Stories from the Gulf

I’ve had a short two weeks in the Gulf of Oman, shuttling between a couple of cities, including of course the old hang-out area known as Dubai.

After getting lost a bunch of times in the new suburban neighbourhood my parents moved to, I took a look around and saw/heard the same crap as last time. Recession, increasing crime rates, mega-corporate partnerships, and so on.

Having recovered from the shock of being served by an European at a restaurant (recession all over the place), I decided to write a few short stories summing up some of my favourite conversations and experiences here. These are all unfortunately true for the most part.

Suburban Legends

“I never want to go out again,” said Anthony Uncle as he sighed the door shut behind him. In almost one fluid move he removed his shirt, hat and watch to reveal his houseworthy benyan sleeveless under-shirt.

“Why not, Uncle?” I asked cautiously, wishing to goodness that my friend, his son, would wake up so that we could leave.

“Bloody mess this place is. International City, some shit.”

My friend and his parents lived in a part of International City, a development outside of Dubai that was heralded as the prototype for boroughs. It was self-contained, themed and as with all of New Dubai had not lived up to its promises.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, knowing that he was anticipating step-by-step questions.

“Arey, I knew this place was going to hell when they started turning off the street-lamps,” Uncle replied. “Then all the tamasha started happening also. First, some two rival pimps were fighting each other. Two months ago they found the body of some eastern European prostitute in the street, just lying there like some rubbish. Then some children – I think they were Chinese na – vomited in school and they found the bones of another child in the stuff. They ate some girl. Sick.”

“Here?” I asked incredulously.

“Where else?” Uncle brushed back his white plumed hair and walked into the kitchen. He continued in a louder voice that could reach me all the way on the couch. “People can’t even walk the street decently anymore. And then? Cops will take so long to come here if you call them; we’re so far outside Dubai.”

“Ahem. What happened today?” I tried to keep things on track and talk loudly so that my friend would wake from his kung-pao-lunch-induced slumber.

“Oh let me tell you.” Uncle swished to the doorway and looked at me, concurrently taking off his gold chain with the large crucifix. “Just taking a walk I was today near the other side of the City. Some black guys were walking around there. Have you noticed all these Nigerians now in the place? So scary man; so strong and they get angry very quickly. Then, Jesus Mary and Joseph, I saw these big bushes. I just started thinking, ‘What if they kill me and throw me in the bushes? No one will even see for many days until the smell comes. Bloody maintenance crews left after they stopped getting paid.’”

I sat fazed for a while. Uncle waited patiently at the door, switching his gaze between me and the rosary next to the door.

“Ahm,” my friend just barely snorted.#

“Oh you’re awake,” I declared, grabbing his sleeve and moving toward the door.

4X4s Are Not Meant for Cities

I sit at the wheel of a machine far too big for me. As I start it up Slipknot screams through six speakers at me. My brother’s choice.
My baby brother, a foot taller than me and now in high school, sits in the passenger seat next to me in a blazer. It is forty-nine degrees outside.

Thrummmmm. I had woken up to the loud sound of a guitar not two feet away from my face. Opening my eyes, I had seen my brother standing in front of me with white gloves on. Having watched too many serial killer films, I had expected some kind of elaborate death at that point.

Instead I gun the 4X4 out of the parking garage, still groggy with the time change.

“Don’t take the bridge,” says my dad from the back seat. “I didn’t put Salik on the Pajero.”

“Why?” I ask, shifting gear to get ahead of the overstuffed minivan ahead of us.

“I will not pay for two Salik accounts,” declares my dad.

My father is a curious man. He is a formidable presence that constantly distracts itself. He is never one for revolting against systems, though he will complain.

I had seen a curious change in his being on the current visit home, having spotted him sitting at the dining room table with an ominous syringe. I had questioned why a man with type two diabetes needed insulin shots when he could control his blood sugar with an adequate diet.

“If I eat I die; if I don’t eat I die,” he had pontificated.

I look at him with one eyebrow raised. He raises one eyebrow back. “What?”

“This Salik is a scam anyway. Stupid toll to cross Sheikh Zayed Road. I’m not paying it on two cars.”

“But everyone has Salik. Even the illegal taxis.” I honk loudly at a Lexus trying to take my lane on Emirates Road, and speed up.

“Not everyone,” my dad whispers, looking out of the window at a speeding Porche.

“What do you mean?”

“I have a group against this Salik. We all refuse to get it.”

“How many people?” I ask, looking at him instead of the taxi driver pleading with me to come into my lane.

“Two thousand,” he says, his face enveloping into a cat-grin. And a website. Bypasssalik.com.”

“You don’t know website design,” I say. “You need me to change the printer ink every time I’m here.”

“I hired the man who cleans our house to do it.”

“That Dinesh is multi-talented,” I muse, faking the machine to the left to scare a Corolla that had been driving twenty below the speed limit. “Do they know you have Salik on the other car?”

“No need for them to know such small details.”

“Two thousand people, hmm?”

“I have a list of signatures, names and passport photocopies.”

“Oh, that’s a formal club then. Where do you keep these two thousand passport photocopies?”

“They, em, disappeared when the old house burned down.”

“It didn’t burn down. We just moved to Muhasainha,” I press.

“We’re here,” he says.  “Take your brother to school now. I’ll be back from the meeting by midnight.”

I realize that he is not going to the mall that I had dropped him at, but instead the police headquarters opposite it.

The Life and Times of Mohammad Ketchup

“What do you think is the worst thing about this place?” Hashim asked as he exhaled thick white smoke into the clear air.
“Fucking goats everywhere,” Mohammad replied, looking around the cafe outside which they sat. “That harami over there just tried to eat my new cargo pants.”

The goat in question looked at the two, knowing it was being watched. A ripped Styrofoam cup dangled from its mouth.

“No, not Buremi,” Hashim said, shaking the mouthpiece of his shisha. “Dubai.” Hashim was as wiry as a human being could be, gaunt with a shock of brown hair. He was as always dressed neatly in a kandura and shumagh that with a cap underneath. He had just raced through the border in his Range Rover, having completed classes just an hour ago. Within three weeks he would find out that he had failed all his classes bar one.

“Long list there,” Mohammad replied. He thought through the gentle bubbling of the double apple shisha. His left hand trembled slightly, having injured itself as he jumped out of a moving Jeep whist duning in the desert. He would go to the doctor only after having worsened the problem through the week, and then find out that he was suffering from a terminal form of cancer.

“Apart from the cheap food that makes you fat.”

Mohammad laughed. “Yes.” He returned to pensive pose. “But the worst thing about that city? Everything is artificial, mainly. People also. And you feel like dirt if you’re not local or white.”

“You ever notice how people are always hustling there?” Hashim suddenly found something remarkable in the dirt in front of them, and furrowed his brows at it.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean all the time, people are trying to sell you something. Sell themselves.”

“There’s a big prostitute population yes.”

“Not just that.”

“Then?”

“You remember we went to school with this guy Salah?”

“Yeah yeah. Fat guy.”

“That’s an understatement. He was the size of a whale. He works now with some petrol company, only I don’t even know what to believe since he lies through his teeth. First, he called me to ask if I wanted to go to his wedding, and then asked me to help pay for it.”

Muhammad almost fell off his rickety plastic chair laughing.

“I know, what an asshole, right?”

“Ha, yeah.”

“He then contacted – you remember Ahmad Rizwan – on Facebook after, what, now ten years and invited him to the wedding.”

“Oh I know where this is going.”

“He asked Ahmad on his wall, where everyone can see it, to bring money for the wedding.”

Mohammad coughed smoke out of his nose and laughed at the same time. It took him a full five minutes to be able to speak. “Oh Salah,” he finally said. “What a right idiot.”

“But it’s everyone here that’s like that. All these damn projects they have that are supposed to be the next big thing in business. Even their relationships are based on profit.”

“Thank god I’m going back west soon,” said Mohammad. “You should get the fuck out of here too.”

“Soon,” Hashim said. “Y’ani soon,” he reaffirmed.

“And we should get back to that god-forsaken place,” Mohammad continued, getting up.

“Yeah, shisha’s dead,” Hashim agreed.

Mohammad was already walking towards his car, keeping one eye on the goat. Within a week the goat would be in a stew to be presented at the wedding of the shisha shop owner’s youngest daughter.