in between the passengers’ goats and sacks of green limes. They had to wait until the tide was low before they set off along the shore for a journey that would take six hours. The sand was thick and slushy. Whenever the truck got stuck, Hareb and the other passengers would dismount to help free it. They shook the vehicle and wedged chinko, the indispensible perforated steel sheets, under the trapped tires before pushing with their full weight until the truck rumbled forth like a beast out of a swamp.

  Hareb returned three weeks later. As soon as he arrived, he unloaded my father’s repaired water pump, along with six brand-new pumps. An Indian businessman he had met had asked whether he would be interested in making a sale in Ras Al-Khaimah. A week later Hareb had sold all six water pumps and was planning his next trip to Dubai to bring back more.

  I’m heading east on Airport Road, my head filled with Hareb’s tales about Dubai and its enterprising creek back then, which brimmed with gliding dhows delivering goods and rowboats transporting people from one side to the other. Neighboring farmers and friends joined us to hear about the traders who arrived in Dubai with wares from India, Pakistan, Iran, and even distant Zanzibar. With the rat-a-tat noise of the newly fixed water pump in the background, they’d settle on palm-frond mats in a well-shaded part of the grove and snack on the dates piled in a bushel in the middle. I served them gahwa, Arabic coffee, in the usual custom—no more than three mouthfuls, poured into tiny bowl-shaped cups—as we listened to Hareb speak of the town’s maze of sandy alleys, hardened through the constant shuffling of buyers and visitors, and of porters pulling heavy loads on wooden carts that rumbled ahead on two wheels. The shops were open-fronted and packed with merchandise ranging from canes, daggers, and brass coffeepots to sacks of rice and fabric bolts. There were spices smoothed into pyramids and shimmering gold displayed in glass showcases, and rows and rows of food in tins.

  Since I had never been to Dubai, I longed to join my brother on one of his trips. But I had a job: collecting customs duties from the few ships and small boats that docked at Ras Al-Khaimah’s sleepy port. The English company in charge of the customhouse employed me. They paid me well and installed me in a small office at the back of the company’s bungalow headquarters, which I shared with my boss, David Dudley from Sussex, a place of green hills and lots of rain in the south of England. Working under David, I learned to speak, read, and write in English. He taught me how to calculate gains and losses, and I kept them listed neatly in a ledger.

  When I asked him if I could take a trip with my brother, he said, “Dubai? Do you know how unpredictable such a trip could be?” Under his feathery eyebrows, his eyes narrowed until they turned into sharp green dots. “If you went with the intention to stay a week, you might end up getting stuck for a month—the truck that travels there might simply break down completely. Happens all the time, you know.” He clicked his tongue and sucked in air through his teeth, as if in pain. “You do agree, I think, that it wouldn’t be wise to undertake such a journey, in view of all your responsibilities here.” And I had nodded, eager to accommodate his common sense.

  That’s how it was with the English. Instead of refusing your request outright, they made you feel as though you were making the decision. Even with this realization I still felt privileged to be around them, so clever and educated they were, so unemotional and organized. David often invited me to join him at the small bar that was part of the compound where he and the other British expatriates lived. The bar smelled of dog because there was always a pair of salivating bitches sprawled beneath the wooden tables. Hareb once asked what I did with all those English people, and I explained the game of darts to him. Naturally, I didn’t mention the lager we drank that made the game all the more entertaining.

  An airplane rumbles overhead and I realize I have missed my turn. I have passed the airport. The city is behind me and the desert stretches on either side of the two-lane road: clean humps of pale dunes. Another thirty minutes and I’d reach my farm in Al-Khawaneej, with its nine hundred palm trees that produce five of the finest varieties of dates: khenaizi, barhi, lulu, sukkari, and khalas.

  I would have liked to continue, skip the office altogether. I could easily miss work for a day, but Saeed will be coming in later to tell me what he found out in his meeting with Diab Al-Mutawa, the man who rejected my son Khaled. Mustafa will have news from Cairo about Dalal and her mother. And I have to look for that photo. I know it’s in the office, but I can’t remember where I put it. I keep my eyes focused on the road, looking for the next U-turn. What year was it taken?

  11

  MARIAM

  For more than a week I searched for Adel. I scanned the lecture halls and clinic, and trailed around the government-style buildings on the university grounds. I made sure to linger longer than I needed to in the library in case he was looking for me, too. Here I am again, poised behind a desk with open books and plenty of diagrams of all shapes of teeth spread in front of me. I sigh and pack up. The driver will be arriving soon to take me back to the sakan.

  Outside, the sky is a cerulean expanse with the odd cotton ball of cloud. There is a grassy patch in front of the library, its edges fringed with stunted trees whose leaves are trimmed into neat squares. I cross it, keeping an eye out for Adel, and move onto the main path, which is broad, with crouching sphinxes on either side. In my mind I have played out various scenarios of how I’ll approach him. I shall walk up to him and say hello. Then I will thank him for his heroic intervention and congratulate him for reacting so quickly. If I am able to keep my voice from shaking, I might even praise his sharp instinct in grabbing the source of the farmer’s pain. And then we can be friends.

  As always, there are groups of students socializing or going over their notes on the lawn, drawn together through nationality and shared interests. A cluster of Sudanese girls, their heads wrapped loosely in colorful hijabs, giggle together. Farther down, a group of rich Egyptians and the fashi
onable set from the Levant—girls and boys—slouch in a loose circle, projecting a world-weary demeanor. They set themselves apart by the conviction that they’re a notch above the rest simply because they’ve embraced a Western style of living. In between their light flirtations, they look up with nonchalant glances. Their deadpan faces reflect boredom with a dollop of scorn. They smoke, too. And it’s not just cigarettes. I catch a whiff of weed as I hurry past them.

  Ahead sits a large group of boys from the Khaleej, mainly Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Qataris, with a sprinkling of Bahrainis and Emiratis. Then there’s another mixed Khaleeji girl–boy group, bunched slightly to the side, where the conversation is carried out with alert formality and studied behavior. One too-familiar word or gesture could set tongues wagging so hard they’d whip the air into a mighty wind that would carry news of inappropriate behavior all the way back to the girl’s home. So every act remains proper in this public place. The girls are huddled together, standing stiffly or sitting on benches; the boys try not to look too interested. There is a visible space between them that every now and then is filled by a courageous girl stepping into it to compare notes with a male student.

  I join them briefly so that I’m not labeled a snob. Curiosity sits in their eyes. I can tell that they are waiting for the right moment to ask me about the attack at the dental clinic, but just in time I spot the driver pulling up to the university gate. Another girl from the sakan, whom he has picked up before me from a different university, is in the backseat. Just as I say my good-byes and turn, Adel pops up midway between the group and the car. My rehearsed lines abandon me and I let out a puzzled squeak. How could I have been looking so hard, only to miss him?