by Joe Bennett
He doesn’t work for his uncle any more, but he won’t tell me what he does. ‘The life is hard here, sir,’ he says. ‘I sleep one room thirteen people. I save money and return Pakistan. I marry.’
‘You’ll get married in Pakistan?’
But it’s his turn to bat and he leaps off the wall with relief. His first huge slog ricochets off an overflowing dumpster and disappears down an alleyway. He turns to me and grins massively. When he’s out two balls later he does not return to the wall.
I lunch at Modern Dish Cafeteria, Home Essentials for the Family. My place mat is sticky from other people’s meals. It shows a photo of the Eiffel Tower at night. For eighteen dirhams I have a can of mango juice and two kebabs, one chicken, one unspecified. Both are shorn from rotating pillars of compressed meat by a perspiring man in a glass sentry box. The man weighs about as much as my dog. His arms are just bone within skin. His face is effectively a skull. I cannot guess at his nationality. He is just a tiny exemplum of Homo sapiens, a specimen. As I eat I try to imagine the story of his life and I come up with nothing.
I cross the Creek by abra, a pretty little put-put water taxi with a bare wooden bench, and after a bit of getting lost in Bur Dubai and not in the least minding, I find the museum and a myth. It’s a pervasive myth, deliberately fostered by the heritage industry that has developed to please tourists, but it suits the ruling Arabs too. The myth is that before its recent transformation Dubai was nothing but a somnolent coastal Arab settlement. It wasn’t. It was somnolent, coastal and a settlement, for sure, but it was by no means exclusively Arab. Because it’s a port that owes its existence to trade, Dubai has always been to some degree cosmopolitan. Indeed you could argue that the difference between the Dubai of a hundred years ago and today’s thrumming metropolis is a difference only of scale.
The museum has lots of worthy and, as far as I can tell, accurate displays of traditional Arab life. There’s informative stuff on oases and date growing and palm frond shelters and camels and falconry and tough nomadic existence, most of which is being photographed with remarkable dedication by a party of Dutch tourists who step unhesitatingly over rope barriers to shove their lenses deep into a display of daggers.
There is also plentiful material on the pearling industry, which was Dubai’s first and most major business. The gulf produced the best and biggest pearls in the world, which sustained the city from the mid-nineteenth century until the 1930s when the Japanese worked out how to grow cultured pearls that were bigger and better and cheaper. Dubai’s pearling fleet was effectively scuppered.
What is clear, however, from a few ancient photographs is that the pearl divers were rarely Arab. Some were Indian. Most were African slaves. And once those divers had erupted back to the surface with their screaming lungs they handed their booty over not to Arabs but to Persian or Indian traders and middle men. Dubai was a port of many peoples. It is far from being a shameful truth but it is a truth that the museum makes no effort to highlight.
By 1880 Dubai was not the biggest town on the Gulf coast but it was the leading commercial port, a position it cemented a few years later when the sheikh of the time, an Al Maktoum of course, made it the Gulf’s first free port. He abolished all tariffs and taxes and customs duties. It was a smart move, which attracted ships and merchants from all around the Gulf. And of course, it was also a small-scale version of the free zone policy that Varood explained to me. Today is just yesterday written in skyscrapers.
By establishing a free port the sheikh encouraged the trade that I saw happening on my first morning at the dhow wharfage. It is the re-export trade, the distribution business. Stuff comes to Dubai and then is despatched to all parts of the region. And once again this trade foreshadows what has followed: the vast incursion of corporate businesses that has transformed Dubai.
In the late nineteenth century there was a sizeable influx of Persian traders. Their presence was resented by some local Arabs but the sheikh welcomed them. He gave them land by the Creek and encouraged them to build and stay and, unlike today’s ex-pats, they were allowed to become citizens. I have read that of Dubai’s current population of approximately eighty thousand Emirati nationals roughly half are of Persian origin, but you won’t see any reference to that in the press. Nor do I find any in the museum. Any Arab claim to racial purity is as false as any other claim to racial purity. Everyone everywhere’s a mongrel.
Indians have been coming to Dubai for a long time too. By 1900 there were already fifty or so resident Indian families. By 1950 there were hundreds more. When India became independent in 1948 Nehru imposed import and export restrictions. They were a boon to Dubai, which became the centre of a lucrative smuggling business. Particularly vital was gold. Indians love gold and Dubai was only too keen to get it to them, taking a very nice cut for itself on the way. The people who did this trading were Indian and Dubai was happy to welcome them.
In sum then, Dubai wasn’t a little Arab village that simply found oil and bloomed into a megalopolis overnight. It certainly bloomed, and oil gave that bloom its first impetus, but the seeds of the blooming had been planted a long time before.
Once the Dutch tourists have left to hoover the rest of Dubai into their cameras, I spend an agreeable couple of hours in the museum then emerge into the late afternoon and the thronged streets of Bur Dubai. Like Deira it is primarily Indian, though no doubt there are distinctions between the various Indian nationalities that elude me. But here are the same narrow lanes and little markets and myriad enterprises and ad hoc games of cricket, that sense of a lived and busy city, that you don’t find in the ex-pat estates or the gleaming malls. If I moved here, this is where I’d live.
And these non-Arab people who fill the streets are not construction workers. They are long-term residents. Much of Dubai may be Arab-owned but almost none of it is Arab.
Near dusk I cross the creek again, find myself back near the fish market and am drawn by an excited, amplified noise like a commentary on a particularly close football match. Any traveller is drawn by animation. I follow the noise to its source. It’s Friday prayers.
Outside a mosque near the waterfront hundreds of pairs of sandals are piled and latecomers are still streaming in, removing shoes, heading to a washroom and then into the mosque proper. The men are Pakistani or African but not Emirati. And the sermon that I would love to go in and see being delivered is being amplified across the Deira littoral by a loudspeaker. The preacher is getting himself into quite a tizz. It sounds, frankly, like a declaration of war. No vicar ever sounded like this. I’d love to know what he’s going on about, but it’s unlikely to be especially contentious. The authorities here quietly keep an eye on the local preachers. They don’t want anything too radical said to upset the sources of wealth.
9
Come Fly With Me
‘Cosmopolitan,’ says a huge sign in the headquarters of Emirates Airline. ‘Empathetic, Progressive, Visionary, Ambitious.’ The biggest print size, and it’s very big indeed, is reserved for the word ‘ambitious’.
The headquarters is just as one imagines a corporate headquarters. It feels like the architectural equivalent of Samsonite luggage, the hygienic home of homo executivus. Everything in the reception area is sleek and magazinish: automatic doors and polished floors and glass walls and silent escalators and men on escalators in suits and women in clothes that aren’t suits but that were bought to be worn in places like this. The floor is studded with islands of padded low-slung chairs for informal business chat. In the middle of it all the receptionists sit, exposed to the world, each with a phone and a computer screen and a work surface improbably free of clutter.
The receptionist, whose nationality I simply cannot guess at and am too daunted to ask, pages the man I’ve come to meet and then invites me to take an ergonomic seat. I feel obtrusive in my casual cotton clothes. Men in suits size me up with a single subconscious glance, and because of my clothes dismiss me.
A man storms into the building, sh
outing at his PA. He sounds American. I can’t make out what has enraged him but from half a pace behind him the PA dances attendance, upset by his upsettedness, her trouser suit black and shimmering, her high heels clacking across the synthetic floor. The pair of them disappear up an escalator. She stands one step below him.
I follow shortly. My contact, Sam, a friend of a friend, can spare me half an hour. English, pudgy, charming, but with a suggestion of steel behind the pudgy charm, he leads me past Security, along the ice-clean corridors of a corporate world and instals us in a booth of a company coffee lounge.
From here we overlook the huge new air terminal, another bit of architectural show-offery, looking a little like a half-buried Zeppelin and rather more like a giant silver maggot. Plane after plane soars beyond the skirt of urban haze then swings onto its flight path, heading for almost anywhere on earth and glinting in the sun. The con-trails form slowly dissolving grids across the sky.
Sam points at the terminal. ‘What does that look like to you?’
‘Well, it’s a bit like the top half of a Zeppelin.’
‘The silver turd, we call it. Right, I gather you’d like to know a bit about Emirates.’
The crisp history he outlines is effectively a microcosm of Dubai’s own recent history. It began, inevitably, with Sheikh Rashid. Seeking to do with air travel what he’d done with shipping, he ordered his third son, Sheikh Mohammed, the current ruler, to build the biggest airport in the region. And just as he had declared Dubai a free port, with equal access to all, so he declared the skies over Dubai to be open skies. Any airline could fly to Dubai. And any airline did. By the mid-Eighties over forty were doing so.
When the airport’s biggest customer, Gulf Air, financed by Dubai’s dear friends in Abu Dhabi, threatened to boycott Dubai unless they got preferential treatment, Sheikh Mohammed told them politely to stuff it. He then ordered the creation of Emirates. He provided the money for a couple of westerners to set it up, and he put his uncle in charge. In other words it was the proven Dubai mix of local money, commercial courage, foreign know-how and ruling family nepotism.
The new airline got no preferential treatment. Dubai stood for competition so Emirates must compete. In 1985, its first year of operation, it made a profit. And it has made a profit every year since. In 1992 it owned six aircraft. At the time of writing it owns a hundred and twenty-three. It flies over a hundred routes. It flies non-stop over the North Pole to San Francisco.
Sam offers me facts faster than I can write them down – the amount of laundry generated daily, the number of meals served, the effect of Emirates on the economy of anywhere it chooses to fly to. Emirates has always flown the best and newest planes. No Emirates passenger has ever died. Collectively the facts amount to one fact: Emirates has been a triumph, and a triumph that has played a massive part in the booming of Dubai. It has enabled trade. It has enabled tourism. It has flown the image-making flag. It has gained renown. It has made a lot of money.
Emirates’ female cabin crew wear distinctive headgear, a hat with a tail of gauze that wraps under the chin. It’s a nod to the Muslim veil, but only a nod. Few of those cabin crew are Muslim, even fewer Emirati. But the hat creates a distinctive, exotic and mildly Islamic image. Emirates, in other words, is Dubai on the wing.
Like all self-promoting businesses, Emirates aims for maximum exposure, to lodge its name and favourable associations in every consumer’s skull. To this end it has sponsored Arsenal Football Club. No one seems to question why a London football club should play in a stadium named after an Arabian airline. Emirates’ sponsorship of cricket umpires is more understandable. They will have noted of course that the television camera zooms in on the umpire at the moments of greatest dramatic tension, when the viewer is at his most vulnerable, but I have no doubt they will have also noted the symbolic fit. For just as umpires stand between two teams, so Dubai stands between two worlds, the Islamic and the Christian, and it cannot afford to upset either of them. Thus, by aligning itself with the impassive arbiters of a global sport, Emirates implies by subliminal association its own wise neutrality. If there’s one thing Dubai is good at, it’s marketing.
‘Emirates has a head start,’ says Sam, ‘because people here travel. They do a dozen segments or more a year. That’s huge. Emirates moves the people around who move the bucks around. And we bring the people here who’ve got the bucks.’
‘Are those people still coming?’
He doesn’t shy from the question. ‘Bookings are softer than they’ve ever been. Profits for the last quarter are down eighty per cent. We’ve had people leaving cars in the car park with the keys in the ignition. They’ve been sacked and they’ve got a mortgage they can’t afford, so they ditch everything and run. You can go to jail here for not paying debts. We towed one car away last week with a message on the windscreen in lipstick, “So long HSBC,” it said, “and thanks for the memories.”
‘People can go as easily as they came,’ he says. ‘Almost everyone here is a bird of passage. They don’t keep their money here because they don’t intend to stay for ever. They export cash back to the UK or the States or wherever. Despite the image of stability, they don’t quite trust Dubai. Dubai is fluid.’
‘Will you stay?’
Sam pauses, then smiles. ‘Ever heard of golden handcuffs?’
Sam is well paid. But the true value of his employment lies in the perks. He gets an accommodation allowance. His kids’ school fees are paid. His whole family gets comprehensive medical insurance. And his visa is attached to his job. Were he to resign, that visa would be cancelled and he’d have a month to find another employer and another local sponsor or get out. ‘Dubai likes to keep us dependent,’ he says. ‘It’s their way of preventing a complete takeover of the city. They keep us dangling from the teat. And the milk supply can be cut off without warning.’
He hasn’t bought a house here. He sees the whole real estate market is a speculative hell. ‘If the Sheikh can cancel New Year’s Eve, what can’t he do? And did you know that most of the villas and apartments here weren’t bought with mortgages? People paid cash, huge wads of cash; Russian cash, Indian cash, Iraqi cash. A lot of it was hot money that needed laundering. There’s a lot of dubious stuff going on here as well as the official stuff, but Dubai’s dynamic. I like that. It suits me.’
‘Will you die here?’
‘I have no plans to die,’ he says, and smiles again. ‘But in the unlikely event of it occurring, no, I doubt that it will be here.’ And on that note, Sam returns to work, the handcuffs glinting.
On Sam’s advice I go from Emirates HQ to Money HQ: the DIFC, or Dubai International Finance Centre. ‘It’ll give you some idea of Dubai’s ambitions,’ said Sam. The taxi I hail is drawing up when another veers across three lanes of traffic and pulls up at my feet to a fanfare of furious car horns. The driver leans across, opens the passenger door and beckons me with desperate urgency, as if summoning a doctor to attend his dying child. I get in. We pull back into the traffic in a manoeuvre that is if anything slightly more perilous than its predecessor. The driver turns out to be Afghani. I guess if you’re brought up in Afghanistan, driving in a suicidal manner through the reckless traffic of Dubai seems like a quiet life.
The driver is transparently delighted to have stolen me from a rival. He is also rather less transparently loquacious in a language that I may as well call English. When I ask him whether he has ever had a crash, he takes thirty seconds or so to grasp the question. He spends those thirty seconds paying rapt attention to the movements of my lips, and none to the road. At the moment he cottons on to what I am asking he erupts with joy. He has a story to tell and nothing in the world could give him greater pleasure. Words prove inadequate to do this story justice. He throws in spectacular sound effects and frequent expansive double-handed gestures, during which the steering wheel is left to choose our route. I learn more from these paralinguistic features than from what he actually says.
As far as I c
an tell, he once hit a truck at high speed. His car flew like a bird (one of his few verbal successes), rolled end over end (he is very insistent with his gestures on this), came to rest on its roof (which he illustrates by ducking his head under the dashboard for several seconds, during which time he doesn’t stop laughing) and then it caught fire. Or the truck did. Or both vehicles did.
When the police arrived he was standing uninjured on the road. They did not believe he had been driving the vehicle. ‘Me very God bless man,’ he says time and time again, clutching my forearm as he does so. ‘Me very God bless man.’ And he drives as though he means to prove the truth of the assertion.
I have rarely met anyone so unstoppably happy. Infectiously happy even. Nor anyone who trusts so utterly in his God. Insh’allah sums it up. The phrase translates more or less as ‘what happens happens’. The man gives the impression of being a practising fatalist, as if he’s renounced all responsibility for his fate, and by extension mine, because these things are decided above and we are powerless to interfere. Bernard Levin claimed never to have met a fatalist who didn’t look twice before crossing the road. This man would have interested him.
‘Me very God bless man,’ he says for the umpteenth time as we pull up outside the DIFC, and then he makes a blatant attempt to overcharge me. When I point at the meter and hand him just over half what he asked for, ‘You good man,’ he says.
