Baghdad without a Map and Other Misadventures in Arabia

by Tony Horwitz

  The balance and civility of Mobarak’s vision was appealing, at least for the men. The only women I’d yet seen were black ghosts in head-to-toe veils, herding children through the streets. I asked Mobarak if women resented the obvious restrictions on their dress and activity.

  He smiled. “In the West, you are obsessed by our women. Do not worry. This too is changing.” Islam allowed a man to have up to four wives, but marrying more than one was frowned on by the younger generation. And though technically a husband could divorce a wife by saying “I divorce thee” three times, this too was discouraged, unless the wife was barren. “Women must be protected and cared for because they are controlled by emotions,” he said. “Surely man is not woman and woman is not man.”

  We finished the tea, and the cardamom coffee that followed. Then Mobarak explained that he had to retire, because classes began early the next day. “I must work on my accounting,” he said. “In the West you have learned to use Arab numbers. But we must learn to use your computers. After all, this is a modern country.”

  * * *

  In fact, the United Arab Emirates hadn’t been a country for long; like everything else, the state itself was newly minted and rather insecure. Before uniting in 1971, the seven shiekdoms often took up arms against each other, usually over land, and the map of their confederacy remained a crazy quilt of neutral zones and lines marked “border disputed” or “boundary undefined.” One of the emirates covered an area of only one hundred square miles. Here, in microcosm, was the Arabia of “tribes with flags” the Egyptians so disparaged.

  Abu Dhabi, the biggest and richest of the city-states, was the center of power. But Dubai, ninety miles down the coastal superhighway, was the country’s brash commercial hub. It was to Dubai that I headed to find some way out onto the Persian Gulf.

  The official at the Dubai Chamber of Commerce had tinted glasses and six pens clipped to the breast pocket of his dishdasha. “We are the black camel of the Emirates family,” he said, grinning broadly. “We love the West. We love capitalism.” He stuffed my shoulder bag with glossy promotional literature, each page of which assured the prospective businessman that Dubai’s port was duty-free, regulation-free, everything-free. Dubai hadn’t let the Gulf war get in the way of its longstanding trade ties with Iran, whose territory lay just fifty-three miles offshore. There were daily flights to Tehran, shell-pocked Iranian tankers limping into Dubai’s drydock for repairs, and Iranian traders pulling up in graceful teakwood sailboats, called dhows, as they had for centuries.

  “We love business, we love tourism, we love everybody!” the Chamber of Commerce official exulted, seeing me to the door. I found myself grinning stupidly back at him, saying, “I love Dubai, too!”

  And I did, though its real appeal was diversity. Outside the scrubbed white skyscrapers and gleaming white Mercedeses, the white-robed natives were lost in a stew of Indians, Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, tall-turbaned Sikhs and a host of others whose homelands I would have been hard pressed to find on a map: Tamils, Baluchis, Pathans, Keralans, and Singhalese. Caste signs were more common than veils on the narrow alleys of the souk; Hindi and Urdu more commonly spoken than Arabic. At the oil boom’s peak in the late seventies, imported “guest workers” outnumbered natives five to one.

  There were also Westerners, most of whom hung out at a mock-Mexican bar called Pancho Villa’s. It was there that I found Jim and Johannes, well into their third pitcher of beer and second basket of double-cheese nachos.

  “About the only thing I’ve never met in this city,” said Jim, an oil worker from Oklahoma, “is a native Dubai-ite.”

  “Dubain,” Johannes corrected. “Rhymes with Hawaiian.”

  “Dubain, Dubaier, Dubai-ite—who gives a fuck?”

  The two men laughed. Even their giggles seemed to slur.

  “Hombre!” Jim yelled, calling the waiter. A Filipino barman clad in sombrero and bandolier scooted up with another pitcher of beer. It was “ladies’ night,” but there wasn’t a lady in sight. Men outnumber women in Dubai by three to one.

  “Money honey,” Jim said, rubbing his thumb and forefinger together. “That’s the only reason anyone lives in this hole.” He gestured at the wall, which was adorned with two bumper stickers: “If you don’t smoke, I won’t fart” and “Beer drinkers get more head.”

  “The last time I got any of that, jeez, it’s been centuries,” Jim moaned, staring into his beer. “Must have been Bangkok. About ’74.”

  “’76,” Johannes corrected. “I was the one who gave it to you.”

  Jim giggled and reached over to fill Johannes’s mug, spilling most of it on the floor. I asked Johannes what kind of work he did. “Sit here and wait for hell to break loose,” the Dutchman said, handing me a business card that read “Tugboat owner and salvage operator.” His boats tugged tankers out to sea, then tugged them back in after they’d been riddled with missiles and mines.

  “I am like a wrecker driver on the highway,” he said. “I make money from other people’s distress.” American destroyers had flattened an Iranian oil platform earlier that day; tension was the highest it had been for months. “At the moment,” Johannes said, flashing gold incisors, “business is very good.”

  I told him I was a reporter, looking for a little distress myself. Could he get me out on the water?

  Johannes shook his head. Lloyd’s of London had recently raised its war-risk premium by fifty percent, and insuring another passenger was costly. But he knew someone who might help and scribbled the agent’s name on the back of a soggy napkin. “Say you’re a friend of mine.” He laughed. “And if you get into trouble, you know who to call.”

  The shipping agent from Bombay worked by the Dubai Creek, the narrow channel that snakes through the city and into the Persian Gulf. Teakwood dhows were moored three deep along the dock, jostling for space with a workaday fleet of trawlers, tugs and supply boats. Most of the dhows were manned by Iranian traders who stuffed their hulls with pistachios and carpets, forbidden exports from Khomeini’s Iran.

  The shipping agent gazed out at the creek, then lowered his teacup and whispered, “I know a vessel that leaves tonight. If the Persians cause no trouble, you will reach the Strait of Hormuz after dawn.”

  He waited for a colleague to take a radio call, then slipped a piece of paper across his desk. “You have never met me and do not know my name. I do this for you only, as a favor.” He nodded his head toward the door.

  * * *

  The rendezvous was set for three in the morning at the Dubai Creek. Sleeping Iranians now littered the decks of each dhow, bundled like mummies in the aisles of their seaborne bazaars. Outgoing traders were already awake and piling their teakwood ships with Marlboros, Levi’s and Panasonic boom boxes for the sixteen-hour run back to Iran. The water was thick with smugglers.

  I was scanning the dark for the Bombay man’s boat when an Arab official stepped from the gloom, demanding identification. He weighed my passport and visa in his hand, barely glancing at their contents. “Your papers,” he said, “I think maybe they are not in order.” He looked as though he might bite one corner to test for counterfeit.

  I forced a nervous smile. “Perhaps I have caused some inconvenience by arriving at this late hour.” Overblown language is the Musak of Arab officialdom. So is baksheesh, at least in Cairo. “Certain arrangements of a—”

  “Please, no,” the man said, recoiling. Here in the world’s richest country, offering a bribe was insulting. He handed back my papers and disappeared into the dark.

  I spotted the name of the Bombay boat on the back of a sixty-foot workhorse, snub-nosed and broad across the beam. On the deck stood a muscular young Indian with curry on his breath. “I am Lawrence of Goa,” he said, helping me on board. “Do not be afraid. The captain knows where the mines are. Maybe.”

  A dim light showed from the bridge, and a fine-boned man with black curls and a pierced ear sat cross-legge
d before the wheel. “I am Captain Kochrekar,” he said. Still chewing on Lawrence’s “maybe,” I asked the captain if there was much danger traveling through the Persian Gulf at night.

  “Wherever there is darkness there is also light,” he said, staring into the night. “A man must make his own map for the shadows.”

  Lawrence of Goa untied the boat and Captain Kochrekar steered us toward the shallow black water of the Persian Gulf.

  Lights blinked from a container terminal towering at the mouth of the Dubai Creek. Offshore oil terminals blinked back. Then we were swallowed up by the night. Faint points of green blipped across Kochrekar’s radar screen. Otherwise he navigated without lights. The Persian Gulf wasn’t the sort of place where mariners sought attention.

  Not that there was much of an audience. Except for a lonely coast guard boat swishing past us in the dark and a few container ships lying at anchor, we sighted no other traffic for the first two hours at sea. But the quiet was deceptive. The gunboats and missiles I’d watched on TV posed little danger to Kochrekar’s small craft, a supply boat that provisioned tankers with spare parts and food. It was Iranian mines strewn haphazardly across the shipping lanes that threatened destruction.

  “A mine is like a snake,” Kochrekar said, peering over the wheel at a dark patch of water. “It does not think before striking.”

  The captain’s engineer, Jesudasyn, appeared from below, munching a chapati and studying a nautical chart. On the map, the Persian Gulf was shaped like a headless figure, reclining comfortably in a La-Z-Boy chair. The Emirates formed the figure’s buttocks and thighs, with Iran sitting heavily in its lap. The figure was covered in pencil marks stretching from Dubai to the Strait of Hormuz.

  “These dots are mines we have spotted before,” Jesudaysn explained. “Of course, the Persians always put new ones.”

  I asked him what would happen if we hit a mine.

  “Like this,” he said, brushing chapati crumbs from his trouser leg.

  I decided to add my own eyes to the night watch. There was a momentary flare as gas burned off at a distant oilfield. Then black sea and black sky, stretching all the way to Iran. We could have been sailing through an inkwell.

  The last time Kochrekar had made this run from Dubai to Fujairah, just south of the Strait, the supply boat patrolling ahead of him struck a mine. Kochrekar reached the scene in time to haul his fellow captain out of the sea. “The man was not broken but he was swollen with water, like a fish,” he said. The others came ashore in pieces.

  Every war has them; little people, caught in the crossfire. But for Kochrekar and his crew, the Gulf conflict was especially cruel. Like other Gulf proletariat, they had come to Dubai in the vast subcontinental drift that brought millions of Indian workers to the oil-rich Arabian shores. The wage in the Emirates was three times laborer’s pay in Bombay. But tending Arab gardens and grooming Arab camels was one thing; dying in someone else’s war was quite another. In the three years since the tanker war had flared in earnest, Iran and Iraq had already destroyed a third of the merchant tonnage that went down in all of World War II. Most of the 350-odd dead were Indian, Pakistani, Korean or Filipino.

  “I chose the sea because it is a peaceful place,” Kochrekar said. A fifth-generation sailor, he’d shipped out of Bombay at eighteen and had been on the water for the thirty years since. “But this, this is—what do you call it? I believe it is Russia roulette.”

  To Lawrence of Goa it was mostly tedium. While his mates stood watch in the wheelhouse, the handsome bronze Goan shelled crabs in the galley, peppering them from makeshift spice jars with labels that read “Tang,” “Nescafe” and “Super Chunky Peanut Butter.” When he wasn’t stirring curry, Lawrence added line after line to an already epic-length letter to his wife in Goa, on the west coast of India. “This is she,” he said, pointing to a picture taped at eye level, just above his writing table. It was a small, poorly focused snapshot of a sari-clad beauty in a tropical paradise of blue water, white sand and waving palm trees. “This is my dream, day and night,” he said.

  Like his mates, Lawrence squirreled away his earnings for the three months each year that he returned home to spend with his family. Even in port, the crew slept on board, cooking curry in the cabin, watching Indian movies on videotape and listening to sitar music on the radio. It was as though they’d never really landed in the Emirates at all.

  “I am not interested in these Arabs,” Lawrence said, returning to his Homeric letter. “Only in their money.”

  I asked him what he had to tell his wife about these long empty days at sea.

  “Nothing,” he said. “So I write how much I miss her and how I count the days until we are together in Goa again.”

  This day’s count was 210.

  * * *

  Above, on the bridge, Jesudasyn’s imagination drifted along a parallel plane. He was an earnest dark Tamil, about forty-five, who spoke with the unflinching bluntness of a four-year-old.

  “There is something I must ask you,” he said after staring at the sea for several hours. “Is it true that men and women in America live together without marriage?”

  “Yes, that’s true.”

  “How is it then that they are still virgins when they marry? Please explain.”

  “They aren’t.”

  Jesudasyn pondered this for a moment, then shook his head. “This could not be in India. A woman must be a virgin.”

  We studied the water for a few minutes before he resumed his interrogation.

  “How is it then that they have no children when they marry?”

  “Some do,” I told him. “But mostly they use precautions. In marriage, too.”

  “And what precaution do you prefer? Please explain.”

  I paused. “Well, there are many options.”

  “Do you like the condom?” he interrupted. “Myself, I do not think it can be so effective.” Then he reached into a drawer and pulled out the previous day’s newspaper from Dubai. He’d circled a story that told of an Arab man who had thirty-two children and three wives—and wanted more of both.

  “This man,” Jesudasyn said, “I think he needs a precaution.”

  Kochrekar, who had been silent till now, joined in the conversation. “A woman is not to be used up and then thrown away,” he said solemnly. “In India a man takes only one wife and they are one until the funeral pyre.”

  The conversation was wandering off course, but I was happy to go with the flow. It was taking my mind off the mines.

  “And what happens after the pyre?” I asked Kochrekar. My cartoon image of Hinduism showed a lot of people lined up to come back as cows.

  “Only the old still believe in reincarnation,” Kochrekar said, “because such things cannot be with science. After the pyre burns, what is left? Dust and ashes only.”

  It seemed a sad creed for a man who spent his life dodging mines in the Persian Gulf.

  “And what gods do you worship?” Jesudasyn asked.

  “I was raised as a Jew.”

  The two men turned to stare. For a moment there were no eyes at all on the water. In three hours at sea, we’d broached two topics—Judaism and sex—that could have remained untouched for a year on Arab land.

  “I have always wanted to meet this thing called Jew,” Jesudasyn said softly, “and to hear about your messiahs. Please explain.”

  * * *

  At daybreak the Gulf became a whitish haze and we churned across it as if through a giant bowl of milk. As the mist cleared, the water turned a brilliant cobalt blue, the way a child paints ocean. And the sea remained astonishingly empty. I’d imagined the Gulf as a cluttered bathtub with ships packed so tightly that they barely had room for incoming missiles. The reality was an azure expanse, twice the size of New York State, stretching from the Hormuz Strait to the swampy confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates in Iraq. There were a lot more sea turtles than frigates.
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  The tension on board our craft eased with the passing of night. In the shimmering morning light, a mine would be obvious at one hundred yards or more. Jesudasyn closed his eyes and slumped against one corner of the wheelhouse. Lawrence’s voice wafted up from below with the aroma of something cooking. “Captain,” he said, “how would you like your eggs?”

  Kochrekar tilted his head toward the cabin. “It is as you decide, Lawrence. A cook must be his own master.”

  When the breakfast was ready, Kochrekar peered through binoculars for a moment, then asked if I’d take the wheel and continue on the same course while he ducked below. It seemed easy enough. I grasped the wheel and trained my eyes on the island toward which the bow was pointing. Steady as she goes. When the boat shifted a little to starboard, I swung the wheel the other way. Now we were too far left. I swung again and the bow began bobbing like a compass needle. Suddenly the island was nowhere in sight. By the time Kochrekar finished his eggs, I was trying to pull us out of a skid straight toward the Iranian coast.

  Kochrekar allowed himself the first smile of the long boat ride. “You must let no current move you from the path you have chosen,” he said, taking the wheel. Even his simplest statements seemed lifted from the Upanishads.

  Nine o’clock was rush hour on the Persian Gulf. First one tanker and then a second and third sprouted on the horizon, followed soon after by another trio. The supertankers, some the size of several football fields, seemed indecently exposed in waters so open. Except that each convoy was tailed by a gray battleship bristling with cannons and radar. The scene reminded me of walking to kindergarten with my older brother.

  * * *

  If tanker convoys and radar were new to the Persian Gulf, naval warfare certainly wasn’t. For centuries the coastal sheiks had sent their fishing and pearling boats into the Gulf to plunder European ships bound for India and the Orient. By the nineteenth century, the entire shoreline of what is now the Emirates and Oman had become known as the Pirate Coast. The pirates took no prisoners.