by Joe Bennett
I suspect the Hummer owners of being American, and in this silent suburban street there are more Hummers than in a Schwarzenegger movie. Brute cars, bully cars, singing a song of paramilitary virility. On the rear windscreen of a yellow one there’s a big red sticker: ‘I Brake for Nobody’.
And all these mechanical beasts – Range Rovers, Hummers, Jeeps, Prados, Pajeros, BMWs, Audis and low-slung growly sports cars – amounting to what must be several million dollars’ worth on this single street, stand beaded with moisture and silent, like sleeping animals.
The houses they sleep in front of are known as villas but they look like mansions. There are several thousand of them in this complex. Most have a pool set in an automatically irrigated garden. All have accommodation for a live-in maid. Her room is about a third the size of the garage. The houses have no external guttering. Rain, when it comes, which is rarely, just bounces off and soaks into the limitless sands beneath. But these villas have been built with a nod to the region’s past. With their rounded edges, and their sandy coloured plaster and their flat tops and their pediments and balconies, and the wooden beams that protrude from their walls for no structural reason, they resemble, or at least allude to, the only local buildings that are more than fifty years old, the mud-built forts and palaces of the sheikhs. And right now, against the bleached pre-dawn sky, they don’t look entirely out of place.
The reason that these buildings exist goes to the root of the nature of this place. Dubai is a sheikhdom. The Al Maktoums are the ruling family, increasingly referred to as the royal family, and they are not elected. They were never elected. They rule because they rule. The current sheikh is Mohammed. His brother was sheikh before him. His father before him. That man was Sheikh Rashid, universally acknowledged as the creator of modern Dubai. Further back than that we won’t go for the moment.
All land belongs to the sheikh but he can and does dole out chunks of it as gifts. These gifts go exclusively to Emiratis so, until recently, there simply wasn’t a real estate market. Ex-pats, which meant pretty well everybody, had to rent. However wealthy they became, however their collection of Hummers for all occasions might spill out of the garage and onto the street, they could not own that garage. As the city boomed, so rents soared. The result was wealthy Emirati landlords and grumbling ex-pat tenants. The tenants clamoured for property rights. Without them, though they might have lived in Dubai for ten or twenty years, their toehold in the sand remained only a toehold.
Every ex-pat in Dubai is here on sufferance. He’s a guest with a visa. The longest visa available lasts only three years, and most visas are tied to employment. Lose your job and you lose your right to stay. And all visas can be revoked at any time by the sheikh without legal comeback. From Dubai’s point of view, it’s a most convenient system. You can get rid of anyone any time.
But if you allow a foreigner to buy a house then it’s harder to justify hoofing him out if he loses his job. He’s gone part way to becoming a citizen.
So the sheikh was faced with a dilemma. If he allowed ex-pats to own houses he would to some extent lose his power over them. Moreover he would run the risk of alienating the Emiratis. They do not elect him, but he retains power only by their consent. So he has to keep them sweet. And what better sweetener could there be than allowing them a monopoly on residential property in a booming metropolis?
But at the same time, if Dubai was to continue to boom it needed ex-pats, and if they continued to be unable to own a house then Dubai might lose out to the several other cities that were trying to imitate Dubai’s success.
Around 2002 the belief grew that the sheikh would cave in and people began to trade in houses. In 2006 the sheikh caved in. He didn’t grant ex-pats citizenship, but he did allow them to buy freehold property. There remains some confusion over precisely what rights this confers, and there may be horrible legal problems down the track, but the decision was like dropping a bleeding carcass into a sea of sharks.
The house in which I’m staying was bought in two minutes. Stephen’s wife, Kay, was given a numbered ticket to a show day for the development called Arabian Ranches. That was all Kay knew about it. The show day was held in a downtown office because there was nothing to show. The houses hadn’t been built. The land was still sand.
Kay attended only out of curiosity. When she arrived, the queue of ex-pats stretched round the block and then some.
She was tempted to turn back but her numbered ticket entitled her to jump the queue. She presented it at the door, was ushered to a desk in a thronged office and was shown three different house designs. She thought she preferred one.
The saleswoman pulled out a plan of the proposed development and asked where she would like her house built. This was all happening a little faster than Kay had expected or felt she could cope with. Nevertheless she studied the plan and pointed a tentative finger at a lot backing onto the golf course because Stephen liked golf.
‘Right, Design three, Lot thirty-two,’ said the saleswoman and she typed something into her computer and said that as yet Lot 32 had not been taken and she could hold it for two minutes while Kay made up her mind. If she decided to go ahead she had to pay her deposit right then. If she didn’t she missed out.
Kay rang her husband. He didn’t answer the phone. ‘Time’s up,’ said the saleswoman.
Kay is a farmer’s daughter from the Midlands. She is not given to whimsical purchases. But then she thought of the queue outside the office. ‘I’ll take it,’ she said. As she wrote a cheque for a hundred thousand pounds or so, she felt queasy and guilty. This wasn’t the sort of thing that a farmer’s daughter from the Midlands did. But farmers in the Midlands had never seen anything like Dubai.
She left the building feeling that she might throw up. When she emerged, the first person in the queue asked if she’d bought a house. Kay said she had. The person made her an offer for it. So did the next. She could have doubled her money, perhaps trebled it, in a minute. All of which made her feel she’d done the right thing.
Every available lot in the unbuilt Arabian Ranches sold that day. And that story was replicated all over the city. It was a property boom to rival any in history. In the golf club the other night I heard tell of an Irishman who flew to Dubai one morning, bought a handful of houses off plan, sold them in the afternoon, and flew home in the evening a millionaire. The story may even be trueish.
Buddy has sunk his snout in a pile of Christmas wrapping paper overflowing from a bin. Turning over a red and black cardboard box that held a remote-controlled car far bigger than him he extracts a discarded hard-centre chocolate with tooth-marks. A gate opens just along the street. A woman and a dog. The woman’s a tiny Filipina maid, the dog’s a vast mastiff. The maid could sit astride the beast and ride it like a jockey. She sees me, yanks the mastiff’s head, and walks swiftly in the opposite direction. Another gate opens, another maid appears, this time with a lolloping shaggy retriever. She too heads in the opposite direction when she sees us. It is obvious from the way they walk that the maids have no affection for the dogs. Walking the dog at dawn is just the first of the long day’s chores.
Arabian Ranches is walled like a medieval city. To enter or leave you have to pass through one of perhaps forty checkpoints. Each has a barrier arm and a guard in a guardhouse. As we approach, the guard emerges, a brown-skinned man in a blue semi-military uniform. He observes my white skin. He observes my un-Islamic dog.
‘Good morning, sir.’
I am unaccustomed to being called sir, especially when dog-walking at dawn. I am wearing old jeans and yesterday’s soiled shirt. I feel a middle-class uneasiness with deference. I ask the man where he’s from.
‘Nepal, sir.’
‘How come you’re in Dubai?’
‘Sir?’
‘How did you get this job?’
‘Security, sir, I am security.’ And he smiles with a sort of eager desperation.
I don’t push it, and Buddy is keen to move on. We cross the road
that circles the blank outer wall of the Ranches. I release the dog. He rewards me with the unfailing joy of dogs. He exults, as little children do, in the simple delight of running. When I call him he stops in a cloud of sand and hurtles back to me for a morsel of hamburger I filched from the fridge. His flesh quivers with zest. To see him is to smile by contagion.
The half light of dawn is shifting by imperceptible stages into the full light of day. A line of pylons marches across the desert, the wires looping like mooring ropes. Some twenty kilometres away a scruffy layer of mist hangs above the city like smoke from a steam train. It’ll take the heat of the sun to shift that. Somewhere in the background I can hear the hum of early traffic on the Emirates Road.
Birds in surprising numbers flit and lilt between the irrigated bushes. Little rufous doves as delicate as vases, another hoopoe silhouetted against the pearly air, a gang of birds with blackened heads like hangman’s hoods, and on the far side of a wrought-iron fence a scuttling covey of partridges. The far side of the fence is desert proper. No bushes, no irrigation, just sand and blown litter.
The dog spots the partridges. He charges. Under the wrought-iron fence he ducks, and away over a little dune. The birds burst into the air. ‘Buddy,’ I call, ‘Buddy, come,’ but he is suddenly atavistically deaf. Scared of losing him, I crawl under the fence and find him a few dunes away, nosing at a yoghurt carton. He sees me and remembers domestication.
The undulation of the sand has concealed from view the vast new housing estate. It has muffled the road noise too. I am perhaps two hundred yards from Range Rovers and air-conditioning yet I’m walking a dog in the desert. I snort with sudden laughter. The dog looks round surprised, then wags his stumpy tail. All joy is good by him.
Fifteen minutes later we crawl back under the fence and startle a work gang. Small, silent, Indian men in overalls with scarves wrapped around their heads against the mildish air, they have the beaten demeanour of prisoners. They carry shears and clippers and plastic bags of food that they hang from shrubs. Their job, day in day out, is to tend the forced vegetation on ex-pat housing estates. When Buddy approaches to sniff at one man’s lunch bag, the man shies and turns away in fear of the shin-high creature. I call Buddy, say sorry and good morning, but get nothing back.
A gurgle and the irrigation switches itself on, miles of black tubing running from plant to plant and coiling round their stems. Near my feet the plug on a side-tube has popped off. Water glugs out to be swallowed by the sand, blackening it. All of this water, every drop of it, has been drawn from the sea and desalinated.
Half a mile up the road I can see a mini-van dropping off another gang. To live here as an ex-pat is to learn not to see these quiet servants, to look past or through them, to edit them out. I haven’t been here long enough.
In the fifteen minutes that I’ve been among the dunes, Arabian Ranches has stirred and rubbed sleep from its eyes. The path inside the ring road is now spattered with joggers, trim, gym-tautened white women in Nike footwear carrying a baby’s bottle of water as they run, blonde hair tied back in a ponytail, skin tanned to a light hazel, shorts laundered and ironed by the maid. Some run in sunglasses. I see only one man running, a man with the look of a banker: pasty, whey-faced, not more than thirty, his soft little belly slopping as he goes, every stride an effort of will, his feet slap-slapping on the paving. The runners pass the workers squatting with tools among the bushes and neither species of creature seems to see the other. Both are aliens in an alien land. They have come to Dubai for the same reasons, but to opposite ends of the status scale.
As I am about to reclip Buddy’s lead he catches sight of a Dalmatian with maid attached. The maid shrieks as the dogs meet and dance. She tries to haul the Dalmatian away. The dogs sniff genitals, their tails wagging with the taut and nervous etiquette of greeting that goes back millennia.
‘Sorry,’ I say as I clip Buddy back on.
‘Thank you, sir,’ says the maid, but she is acutely uncomfortable. Were she my social equal she would not have said thank you.
She’s carrying a Spinney’s supermarket bag with which to scoop up the Dalmatian’s shit. Here on the desert fringe there are dedicated bins for dog shit, so that instead of baking in the sun and crumbling to dust within a day, the shit can fester in its own hot juices and bloom to putrescence before being collected by a minion in a truck and lugged to a place of disposal.
As I pass back through the security gate a string of 4WDs is heading the other way, each with a single male passenger bound for the city in his tank-like vehicle. And as he swings onto the Emirates Road, a multiple-laned highway that carves across the last scrubby remnants of desert between this estate and the city that is coming out to meet it, he will pass a billboard the size of a house. On it is a picture of Sheikh Mohammed, Ruler of Dubai, and the sons who are being groomed to succeed him. In block letters above the image, the words ‘Our Visionary Leaders’.
When I get back to Stephen’s house, the papers have arrived. Israel is attacking Gaza with its customary military ruthlessness. Hundreds of Palestinians have died and a dozen of the dead are on the front page in colour, curled foetally or stretched like starfish, the wounds that killed them centre stage, engorged and purple. The blood puddle that surrounds the corpses is turning black like irrigated sand. No newspaper in the West would print such photographs. And yet no newspaper in the West is as subject as this one to effective censorship. Every editor here knows that if you wish to remain in business there are things you just don’t say, such as boo to the sheikh, and other things that you say as often as possible, such as boo to Israel.
4
Essential Supplies
Coffee is to be found in Dubai, but you have to go to the malls. The coffee shop Stephen’s brought me to, in the atrium of a mall somewhere off Sheikh Zayed Road, is part of an American chain and could be anywhere in the wealthy world. There’s low-slung padded furniture and bleached wooden tables and thirty varieties of coffee that come in disposable cups. The cup sizes are described as regular, tall and large but would be more accurately rendered as too big, much too big and swimmable-in.
Stephen’s friends that we’ve come to meet are all ex-pats of long standing. One’s Swedish, two English, and each is the size of a couple of Filipinos.
The bulkiest of them has a handshake like a damp petal. He’s a spook. He instals telecommunication surveillance equipment for anyone who pays. His most recent employer was the Libyan government.
The Swede’s in telecommunications too. Soon he and the spook are engaged in a merry conversation crammed with acronyms. CDMA and GSM are the only ones I recognize, but the nub of the conversation is how easy it is for the technologically savvy to fleece telephone companies and how easy it is for telephone companies to fleece the non-technologically savvy. ‘Once you get a mobile phone,’ says the spook, ‘we’ve got you. You can’t get away.’
The spook is married to an Iranian. He tells us that at a party the other night they were playing some board game and his wife was required to guess the class of object most likely to be found hanging outside someone’s house. The correct answer was washing. Her guess was criminals.
The third man turns out to be an authority on horizontal drilling, which is a method of gaining access to oil reserves that you otherwise couldn’t gain access to for reasons of geography or politics.
‘This guy,’ says Stephen, ‘started the first Gulf War.’
The horizontal driller smiles modestly.
It seems that by means of his expertise, Kuwait was tapping into Iraqi oil. Saddam told Kuwait to stop. Kuwait persisted. So Saddam invaded Kuwait. Whereupon the Americans invaded Kuwait as well, led by Stormin’ Norman.
‘Well done,’ I say to the horizontal driller, though I am unsure whether I am having my leg pulled, and if so to what length. All three men sprawl. They occupy space with a regal confidence born of wealth and certainty. And like blokes anywhere they swap stories. The horizontal driller is a rugby enthusiast,
a fixture at the annual Dubai Sevens where he dedicates several days to drinking. Last year the tournament was interrupted by a ferocious thunderstorm. ‘I had to ring my bloody houseboy,’ says the horizontal driller, ‘and get him to bring me some dry clothes.’ Everyone enjoys the tale, but I suspect I am the only one who jumps at the word ‘houseboy’. It sounds like the British Raj to me. But if I lived here a while I’ve no doubt I’d get used to it. Indeed, I’d probably employ one.
As we leave the mall we pass an Ice Bar.
‘Sixty dirhams,’ says a surly Russian youth at the door when I ask whether I can just nip in to have a look. ‘With complimentary juice.’
‘Oh go on, I just want a quick look.’
‘Nyet. Look through the window, like everybody else.’
I look through the window. It’s thick, like a heavy-duty aquarium. On the other side of it is a room made of ice. All the furniture is carved from ice. There are crude ice chandeliers and a few coloured lights illuminating the icy walls. Three Asian women are inside, togged up in fur-trimmed anoraks, taking photos of each other, sipping from their complimentary juices and looking frankly bored.
Opposite the ice bar is a Lamborghini stand. Not the Lamborghini of the cars, but his brother, apparently. He’s selling Lamborghini key rings and Lamborghini coffee, or at least offering them for sale. I’m the only browser. The coffee and key rings bear a logo not entirely dissimilar to the logo on his brother’s preposterous cars.
‘Come on,’ says Stephen, ‘we’ve got to go.’
We’re going to fetch booze.
Booze is readily available in Islamic Dubai. It may not be drunk on the streets, but in the business and tourist areas, which means pretty well all of downtown Dubai, there are innumerable licensed hotels. The stuff is expensive, however, so when an ex-pat needs to restock his liquor cabinet at home he heads north-east, out of Dubai, skirts the neighbouring emirate of Sharjah, and fetches up in the little emirate of Umm-al-Qwain. The UAE isn’t big.
