Hello Dubai

by Joe Bennett

  The DIFC, which is where Varood’s private equity outfit does business, is next door to the twin Emirates Towers. They are very tall, very new, and reminiscent of electric toothbrushes with the brushes removed. On the lawn at their feet stand some fetching sculptures of ants.

  A giant electronic ticker-tape announces: ‘Lord Falconer, former Lord Chancellor of the UK, to give breakfast seminar at DIFC’. Steps on a fascist scale lead up to the Gate. It’s a vast rectilinear arch of a building, a triumphal brute of a thing, foursquare and imposing. I watch a pigeon repeatedly trying and failing to find a perch on its sheer and gleaming flank.

  A very sweet Indian concierge tells me that unfortunately I can’t get inside to have a look around but he does give me a glossy brochure. It’s got a foreword by the ruler Sheikh Mohammed, who just happens to be the DIFC president.

  According to Sheikh Mo, the aim of the DIFC is ‘to create a financial marketplace to serve a region which extends across time zones between London and Hong Kong . . . a region encompassing the Middle East, North and East Africa, the Caspian and South Asia . . . with a GDP of 2.15 trillion dollars and a population of 2.2 billion.’

  Moreover it plans to be the ‘global hub for Islamic finance’ and ‘to establish global standards for Shari’a compliance’. In other words it means to settle once and for all the pesky business in the Koran about not lending money for profit.

  Like the other free zone cities, DIFC isn’t really part of Dubai. It has its own independent court system for settling disputes, using law based on international models. This puts its jurisdiction beyond the reach of Dubai’s autocracy. If it didn’t, the banks would never have come.

  And how they’ve come. Every bank I’ve heard of seems to be represented here, though what they actually do I can’t tell you. These aren’t the sort of banks where you open a cheque account. They are the movers of big money, whose bonuses infuriate the world and whose startling mixture of greed and stupidity almost decapitated capitalism.

  The DIFC and its monumental buildings are expensively dotted with sculptures, including a high wire slung between two banks with mannequins balancing on it. It seems a tad more symbolic right now than was perhaps intended. The art’s presence is explained by a nice paragraph in the brochure: ‘DIFC’, it says, ‘supports a strong role for art in the community based on the belief that art can stimulate new ideas and perspectives in business.’ This is accompanied by a photo of a chic young businessman sucking the earpiece of his spectacles while staring at a piece of abstract art and presumably arriving at a new perspective in business. But, then again, he could be wondering why anyone bothers to paint things when there is so much easy money to be made in banking. Or even that he ought to buy the painting to appease a little whisper of guilt.

  DIFC is surrounded by restaurants for celebrating bonuses and pretentious clothes stores – what the brochure calls ‘high-end retailing’ – with their windows of sleek suits, artfully folded sweaters and prices that seem like a joke.

  As dusk settles I amble a couple of streets away from high finance and find a little restaurant that supplies me with a whole fried hamour and more side dishes than the table can cope with for about half the price of an hors d’oeuvre at DIFC.

  I’m outside afterwards, smoking and wondering how I might spend the evening, when a dumpy little man asks me for a light. He initiates a conversation, which makes a pleasant change. He wants to know who I am, where I’m from, what I’m doing here. His name is Andrew. He’s a Catholic Pakistani, working for one of the large American investment banks.

  ‘Is your office here in DIFC?’

  ‘I’ll show you. Come on.’

  I follow him through alleys between tall buildings, then into the lobby of what seems to be an apartment block. He collects mail from the concierge. We enter a lift. It’s clanky, dark.

  ‘This is where you work?’

  He smiles and says nothing.

  It isn’t where he works. It’s where he lives. The apartment is tiny. He gestures me to sit on a two-seater sofa of soft blue leather. It’s the only seat in the room.

  ‘I’ll fix you a drink,’ he says. The walls of the living room-cum-kitchen are decorated with pictures of Ferraris, rural France and the Virgin Mary. He hands me a tumbler of what turns out to be vodka and orange juice with the normal proportions inverted.

  ‘It’s nice to relax,’ he says, and sits down beside me. He’s little more than five feet tall and his thighs are so plump that when he crosses his legs the top one sticks straight out. He takes off his glasses and lays them aside with prissy delicacy. He tells me he shares this flat with an English banker who has decided to become a clergyman. But he’s away at theological college in England.

  ‘I am lonely,’ he says. Then, after a pause, ‘Relax,’ and he looks straight at me with brown, poorly focussed eyes.

  In answer to my deliberately diversionary questions he tells me that it isn’t easy being a Catholic in Pakistan. They are subject to prejudice, and there is much violence in the cities. But he doesn’t think much of Dubai, either. He wants to go to Canada or London but he’s been turned down for visas. He sighs.

  A few seconds of this then he levers himself up with a small grunt of exertion and disappears into what would seem to be the only bedroom. He emerges moments later in a short blue satin dressing gown. He sits back down beside me and runs a finger gently along my forearm. ‘Your hairs are golden,’ he says.

  ‘Look, Andrew, I’m sorry but . . .’

  ‘Would you like a massage?’

  He keeps me on the sofa by gripping my arm, presses me to have another drink, insists that his friend really is away at theological college. His dressing gown has opened above the waist sash. His belly juts like a hairy medicine ball. But he is soft and weak and peaceable, and when I finally detach his arm and stand, he gives up. He watches me go from the sofa.

  ‘I’m sorry, Andrew,’ I say, and I am. I close the door behind me and press the button for the lift. The apartment door stays shut. I can hear no noise from inside.

  Back on the main road, where the ceaseless traffic gives no thought to lonely men, it doesn’t take long to find a bar.

  10

  You Know It

  You know the Burj al Arab hotel. You may not know its name but lodged in your skull is an image of it standing on the coastline of the Gulf, floodlit by night, or framed by day against a sky of the bluest blue. Its structure is for some reason memorable, as is, say, the giant pylon that’s the Eiffel Tower, or the coxcomb roofline of the Sydney Opera House. Just like those two buildings, the Burj has become the best-known symbol of the city it stands in.

  It is also common knowledge that the Burj al Arab is a seven-star hotel, the only seven-star hotel in the world. Greater luxury simply cannot be had. Less common knowledge, however, is how it came by its seven stars. It awarded them to itself. No hotel inspectors recommended them, no Michelin Guide awarded them, for the very good reason that the international rating system for hotels runs only to five stars. The proprietors of the Burj al Arab, who are effectively the ruling family, simply invented the sixth and seventh stars and then appropriated them for their own exclusive use. It was pure chutzpah. It was marketing as audacious as Napoleon’s march on Moscow. But unlike Napoleon’s march on Moscow, it’s worked a treat. The fib has become fact.

  The masterstroke, I suspect, was the choice of seven. Not only is seven a famously propitious number, with warm associations of luck and prosperity in almost every society, but it also isn’t six. Granting themselves a mere six stars would have seemed like sticking a nervous nose into the air to see if it got bitten. Whereas going for seven was to leap from the burrow shouting, ‘Hey, look at me.’ If you’re going to tell a lie, tell a whopper.

  And the beast looks good, especially now, mid-morning, with the sun shining. The stretched frontispiece of the hotel does vaguely resemble what it is meant to resemble which is the filled sail of a dhow, an impression only slightly marred b
y the helipad sticking out from the top of the mast like half an oyster shell. I see no choppers buzzing around it, and I somehow doubt that it gets used all that much, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that it is there and obvious to all. It enshrines a notion, the notion of impossibly rich people, of Trumps and Tigers avoiding the foot-bound hordes of nonentities and coming in to roost here like birds. The sky is theirs and the Burj al Arab a tree for their exclusive nesting.

  They advertised the completion of the helipad by having Federer and Agassi play tennis on it. I imagine they played circumspectly. I don’t know who won the game and neither do I know whether they hit any balls over the edge. If they did they might have killed someone. But it wouldn’t have mattered. From so far up there Andre and Roger wouldn’t have heard the scream, and the body would have been whisked swiftly away and the relatives placated with wads.

  The game was yet another instance of Dubai’s mastery of marketing. The image of these two men playing against the sky arrested the senses. You could guarantee that no news service would ignore it. And its connotations were faultless. These were the best two players in the world and Dubai could afford them. Moreover tennis fits exactly with Dubai’s branding. It’s a global game, it’s awash with money, its stars drip glamour, and it’s constantly televised. The professional tennis circuit visits all the globally significant cities of the world, the rich cities, the cities that Dubai competes with and whose citizens it wishes to impress. And tennis itself has all the right connotations. It suggests opulence and leisure. A tennis court in a garden signifies a posh house, a place with real estate to spare. Moreover tennis is nice, in a way that football, for example, isn’t. Football is for the mob, and the mob can get out of hand. Tennis fans don’t get out of hand. Tennis is Wimbledon and restraint and umpires in tall chairs. There are no tennis hooligans.

  The details of the Burj are predictably eye-widening. They were designed to be. We all love to read of needless indulgence. The Burj’s atrium is plastered with gold leaf. A suite at the Burj comes with its own butler and a chauffeured Rolls Royce. The nightly rate for a suite is not published because if you need to know it you can’t afford it.

  When they switched on the air-conditioning for the first time to make the building habitable – air-conditioning that must continue to run for as long as the building stands – it caused clouds to form inside the atrium and a shower of rain to fall. The Burj has its own weather. Indeed, the Burj has its own everything. It stands on its own little island just off shore and it has its own access road. In short the Burj is both a literal and metaphorical totem of Dubai, a symbol of its identity as a place where money is revered and where it buys you unparalleled exclusivity. As a hotel the Burj apparently runs at a substantial loss, but as a creator of myth it must have made the city uncounted millions.

  Because of the Burj’s magnetic appeal, its access road, like so many roads in Dubai, is blocked by a barrier arm and a guardhouse. The guardhouse is called the Welcome Centre, a phrase which is about as convincing as arbeit macht frei. On the poor people’s side of the barrier there’s a swarm of tourists, most of us white, pointing cameras at the top two thirds of the hotel which is all we can see. On the rich people’s side of the barrier there stands a thickset African man in uniform.

  I duck under the barrier arm and he stops me with a fat smile. Access to the Burj, he tells me, is by restaurant reservation only. Do I have such a reservation? He knows perfectly well that I don’t. People with reservations don’t duck under barrier arms.

  I have a crack. I tell him that I’ve come all the way from New Zealand solely to marvel at the Burj al Arab. I tell him that I’m a writer and that what I will write about the Burj will bring it vast publicity and patronage from the Kiwi elite. I hint at the enormous influence of my friends. The African listens to rather more of this than I’d have expected and his smile broadens at every lie. I don’t get in. I didn’t expect to and I don’t much mind. The Burj is less a thing than an idea.

  I don’t get into the Wild Wadi next door either but only because I choose not to. Wild Wadi’s a water-themed fun park, guaranteed, as the brochure has it, ‘to delight the young and the young at heart’, which rules me out twice. It is also ‘the perfect location for . . . special events such as team building, business functions and employee incentive schemes’, which does nothing to enhance its charms.

  A wadi is a valley in the mountains where they haven’t heard of employee incentive schemes. Unlike the theme park, which has an unlimited supply of desalinated water, a wadi gets wet only a couple of times a year. But when it does get wet, when the fierce rains come and have nowhere to go in the harsh landscape, a wadi becomes a torrent. It sweeps people and camels to a messy death. But not here. Through the wooden walls of Wild Wadi, which bizarrely resemble a stockade in a cowboy film, I can hear the young at heart and incentivized employees squealing with delight.

  All cities are to some degree divorced from the land they inhabit, but Dubai goes a degree further. It could be on the moon. As could its bus stops. They’re dotted along Jumeirah Road and I’ve never seen their like. They’re air-conditioned. They stand like reptile houses at the zoo, glass fronted, fully enclosed, and trapping their customers, like exhibits, in artificially cooled air.

  Jumeirah Road runs parallel to the beach and consists mainly of clinics. The Sports Medicine Clinic, The Dubai Urology and Nephrology Clinic, back clinics, cancer clinics, clinics for anything that might go wrong with your eyes, your liver, your lungs, your anything. And clinics too for bits of you that haven’t gone wrong but that you just don’t like very much. Here’s the British Lasik and Cosmetic Surgery Clinic, a hair removal clinic, several clinics for stuffing or trimming breasts according to whim, and a nose job shop. All are private, all expensive.

  Pretty well all western ex-pats have medical insurance and Emirati citizens are well looked after by the government. But these two groups account for less than a third of the city’s population. The rest of the people, the labourers and menials, the bar staff and gardeners, the doormen and the maids, do all they can not to get sick. The medical services available to them are sketchy at best. Dubai is no welfare state.

  The coastal strip known as Jumeirah was the original ex-pat territory, and it’s where a Dubai stereotype originated. She’s called Jumeirah Jane. The pampered wife of a corporate hubby, she spends her days disposing of his tax-free dirhams, driving a little yellow sports car, getting her hair done, accessorizing herself and the house, having a nip here, a tuck there, and perhaps a silicone implant; and all in all leading a life of sunshine and self-indulgence, the Sunday-supplement, fashion-mag dream. She also tends to drink too much.

  The Jumeirah Beach Hotel is another chunk of show-off architecture. Its imposing humped outline is supposed to resemble a wave. To me it resembles a hump. And I suspect I’m not alone because the public mind has never latched on to this building as it has the Burj. It is just another posh tourist hotel – and one that I can get into simply by walking through the front door.

  The lobby is as plush and brightly lit and marble floored as you would expect, with coffee bars and restaurants and uniformed servants. I could be anywhere from Houston to Hong Kong. A disregarded pianist plays John Denver’s ‘Country Roads’. It doesn’t pay to take words seriously here.

  Through the back of the lobby I emerge onto a terrace where the reasonably wealthy are taking coffee and looking bored. Halfway down a path that heads to the sea, a swarthy young man, the sort of character who might wear a leather jacket and drive a minicab in London, steps firmly in front of me. He wants to know, politely, whether I am a guest. I have no doubt that he already knows that I am not.

  I don’t bother to lie. He explains that the beach is exclusive to guests and that he’s mortified by his inability to allow me access but is delighted to be able to inform me that just along the road there is a simply adorable beach with every possible attraction and amenity, and best of all it is open to riff-raff like
me. All of which is communicated in English of course. You can live here twenty years and not learn a word of Arabic. Many ex-pats do precisely that. Does Dubai prefigure the global supremacy of English? I hope not, but in the very long run I expect so. Computers and business will probably see to it.

  I’m glad it’s not Tuesday. In a typical nod to Islamic propriety, Tuesday is ‘ladies only’ day at Jumeirah Beach Park. I pay a few dirhams, pass down a set of wooden steps and arrive on the sand to meet a scene that doesn’t greatly surprise me. European women are splayed like starfish on towels or loungers. They bask in a way that few men can manage for more than five minutes. The women range in age from sixteen to eighty and their bikinis range from the merest smidgens of cloth, to the sort of reinforced and capacious all-in-one costume that can stand up on its own.

  Youths with chest hair play volleyball loudly in order solely to draw the attention of the smaller bikinis. Kids build sand castles in the time-honoured manner, and the sea looks as gentle as a bath, though few people swim – perhaps because of the recent tides of sewage.

  Dubai’s sewage system has lagged far behind the construction boom. This city is a lady who pays more attention to her appearance than her bowels. Much of the human waste has to be collected from septic tanks and trucked out to a treatment plant in the desert. But the drivers claim that the queues at the plant are too long and that they are too poorly paid to wait. So they’ve taken to dumping it in the storm water drains, whence it flows unimpeded to the sea.

  Regardless of the sewage it was to this beach that thirty-four-year-old Vince Acors, a British businessman, led his paramour, thirty-six-year-old Michelle Palmer, one sultry summer evening last July. They’d only just met but, encouraged perhaps by the day-long drinking binge they’d been on, they felt an irresistible chemistry. On the soft sands and amid the warm air, one thing led to the other, though there is some dispute as to the precise degree of the other. Mr Acors acknowledges intimacy but denies that full blown intercourse took place, perhaps because of the daylong drinking binge. Ms Palmer’s version of events has not, as far as I am aware, been publicized. Anyway, they did enough to draw the attention of a passing constable and to upset him with their flagrant breach of Islamic propriety. He arrested them. They were sentenced to three months in jail. The British tabloids loved it. In the end the sex-on-the-beach couple were extradited. Sadly, however, their love did not go on to blossom.