Brilliant

by Denise Roig

  “Come on, Davy. Where do we live?”

  “Hey,” said Davy another morning in another café, “how many Emiratis does it take to change a light bulb?”

  “Wait a minute,” said Deborah, already laughing. “Three. One to call an Indian labourer to do the work, and two to brag that it was the brightest light bulb in the world.”

  “Way too few,” said Davy. “How about one to heckle the Indian manager, who’s supervising four unskilled labourers from Bangladesh; one to call the newspaper and report another milestone for Emirati ingenuity; one to shoot photos on his iPhone. How many does that make?”

  Each version — it got so bad they were texting each other several times a day — bested the last: “Twelve. Six Indians and Pakistanis speaking different dialects: one to ring the doorbell, one to explain in a mix of Hindi and English why it took two weeks to come out; a third to carry the six-foot ladder to reach the bulb in the twelve-foot ceiling; three to watch and scratch their heads; two Western journalists to rhapsodize on how the changing of the light bulb reflected the vision of Sheikh Zayed; one editor to kill the anecdote about Sheikh Zayed’s fifth wife; and one Emirati to explain how the changing of the light bulb fit in with Abu Dhabi’s 2030 Plan.”

  “I think that’s only ten,” Deborah texted back.

  Actually, they decided one afternoon after too many coffees, the correct answer was zero. Emiratis didn’t do manual labour and they didn’t make house calls. “And in my building, which, as you know, is brand new, once a light bulb burns out, that’s it. Never changed,” Davy added. “This joke doesn’t really work here.”

  “They can build the world’s tallest building, but they can’t change a light bulb,” said Deborah. “Ironic, eh?”

  “Irony doesn’t work here either,” Davy reminded her.

  By now Deborah had grown skeptical about the country’s dreams of meteoric, painless success, painless to locals because it was built on the backs of migrant workers, paid abysmally and treated worse. She’d grown weary of We Are the Biggest, We Are the Best. The 2030 Plan — she longed to tell that silver-haired man of long ago — was going to sink like The World, Dubai’s man-made islands, which were rapidly going under. Dust to dust, water to water. Even in more fiscally solvent Abu Dhabi, construction projects were being scuttled as global markets tightened and choked. We Are the World had never been truer or more unfortunate.

  Sometimes they still hit one of their old coffee mornings. They were good for gossip, good for a laugh. Davy was a terrific mimic — could duplicate the Texas purr of oil wives so well she might have been from the Big D herself, though she could also nail the disdainful, disappointed tones of a Brahmin Brit. “I think we’re turning into bigots,” Deborah said over falafels one morning. Davy had just impersonated a Japanese woman who’d come to speak to “the laddies” about feng shui. “Well, it was almost English,” said Davy. “Didn’t stop her from going on like a peppermill. Racist? This place does it to you.”

  In late March, Davina’s husband, Jack, got laid off by the construction company that had brought them there. A huge project — two towers of 100 offices each — got the thumbs down four days before building was to start. “Postponed, they’re saying,” shrugged Davy. “Meantime, they’ve cancelled everyone’s visas. We’ve got thirty days to find something else, but other companies are laying off too. Even the Guggenheim and the Louvre are being stalled. Just like that, in a crack.” She’d teared up, something Deborah would do for months afterward when she drove past Davina’s building. “There’s nothing back home, nothing.”

  They’d stayed in loose touch in the two years since, Deborah writing missives every few months, Davina replying with funny, cryptic notes. Letter-writing wasn’t her thing, she admitted. And she was working two jobs in a suburb of Glasgow — secretary in one school, nurse in another, so time was tight. Robbie, too, was back home and in a regular school, and Jack’s employment was hit and miss since their return. “Wanna meet somewhere for a shawarma?” Davy wrote every now and then.

  Crazy the things she was craving, Deborah thought as she plugged in the GPS. She was venturing out again, though sky and air threatened snow, though the sight of a disembowelled raccoon on Walker’s Line, outside Burlington, had nearly made her turn back. She’d almost forgotten the sensations — bitter wind penetrating everything not padded, nose hairs tingling. But shawarma! In the morning-cold of the car, she could almost smell the meat, see it falling onto a platter as it was sliced from the spit. She’d had her pick of three shawarma places within walking distance of their first Abu Dhabi flat: Al Sultan Good Foods, Just Falafel and her favourite at the end of the block, Lebanese Flower, where the slick-haired Palestinian waiters greeted you formally, respectfully, but like family, especially if you threw in a few Arabic phrases.

  Deborah unplugged the GPS, cutting off Fiona mid-“recalculating,” pulled over and took the stick-it from the dash. Harris’s get-a-hobby comment of the night before had done some damage, but it was galvanizing too. She had to find a job, volunteer work, something. She plugged the GPS back in, programmed the address — somewhere in Brantford, wherever that was from there. People assumed that if you came from Ontario, everything from Ajax to Windsor must feel familiar. But Burlington was nothing like Ottawa, nothing like home. The condo compounds and cookie-cutter developments separated by farmland and green spaces was a foreign landscape peopled by no one she knew. It wasn’t Abu Dhabi either.

  “Please drive to highlighted route,” said Fiona.

  When they’d bought the GPS their first week back in Canada, they found it amusing that they could choose between an American voice or a British one. “You’d think we’ve heard enough of both,” said Harris. In the end, out of something close to affection, they went for the plummy Oxford accent. “We’ll just have to call her Fiona,” Harris said. Half the time they argued with her; the other half, they ignored her. She was their guide and as lost as they were.

  “They’re pretending, you know,” Harris said at the end of their third Abu Dhabi year. “They don’t really care about teaching or learning.” He’d been a lecturer in the English department the first semester, downgraded by the Irish provost, new that year, the third in as many. McGuinness had refused to call it a demotion, more a strategic move to capitalize on Harris’s real strengths. “We’re moving from strength to strength here at Al Nahyan University, meeting the challenges of a dynamic twenty-first-century world,” he’d said every time he got the chance, and The National and Gulf News had dutifully quoted him each time.

  He hadn’t lasted. McGuinness’s curriculum vitae was less résumé than blarney, apparently, and the administration sent him packing mid-year. The resulting cabinet shuffle saw Harris made dean of student services, though he was still expected to teach his full course load. Befitting his new status, they moved into a stunning, paid-for villa in Khalidayah: four bedrooms, huge kitchen, tiled pool just steps from their door. Even the maid’s room — a space so minute in their first flat, they’d used it as a storage closet — was big enough to hold a single bed. The boys loved it, especially the pool. Even Deborah felt something shift. They were lucky to have what they had. Harris wasn’t around enough to notice.

  “Who knows what they’re going to want next year,” said Harris. “Full accreditation? Harvard profs begging to get hired?” They were having supper at India Palace, a last alone-meal before Deborah and the boys left again for the summer. This time Thom would be staying in Ottawa to start university. She loved the summers with old friends and old routines. And she dreaded them, the pain of reconnecting and disconnecting again, the packing and unpacking — their Ottawa house was rented — as they went from friends to relatives to friends: a week here, four days there, the missing of Harris, who would be enduring 50-degree days and an empty flat back in Abu Dhabi. He would join them for the last two weeks of August, a marathon of family gatherings, lunch with one set of friends, dinner
with another. Wonderful and insane.

  And as the Ottawa summers went on, something neither of them cared to admit had begun to show. They didn’t live there anymore. Their friends were interested in their travels and adventures, but to a point. “You really don’t have to cover?” some still asked Deborah. “But you can’t drive, right? I mean, it is a Muslim country.” It didn’t seem to matter how they answered — “Of course, I drive!” — the questions felt stuck in 9/11. Even the boys felt it: “Why does Uncle Ron keep asking me if I feel safe there?” “How come Gran doesn’t believe there are real churches there?” And truth be told, it wasn’t that thrilling to keep talking about Canadian politics, issues they weren’t following so closely any more, events that paled next to those now closer to home. Would the new Indian president defend the rights of migrant workers in the UAE? Would the Saudi Al Gosaibi family come clean about its dealings with the Saad Group? What would happen to Nakheel and Dubai World now that the bottom had fallen out? Would the Federal National Council start holding real elections?

  But if they no longer lived in Ottawa, where did they live? Abu Dhabi wasn’t home; it could never be. “Listen,” she’d had to say to Thom, who was now as sad to leave Abu Dhabi as he’d been about leaving Ottawa three years before. “I know you like your life here. It’s a great little life. But we all have to leave at some point. Even if we were to stay here until Dad retires, we’d have to leave thirty days later. No job, no visa.” Thom, not a crier, not a hugger, had cried and let himself be hugged.

  She understood; of course, she understood. During those cooler, greener summers she found herself missing Lebanese Flower and Carrefour, the call to prayer filtering through windows, the Indian friends who brought over roti and kebabs, the whoosh of relief when you stepped from impossible heat into air conditioning, the Sudanese guard in their building who put his hand over his heart when she greeted him. Small things, really, in the face of what she often hated and railed against. But missed things.

  Deborah had watched Harris as he’d reached for the last onion bhaji, an India Palace specialty. He hadn’t seemed to notice she’d had only one. He’d bulked up in that third year: too much stress, too many meals out. “Did I tell you about the Emirati student I have this term who comes in and talks on his mobile the whole time? He sits there, right in front of me. Can I fail him? We both know the answer to that.”

  “Have you told him what you expect?” Deborah had asked, but she knew how it would go. He would talk and the student would listen attentively, nodding, letting him have his little teacher rant. The next day out would come the phone. Kids like him were untouchable. And, Harris said, unteachable.

  “Should I pack my bags as if we’re not coming back?” she’d asked. And he’d given her a look that made her feel small and stupid. There were no jobs at his level back home and even if there were, they wouldn’t pay nearly as much. Then there was the matter of taxes, the reason so many expats stayed on and on. Income tax, who needed it?

  “We’re here for a while, aren’t we?” she said.

  She didn’t have an interview, per se. The Grand Erie District School Board was looking for a special ed teacher, according to their website. She hadn’t taught in a Canadian school for more than a dozen years, had moved into advocacy work in the years before Abu Dhabi. While she couldn’t quite imagine facing a room of jaded faces again, there was always the resource room. With more kids being coded, she might be able to find something part time. She’d go to the school board, fill out an application, act as if she was moving in a constructive direction.

  But the map didn’t make sense when she looked at it on Fiona’s screen. Upper Middle Road? Was there also a Middle Middle Road? They hadn’t explored Burlington or the neighbouring area yet, not that there seemed much to explore. There was an Ikea and a Lee Valley, a store she used to dream about the first year in Abu Dhabi. And reno store after reno store, as if people here lived mostly for their granite counters and in-ground pools. It was enough to make her want to sleep till noon.

  “Which, of course, is what I’m doing, isn’t it, Fiona?”

  “Recalculating,” said Fiona, and Deborah realized that instead of getting on the 403, she’d taken a turn toward another generic strip of box stores and chain restaurants. She passed Kelsey’s and Montana’s, Jack Astor’s. Ribs and more ribs. But there on the left was a shawarma place. Sana Grill was a hole in the wall and packed.

  “Arriving at destination on left,” said Fiona.

  “Can you believe it? She took me there after I’d been thinking I’d kill to have a shawarma. I didn’t tell her to do it, but she did it,” she told Harris that night. He’d arrived home early, looking grey around the edges and not especially talkative, though she got a smile out of him about the shawarma. “Was the food any good?” he asked. “Should we go back?”

  That wasn’t the point, she wanted to argue. But she knew that grey look. “Why don’t you watch a little TV, go to bed? I can clean up.” He hadn’t resisted, pushed off wearily from the kitchen counter. “What were you doing out there anyway?” he asked.

  “Cruising,” she said.

  “Oh,” he said. And she understood she could have said almost anything: I was looking at houses, I was meeting a man, I was going ape shit at Ikea, and he would have nodded and said good, sounds good. She didn’t tell him about the job or that she’d stayed in the shawarma place for over an hour, eating, watching people, chatting with the owners, who were from Lebanon and had lived in Dubai in the ’90s. She didn’t tell him that after, she’d driven home, made a cup of tea, pleasured herself and napped.

  The beginning of their fourth Abu Dhabi year was so different than the beginnings of the previous three that it felt as if they had been reinvented. After a summer of cottage stays and hotel rooms, the new villa felt vast, luxurious. The neighbours were dazzling, too, high-flying diplomats, lawyers, investment bankers. None went beyond “good-morning” friendly, though Talbot and Molly, the Scottish family next door, seemed down to earth. Not that they needed the neighbours for a social life. They were being invited everywhere now: cocktail parties at various embassies around town, openings at the new gallery space on Sadiyaat, eighties-music nights at the Sheraton.

  “Get someone in to help with things,” Harris suggested in November. “Free yourself up.” Leena, tiny, smiley and fluent only in Bahasa Indonesia, had been the nanny of a family they’d known through the French school. Now after six years on a CAE flight-simulator project, they were headed back to Montreal. “I don’t know how we’ll manage without Leena,” the wife told Deborah. “My kids will have to learn how to make their own beds again. En tout cas…”

  Transferring Leena’s visa went quicker than expected, though it had involved an excessive number of photocopies, staples, stamps and signatures. Leena had worked for one family; now she worked for them. She arrived on a Saturday with two suitcases and headed straight for the kitchen. “Indonesia okay?” she asked, scaling the hamour she’d found in the fridge, then expertly filleting it. An hour later, the twins were going for thirds. “Don’t bother cooking any more, Mum,” Terry said.

  Even with years of every-other-week housekeepers, Deborah had often felt uncomfortable having someone clean her stove, her bathroom, her mess. But here it felt almost okay. They would pay her well by Abu Dhabi standards — 4,000 dirhams a month, the equivalent of $1,100, nearly $500 more than the Quebecers had paid. Leena would have the summers off to visit her three children back in Indonesia, plus every Friday and Saturday during the school year. The twins wouldn’t demand much in the way of care and Harris would eat just about anything. What was there to apologize for? It helped that Leena was hardworking, grateful for a job and overjoyed to have them as employers (“Canada good!” she said often, her small teeth bared in a perpetual smile). She was a breath of fresh air after the stories Deborah had heard from other expats. “It’s like having a fourth child,” one woman had complain
ed at a coffee morning. The bad-nanny stories were fodder for much griping, sniping and nastiness on the Abu Dhabi Women’s chat board.

  “Can you believe my nanny asked for a raise? As if 1,200 dirhams a month wasn’t generous enough!”

  “I caught my husband looking at our maid last night. You all know what I mean: looking! I’m going to have to forbid her to wear T-shirts.”

  “Think our nanny’s screwing around. Should I do like some of my friends and lock her in at night?”

  Deborah had only gone on the board occasionally in the first years. Now she checked the back-and-forth messages several times a day, though she changed her board name frequently: Canuck Gal, MOMx3, Desert Deb. Some of the discussions made her nearly sick with embarrassment and rage. Who were these people who wrote so callously of the women who made their new lives possible, the women who cared for their kids, washed their cars, scrubbed their toilets — all for a fraction of what they would have paid at home? Had these women always harboured a sense of superiority, thwarted only by political correctness back in Atlanta or Adelaide? Or did this place do it to them? Maybe one of those bitchy women lived in the villa across the way. Maybe one was a colleague of Harris’s.

  “Why don’t you stop reading that stuff?” Harris would ask when she’d vent over dinner, using the excuse that she wanted the twins to know what was really going on in this country.

  “Do you like feeling mad all the time?” Jon asked.

  “Yeah, why can’t you just be happy here?” Terry said.

  Harris might have been happy, should have been happy that fall, but if he was, it was lost on them. Mostly he seemed distracted. And frantic, over even small things. “Does Dad have ADD?” Terry asked one morning after Harris had torn up two rooms looking for his office keys. He seemed to barely register Thom’s absence, even sometimes missed their Skype chats. “Where’s Dad?” Thom would ask, looking pale on the laptop screen. “Tell him hi for me, eh?”