Brilliant

by Denise Roig

  “Faggots,” hisses Rashid from the back seat.

  “Seat belt,” says Sami.

  “Where?” says Rashid.

  “Home,” says Sami.

  “No fun,” says Rashid.

  He’s right. With Madame studying for her university classes, with Sir writing poetry in his own villa across town — “Poets need complete peace and quiet, Sami” — with Sultan, named after his grandfather and the oldest, doing military duty in Ras al Khaimah, Eiman graduating from university in Al Ain and about to get married, Hassan training his camels in Madinat Zayed, it’s often just the two youngest rattling around the compound: Asma, sixteen and Sami’s least favourite — the girl’s too smart for her own good — and Rashid, ten going on four. It doesn’t help that the two hate each other. The once-strong Qubaisat clan isn’t what it was, Sami admits, turning at the evangelical church. What is? says Mohsin. Except, of course, our royal family. (Mohsin loves the Queen.)

  They’ve argued this before — both in phone calls and in his head. Sheikha Salama, a Qubaisat, gave birth to Sheikh Zayed, the father of the country, Sami tells Mohsin. She is our Queen Mum. But he can hear the amused snort.

  She married a murderer, Sami. His own brother yet. What’s to be proud of?

  Yes, brother, I know, brother, sighs Sami, easing onto 26th Street and then through the Delma roundabout. Arabian sands cover a lot of history.

  You mean blood, says Mohsin.

  “Sami,” whines Rashid from the back seat.

  “Seat belt,” says Sami.

  “Happy?” says Rashid, and Sami hears the click.

  He should drive the boy home. He should. But what’s there? More nannies, cooks, gardeners, drivers and maids than there are parents or siblings or friends. Homework that will not get done despite threats and punishments. Five TVs that will be on with no one watching. Three salukis growling for food and attention, their nails skittering and scratching on the marble steps outdoors. Sami pulls onto Khaleej al Arabi.

  “Hey,” says Rashid.

  “You asked,” says Sami.

  But already Rashid is bent over his iPhone, gone, lost. They could drive all the way up the E11, all the way to Jebel Ali, the Emirates’ vast port, a place Rashid was fascinated by once — “Boats! Boats!” he would cry when little. They could take the ring road around Dubai, passing Sharjah, Ajman, Umm al Qawain, Ras al Khaimah, swinging across to Fujairah on the return, a private, grand tour of all seven Emirates. From sea to desert to sea. Rashid’s world, birthplace and birthright. But the boy, lost in battles with mythical beasts and spear-wielding women, their bosoms filling the tiny screen, would barely notice.

  “Yes!” he crows from the back seat.

  See, says Mohsin. See what your job is.

  Sami tried London for a year when he was nineteen, in the early 1980s. He’d needed to go somewhere, anywhere, after the girl he’d loved since age six fell in love with the American exchange student at her private high school. Love was supposed to be simple, mutual. It wasn’t supposed to make you want to die. Forget her, little brother, said Mohsin. Come to London.

  Mohsin worked for a taxi company started a decade earlier by a man, like them from Peshawar, now a millionaire. Maybe a billionaire, Mohsin said. But Sami couldn’t get The Knowledge down, though he took the London cabbies’ test three times. (“Three times? That’s nothing. I did ten appearances before I passed,” said Mohsin.) But Sami hated the drizzle, the smell of Wimpy burgers, the grotty damp of the flat he and Mohsin shared with four other young men from home. He found the British unsettling. Chirpy, distant, friendly, aloof, push, pull. They chatted and smiled, but didn’t register anything other than what was in front of them, what they already knew. Dear, darling England! They could not imagine the life of a young man far from home, heartsick and homesick. And those were the good ones.

  “How do you take it?” he’d asked Mohsin, when his brother would tell stories after his shift. Some customers, if they’d spent too long in a pub, called him “Paki” or “Pac-man.” Mohsin shrugged. “I go heavy on the brakes. Bounce them around. They can call me whatever they like. I’m the one behind the wheel.”

  Sami had tried once more to face down The Knowledge, borrowing a scooter from one of his flatmates so he could memorize the 25,000 London streets that might come up on the exam. There were 320 standard runs — how could that many anything be standardized? — through central London alone. Still, some of it was finally getting into his head and staying there when they got the news that their mother was ill.

  “You go,” said Mohsin. Grateful for the chance to leave all those streets with their funny names — Amen Corner, Finsbury Pavement, Mincing Lane…damp streets, too many streets — Sami packed a small bag and boarded a plane for Abu Dhabi. The plan was to spend a day in the new-oil, upstart city where their mother’s older brother — also a cab driver — lived. The two would make their way to Lahore, then on to Peshawar. By the time Sami landed in Abu Dhabi, their mother was dead.

  The rest, says Mohsin, is history.

  A good history, retorts Sami. A happy history.

  Whatever you say, Mohsin says.

  “Sami,” says Rashid.

  “Yes,” says Sami.

  “I’m hungry.”

  The traffic is slowing. Only an accident, a bloody one, slows traffic on the E11. Sami has heard stories about the M1 in Britain, that you’re as likely to end up in an ambulance as at your destination. But Britain can’t match this. Driving is blood sport in the UAE. Sami has seen things that make him toss at night — an arm on the side of the road; an entire body’s worth of blood smeared on the pavement; bodies rolled in muslin and stacked like building material in the back of a pickup.

  Be careful out there. Check your mirrors, Mohsin says, when they talk once a week, though Sami hears it more as further reproof than brotherly concern. They’re both middle-aged men now. It’s too late to play protector and protected.

  Bad traffic, awful traffic. Though he has no real idea where they’re going next, Sami chafes at the standstill. It’s claustrophobic to be surrounded by SUVs, many even bigger than theirs. Two finally let him in; he navigates the lane changes, moving right again and again across six lanes, until he can creep off the exit ramp. Others have the same idea: he’s rooted again. But there on the right is a sign giving them a destination.

  “Sami?” It’s a question now, not so much a demand. “Am I good?”

  “You are good, Rashid,” says Sami, turning onto a smaller highway. “You go to Akhdar City, Rashid?”

  “No I don’t know maybe yes,” says Rashid, and Sami can tell by the way his voice muffles that the boy’s head is down, his attention scattered again.

  “You know Akhdar?” Sami asks.

  “Yes!” crows Rashid, an answer that has nothing to do with the question.

  The boy’s a loser, says Mohsin. Like his father, like all those people.

  Give him a chance, says Sami.

  Maybe he has too many chances, says Mohsin. He has too much, period.

  Sami drove Rashid to a birthday party a few Fridays back. Rashid doesn’t have any friends, not really. But this boy, a new Canadian kid in the class, was keen to make a good impression and invited the entire class. Only half turned up at the ballroom in the Beach Rotana Hotel. “What kind of a place is that for a kid’s birthday?” Mohsin asked on the phone the next weekend. “Why don’t they go to the beach like normal kids? Don’t you have nice beaches there?” And Sami had tried to explain that this is what children did here, especially if they were locals. “Throw money at the youngsters, right?” Mohsin said. “Teach them what’s important.”

  “It was too hot for the beach,” Sami added. No parent would let their kid attend a beach party in May. But Sami never complains about the impossible, burn-through-the-sandals heat to Mohsin, who already has too much ammunition.


  At first Rashid hadn’t wanted to go to the party. “I want to stay home,” he said. “I want to play at home.” But Madame had insisted, and Rashid’s nanny, Lilibeth, had promised to order a cake from Al Zaabi Finest Bakery just for him for afterward, even though he wasn’t the birthday boy, and Sami had offered to take him to buy a special toy for his friend. “And maybe one for you too.”

  “I want the same toy,” Rashid finally agreed.

  Madame had pressed 2,000 dirhams into Sami’s hand as they were leaving. “Make sure it’s something nice, nothing that looks cheap.”

  The kid-size electric cars at Toys “R” Us — the most expensive thing in the store — cost a little more than this, so Sami had to throw in 120 dirhams of his own. He couldn’t interest Rashid in anything other than the car for himself, not even the latest version of X-Box.

  Rashid had stood at the counter shaking his head over and over, even after Sami explained that he didn’t have the money to buy a second car. “We’ll come back next week, even maybe tomorrow, and get you the car, okay?” Sami promised.

  “Tonight,” Rashid said.

  “How late are you open?” Sami asked the checker.

  “Ten,” she said, and Rashid had given her the thumbs up.

  But at the entrance to the hotel ballroom half an hour later, the boy’s better mood evaporated. “I don’t want to go,” he told Sami, who’d planned to duck into his favourite shawarma shop across the street, visit with an old friend who often went there after prayers on Friday afternoons. Sami had ferried the toy car in on a hotel dolly, no one offering to help. He was tired and sweaty. Oh, for a cup of Lipton’s Yellow Label.

  “But your friends are here,” said Sami, knowing this wasn’t true.

  “I go in if you stay,” said Rashid. “You are my friend, Sami.”

  “Poor boy,” Sami said to Lilibeth the next day. They sometimes talk about Rashid, shrugging, shaking their heads. What are they to do? What can they do? “I tell Madame that boy is good boy, but needs special help,” says Lilibeth. “She doesn’t want to hear.” Lilibeth is a tiny, plain woman, older than she first appears, and better educated than some of the other children’s nannies. She has a good heart, Sami tells Mohsin often. But Sami didn’t tell even Lilibeth that before the games and cake and gift-giving, before most of the other guests had arrived, Rashid had ripped the gift paper from the huge box and insisted on riding the car round and round the ballroom while the birthday boy and his parents watched.

  “I was showing him,” Rashid protested when Sami told him on the way home that this was not polite, good-guest behaviour. He also didn’t tell Lilibeth that Saeed Al Qubaisi, dropping in for coffee and a chat with his wife later that night, slipped him 3,000 dirhams to buy another electric car and that he had done just that, hurrying into Toys “R” Us minutes before they closed. (Lilibeth would see the car soon enough.) He didn’t tell Mohsin about it. Any of it. Nor that the car had held Rashid’s undivided attention for one day.

  “Akhdar City,” Sami says to the back seat as he tries to follow the signs, “is an amazing place. No country has anything like Akhdar.” Sami doesn’t know if this is exactly true. There must be other projects like Abu Dhabi’s experimental green city. People were so worried about the environment nowadays. High-class problem, according to Mohsin. People starving, that’s a problem, he says. People not believing in God, that’s a problem. But if we run out of energy, Sami argues back — imagining Mohsin’s emphatic head-shaking — then what? None of the rest will matter. Since when did you get so fatalistic, little brother? Mohsin says. You’re not going to the mosque enough, are you?

  Their faith, their practice, their bedrock. It had been the one place they could find each other in the past. But then Mohsin had made some new friends, younger fellows coming from home to the UK. They’ve got something, these guys. Clear as a bell, says Mohsin. Know where they’re going. Mohsin is planning on making the hajj next year. What about you, Sami? Mohsin has begun to ask this in every phone conversation. Don’t you think it’s time to make the hajj? None of us knows how long we have, he says. Now who’s the fatalist? Sami retorts, but only in his head.

  “I need food!” Rashid has come alive again and kicks the back of the front seat.

  “Patience, Rashid, patience,” says Sami, knowing that the word means nothing to Rashid. It doesn’t mean much to any of the Al Qubaisi children. Eiman, who turns twenty-one this year, still stamps and screams when she doesn’t get what she wants in the very next minute. Patience, Sami and Mohsin’s mother used to tell them, is the highest virtue. It is golden.

  The mobile again: “Sami, where are you?” Asma, who has only contempt for her mother, would be mortified to know how much she sounds like her on the phone. “I need you to pick me up. Now.” Sami hears a crowded room behind her. Lately she’s been summoning him at all hours. “Friends,” she always says. But the night before she had him come to a run-down villa in the industrial part of Musaffah. “Friends, who do you think?” Asma glared at him in the rear-view mirror when he asked.

  “I need to be picked up,” she says again.

  “Where are you?” Sami asks, dreading rejoining the gridlock.

  The girl’s usual bravura seems to fail her. “I’m not sure.”

  “I’ve got Rashid,” Sami starts to say.

  “Never mind,” says Asma, composed and imperious again, and hangs up.

  Alhamdulillah! There’s an Adnoc station right on the service road. Sami turns in, manoeuvring carefully past the long line-up for petrol, but calls Madame before parking. “Fine,” is all she says and hangs up before Sami can even tell her where they are or that Asma has just called, that she’s out there somewhere.

  Rashid orders three Big Macs, grabbing a dozen packets of ketchup for his three cartons of fries.

  “Are you sure you can eat all that?” Sami asks and Rashid looks at him scornfully. But food, especially in large quantities, always perks Rashid up. In between open-mouth chewing, he quizzes Sami on soccer. Sami’s up on the British teams, via Mohsin, but falls down on the Brazilians, Rashid’s current obsession. “See, I’m smarter than you,” says Rashid.

  Sami looks at his watch. He hopes Akhdar City is still open. He hopes Asma finds a cab.

  “Right?” presses Rashid.

  “Right,” says Sami.

  And then, as if he’s wearing ear buds and singing along to a pop song, Rashid suddenly chants, “Baba loves a lady, Baba loves a lady.”

  “Your mother is a good woman,” says Sami. He doesn’t really believe this after all these years of working for Madame, but it’s sweet that Rashid appreciates his father’s devotion.

  “No,” says Rashid, shaking his whole body so adamantly that the wrappers from the Big Macs flutter to the ground. A Filipina is there in an instant, picking them up. She smiles nervously at Rashid.

  “Your mother is a lady,” says Sami, starting to feel anxious.

  “Different lady, Sami. Russian lady. Don’t you understand? Are you stupid?”

  Watch out, whispers Mohsin.

  “Baba loves a different lady. Different.” Rashid shouts the word as it’s written, all three syllables.

  “We go,” says Sami, gathering up the sticky packets and used napkins. He hates leaving a mess behind for the workers. They are not as lucky as he’s been. My life has been touched by…but he can’t at that moment think what it’s been touched by.

  “She’s a nudie,” says Rashid, slurping the last of his Coke. “I saw her. Big ones.”

  “Where?” Sami asks, even as he hears Mohsin hiss: Back off.

  Rashid looks at him as if he’s an idiot. “On her head. Where do you think?”

  “At Baba’s villa?” Sami needs to leave this alone. He absolutely has to.

  “Of course at Baba’s villa. Where do you think?”

  Sami gets up, takes Rashid’s el
bow and leads him out of McDonald’s, back to the Land Rover. Rashid is many things — a troubled boy, a spoiled boy — but he is not a liar. The other children in the family are better at this. Sultan, Sami knows, cheated his way through university. He will never reveal how he knows this, but he does. Now he can’t look at the eldest son, once his favourite, without feeling a cloud pass over his heart. Sometimes it’s better not to know people too well.

  So why does he have to know this? How is knowing this going to help anything? Because now the pieces are flying into places where they should have landed months, even years ago if he’d had half a brain and half the trust: the separate villa, the weeks away from home, the smell of perfume in Sir’s bedroom, the trips to Hong Kong and New York without Madame. The poetry. And now Mohsin will never shut up. Those people, he says. Godless.

  The Adnoc station is jumping as they leave, long lines for petrol, longer lines inside for fast food, for coffee and candy and cash from the bank machine. Cigarettes and DVDs and Tampax and condoms. You can buy anything over there, can’t you? says Mohsin. Sami once saw bottles of special lubricant for exciting a woman, right next to the Panadol and mouthwash. He’d looked away fast, but he’d seen it.

  From the back seat, Rashid sets up the chant: “Akhdar! Akhdar! Akhdar!” Once out of the station with its fever of bright lights and big cars, it’s dim and silent. Sami follows the signs through long stretches of sand and scruff. The sky is darkening quickly, the road narrowing from four lanes to two. They pass no other cars, not a good sign. The endless landscape can still take Sami by surprise, still makes him vaguely uneasy, even after all these years. Of course, Abu Dhabi is dense and developed compared to thirty years before, when this highway didn’t even exist, when there were only a few petrol stations in the entire city. But he finds the desert distances somehow more unsettling now, as if all the new high-rises — the giant, tilted sausage of the Gateway building, the massive obelisk of the Mubadala headquarters — make the spaces in between yawn wider. The city is spreading wildly out here: Khalifa City A, Khalifa City B. But each isolated development looks lonelier than the next, pretty sand-coloured villas surrounded by nothing. Sami prays they reach something soon.