by Joe Bennett
Above the heads of the frolickers runs a chairlift, hoisting fully kitted skiers through the roof of the building and round the corner into the giant spectacle-case. And out of that spectacle-case and back into sight comes a steady stream of skiers. Some are rank beginners, frozen in snow-plough posture, terror on their faces and arses aloft, as if awaiting an old-fashioned schoolmaster. But waltzing and winding past and through them come the arrogant majority, deft with skills learned on holiday in the Alps, carving their turns and relishing the liberation of speed without effort, the best of them with upper bodies seemingly unmoving. Their hips swivel like alternators and their knees flex like springs. I feel an urge to rent skis and join them. It is years since I skied. Though I live only two hours from good mountain skiing, those two hours are always enough to put me off. Here you can do it while grocery-shopping. It may be absurd but if you’ve got the money it is also indulgently wonderful.
At the foot of the slope the beginners come gradually to a halt and unfurl themselves with relief from their posture of terror. The more skilled do look-at-me finishes, flicking the skis parallel, digging the edges in, throwing up their own little boastful flurry of snow. And in the fifteen minutes that I stand with my face to the glass enjoying the whole business, every skier I see is white.
There are so many indistinguishable malls in Dubai that each has to bellow its distinction. Each has to fix in the cerebral cortex of the crowd a USP, a Unique Selling Point, an image that must pop up automatically whenever the place is mentioned. For the Mall of the Emirates that means skiing. For the Dubai Mall the USP is fish. Dubai Mall’s got more fish than you can shake a trawler at.
When completed, Dubai Mall will be the biggest of the lot. It will be the anchor of the most ambitious and arrogant of all the city’s ambitious and arrogant constructions. For it sits at the foot of the Burj Dubai1, the tallest building in the world. When finished, the Burj Dubai will spike almost a kilometre into the sky. It will be Dubai’s landmark, its signature.
When I first saw it I took a while to realize what it reminded me of. But then it became obvious. The thing is a steeple. It tapers like any of the great cathedral spires of England, like Salisbury, say, that took a century to build. It spikes the sky and narrows to nothingness then vanishes at the very feet of God.
The mall at its base has more stores than anyone could need and an ice rink and a synthetic Christmas tree that rises though three storeys and changes colour completely every minute or so, but it’s the fish that I’ve come to see. The fish are bait, devised to lure the shoppers and open their mouths wide with gawping wonder and then to hook them through the wallet. And effective bait they are too. A huge crowd is standing in the concourse and staring at a glass wall the size of a couple of houses. Behind the glass are fish in prodigious numbers. It’s the Arabian Gulf in a tank.
Dull fish, flashy fish, flat fish. Fish like lugubrious old men. Fish with faces like tragedy masks. Fish as pale as ghosts. Fish that are halfway between skate and shark. A scutter of little yellow striped fish that cluster like paparazzi round a monstrous groper. The groper moves as slowly as the moon. Fish with bulbous foreheads, like the cockpits on fighter planes, fish with tails like trenching spades. A school of rays that flap like slow birds. The ripple that passes along their wings resembles a mathematical function made flesh. Here are all the blind permutations of evolution that happened to work. They have all passed the only test, which is to survive long enough in order to reproduce. And they are our ancestors. We came from the sea.
It is tempting to imagine that it is the ghost of this knowledge that keeps me, and perhaps a thousand other human beings, entranced. We stand and we stare, with some tiny portion of the amygdylla perhaps fizzing with ancestral memory. We swam among these creatures. We were and partially are of these creatures. It’s deliciously sobering, like examining ourselves through the wrong end of a telescope. It gives perspective, a belittling sense of futility. To stand and stare at the fish is to sense that the whole business of being alive is cosmically comic, an excellent joke told to an empty theatre.
The crowd is enjoying the fish a lot. Indeed, many want more and are queuing to get right in among the fish, to pay a few dirhams to walk though a glass tunnel with fish above, below and on all sides of them. Is there a coelacanth in here? The coela-canth’s fleshy fins are thought to have been the first prototypes of terrestrial limbs. It’s the fish, in other words, that led to us.
The fishes, as far as I can tell, feel neither joy nor gloom, intent only on the neutral business of going on going on, swimming in wide and pointless swoops, touring the tank until they die. The spectators make up for that neutrality with anthropoidal gibbering and chattering.
The children are particularly ape-like, clambering onto parents to get a better view of the aquatic monsters, running up to the glass and banging it, then recoiling with delighted fear from a shark ten times their size, its snout a few inches from their own. As always, the adults are more restrained, contenting themselves with taking photos with cell phones held arbitrarily, hopefully above the heads of the crowd.
I don’t understand why the big fish, and the sharks in particular, don’t eat the little fish. But then comes feeding time. Two men drop in through the roof of the pool. I say men, but they are effectively throwbacks. They have regained the bits we lost when we adjusted to living on land. Their oxygen cylinders are clumsy temporary gills. They’ve acquired a skin to fend the cold off, and webbed propulsive feet. And they bring with them chunks of fish flesh. The big fish have learned about these strange amphibious men and weave around them in a menacing dance of hunger, as if spinning a web. The men haul the flesh from their baskets and hand it into the sharks’ forbidding mouths and the sharks dive instantly to a corner to feast, like my dog when given a bone.
The little fish hang around to snap at floating morsels. None of the food that the divers bring goes to waste: it all forms more fish flesh. The whole process is beautifully complete, blindly established and inevitable and cyclical and neither good nor bad, just sleek and greedy and clean. In short, the fish make a cracking USP. Three or four times I make up my mind to move on, but my feet don’t shift. In the end I have to wrench them into motion, ripping against the glue of fascination that fixes them to the synthetic floor. It’s hunger that does it.
It takes a while to find food in Dubai Mall. I cover perhaps half a mile of galleries and escalators in search of the food court. This building’s as big as a village. I suppose that as malls expand to cover ever greater acreages and embrace ever more diverse activities, mini-malls will sprout within mega-malls. Indeed the process has already begun. In the Dubai Mall there’s a distinct region they call the gold souk. It consists of perhaps twenty identical jewellers. The effect goes beyond dazzling. It exhausts the eyes.
When I do find food I find a globesworth of it: tacos, hamburgers, kebabs, sushi, a Chinese smorgasbord, muffins, sundaes, a trillion flavours of ice-cream, hot dogs, cold smoothies, roast meats – nothing from Arabia and nothing I haven’t seen before. It’s the universal menu and it’s wordless. You choose by looking at pictures and to order you have only to point.
From the glistening photos that surmount every kiosk I select a plate of kebabs. The meal takes ten minutes to arrive, is delivered without a smile and resembles fried sadness. In contrast with the bright lit world of its own advertisement, it sits on the plate limp and beaten, a dispiriting incarnation of a platonic ideal. I lug it to the table least littered with the remains of other meals. How many paper tissues are scrunched and discarded worldwide each day? How many sachets of tomato sauce half-squeezed?
Across the way from me an Emirati family is finishing its paper-wrapped meal of burgers and hot dogs. Dad’s in a faultlessly laundered dishdash and headgear, mum in a black abaya but no veil. The kids are in junior versions of the same outfits, except for the toddler who wears a light-blue romper suit. The Filipina maid, sitting ignored two chairs away, is in jeans and t-shirt and t
raining shoes. She doesn’t seem to have been given food. Discreetly she oversees the children’s eating, unwrapping stuff for them and cleaning their fingers with a tissue. She looks down-trodden. She looks defeated.
The mother turns to her for the first time since I’ve been spying and says a few words, then she and her husband up and leave, taking the eldest girl with them, and leaving the other three kids in the Filipina’s care. She is perhaps twenty years old. From what I know of Filipino society there’s a good chance she has children of her own, even at that age. An aunt or grandmother will be looking after them while their mother looks after other people’s kids here in Dubai and strives to save money to send home.
The South African party-goer called Filipinos the stupidest people on earth. I’d call them the unluckiest. In the last four hundred years they’ve been done over by the Spanish, the Catholic Church, the Americans, the Japanese and their own presidents, every one of whom has been as corrupt as Mugabe. In short, Filipinos have been beaten with the shitty end of the stick for so long that they barely know that a shitless end exists. The ambition of most young Filipinos is to go overseas to earn money in menial jobs and remit as much home as they can. The government of the Philippines has a department dedicated to such remittances.
You can see history in the face of this maid. She has dark Spanish eyes. She has a hint of the asiatic features of her indigenous island-dwelling forebears. She wears a little silver crucifix. She speaks reasonable American English. And she’s treated like a household appliance. By geographical accident of birth she finds herself at the bottom of the heap. It’s hard not to think of the sharks in the tank downstairs.
When her employers disappear, quite possibly to fritter more money on their daughter than they pay the maid for a month of drudgery, she sags. She visibly lets exhaustion and dispiritedness get the better of her. Her two older charges, aged perhaps six and eight, start a raucous chasing game around the tables. She does nothing. The toddler starts to cry, I can’t work out why. She tries to comfort the child. It wails. The wail’s like a saw on metal, a noise designed to grate on adult brains, to cause them to act.
People at other tables are staring. The Filipina desperately tries to pacify the child. She calls to the two roistering kids. You can sense from her shy voice that they hold the whip hand over her, have been encouraged to do so perhaps, or have simply learned it from their parents by osmosis. It seems that she wants to take the toddler to the washroom, but the older kids play up. The little one keeps wailing. The maid looks close to breaking point. I can’t take it. I get up and go over to her, ask if I can help.
She looks up from the infant and her face is stretched with horror.
‘No, sir, thank you, sir,’ she says, and looks desperately around as she speaks.
I offer just to keep an eye on the two kids while she tends to the wailing one. To be frank I’d like to bang their heads together.
‘No, sir, no, sir.’
People are looking. She is consumed by distress. I have only added to it. To leave the kids with me would be a sackable offence, or even, from what I’ve read, a reason for a beating.
I’ve done a stupid thing. I retreat to my table, and feign interest in an advertising brochure.
Eventually the maid manages to corral the other two kids and leads all three to the washroom, carrying the still wailing toddler, its noise receding as she rounds a corner.
I go. A few people stare at me as I go. I stare back at them venomously, though they have done nothing wrong.
It takes a while to find an exit into the real world. At the door I ignore the monstrous snake of taxis. I feel the need to walk. A few hundred yards, and I turn to take in the steepling eminence of the world’s tallest building. Perhaps half of it is clad in mirror glass. The vast remainder stands open to the air like a honeycomb. The arms of construction cranes swing from its side, hundreds of metres into the air. Apparently in the event of a fire the crane drivers are supposed to clamber to the tips of their cranes and await rescue by helicopter.
I try to feel a fitting sense of awe at the scale of the thing. Whether it pleases you or not it’s an impressive endeavour. But I just find myself wondering how many people have died in its construction. Poor people, unlucky people, people like the maid who came here with hope.
7
How it Happened
It’s the sort of desk that a boss might sit at in a cartoon. Its polished acreage holds a blotter, a gold pen, a telephone and nothing else. All it lacks is a sales graph behind it with an arrow heading through floor or ceiling, plus an intercom into which the boss leans occasionally to bark amusing instructions to Miss Fish.
Thirty years ago this was just about the highest-flying desk in Dubai. For it sits in an office near the top of the World Trade Centre, Dubai’s first skyscraper, officially opened by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II in 1979.
It’s a monolith of windows in a lattice of stark white concrete. It lacks the smooth-honed elegance of the modern skyscraper, but when it went up it was both a wonder and an act of bravado. It rose from the sand like a single inexplicable tooth with nothing to chew. Its main use to begin with was to serve as Dubai’s unmistakable landmark. You could see it from everywhere, towering over a mean huddle of next to nothing.
Had any disaffected dingbat thought of flying a plane into this World Trade Centre he couldn’t have missed. Today he’d have to be a stunt pilot. He’d have to weave through a forest of skyscrapers: show-off, gleaming, my-dick-is-bigger-than-yours buildings with flanks of glass and steel. There are buildings shaped like giant Bic lighters, or like pencils. One resembles a tuning fork.
I’m holding a photo that was taken from the window of this office in 1979. And nothing I have seen has so brought home the suddenness of Dubai, the speed at which it has risen. From here I overlook Sheikh Zayed Road, a mighty eight-lane highway, a roaring river of vehicles. In the thirty-year-old photo it’s just a track through sand, unsealed and all but deserted. A couple of blurry dots on it I take for dune buggies. Beside it stands a pair of unadorned four-storey buildings, like accommodation blocks for Soviet workers. These formed the only hotel in these parts at that time. In the background I can make out the coastline and the Gulf beyond, and a sparse scatter of huts and chalets set back from the beach in what is now Jumeirah. And everything else between the window and the horizon is sand.
Today every inch of that sand is built on.
Time after time my eyes go down to the photo then back to the view from the window. In 1979 I was just leaving university. While I have wandered my way through adulthood, working too much, not laughing enough, watching a few puppies grow into dogs, this city, this latter-day Babylon, has come into being in the desert, has been built from nothing. In those thirty years I’ve built one single-storey, though pleasingly sturdy, goat shed.
The boss who owns the big empty desk and the photograph I am marvelling at and the office in which I am standing and the gold-rimmed coffee cup from which I am drinking, does not want to be identified. I got his name from someone I met at a party and rang him cold and he invited me to his office, but when I explain that I make a living by writing he becomes a little nervous. ‘I don’t want publicity and I don’t need it,’ he says.
But most of what he says is uncontentious. It is largely a paean to Sheikh Rashid. ‘Rashid’, says the boss, ‘had vision.’
Rashid, the father of Sheikh Mohammed, succeeded his own father in 1958 and is universally acknowledged as the man who set Dubai on the path to what it’s become. He’s the reason you’ve heard of the place. But he didn’t have it easy to start with. There were rumblings in his sheikhdom. The pearl industry that had been the economic mainstay of Dubai had collapsed; the emirate was pinched with poverty. And in the wake of the Suez crisis, there were moves throughout the Arab world for independence. This made the Al Maktoums vulnerable because, ultimately, they ruled Dubai because they had the backing of British authority.
And the British rec
ognized their vulnerability. When Rashid took power they sent a warship and gave him a five-gun salute whose booming echoes reminded any would-be rebels that the Brits were in behind the Al Maktoums, as per trucial agreement. All the same, privately, Whitehall had doubts that Rashid would survive.
But Rashid had fended off the threat of insurrection before. In doing so he’d proved himself both clever and ruthless. In 1939, when he was only a young man, a rebel group of Emiratis had sought to rein in the power of the Al Maktoums. They resented the way the ruling family was enriching itself from monopoly concessions granted by the Brits. They wanted to establish a majlis, or consultative council, which was how tribal affairs had traditionally been run, with the ruler having to consult with his elders. They wanted the new majlis to take control of the money that was presently going straight into the sheikhly pockets. They wanted to distribute it more evenly. It sounded dangerously like democracy.
At the time Rashid was about to marry a daughter of Abu Dhabi’s ruling family, a union founded purely on love. As a gesture to the rebels he offered to hold the marriage ceremony near the rebels’ stronghold in Deira. They could all come to the beano, he said. It was a popular move, because everyone loves a beano. It also seemed a conciliatory move, perhaps paving the way to some financial concessions.
On the day of the wedding everyone piled into Deira, including a lot of Bedouin supporters of Rashid. But instead of heading straight for the beano and hoeing into the date juice, these men snuck onto rooftops with sandbags and rifles. At a prearranged time they opened fire on the rebels and killed a fair swag of them. A couple of hours later Rashid turned up smiling, announced that Dubai was united once more and got married.
