by Joe Bennett
My arrival galvanizes the shopkeepers. They urge me in, each Indian holding up for my western eyes the agreed symbols of an Arabian heritage. ‘Coffee pot, sir? Camel, sir? Look, sir, model of Burj.’ One folds a red and white Arab headscarf and, despite my weak protestations, loops and ties it around my baldness, then leads me by the arm to a mirror from which he removes a fake tiger skin the better for me to survey the transformation in my appearance. I see a white man in late middle age wearing an Arab headscarf, at his shoulder an eager Indian shopkeeper. I giggle. The shopkeeper is delighted. ‘You like, sir, oh you like very much.’ He is so eager, so cheery at the thought of money, in this strange little excrudescence of commerce amid barren sands, that I say yes, I like it very much indeed and I will buy it.
Whoa. Deep into the shop he plunges and hauls out item after item, a dishdash, an ornamental dagger, a camel doll, an authentic camel stick that is hard to distinguish from any other sort of stick, a . . .
‘No, no,’ I say, ‘just the scarf.’
He charges me far too much for it. But I am English and middle class and therefore congenitally incapable of haggling. It is such an unseemly and honest display of self-interest that I prefer to be ripped off.
‘Keep Hatta Green’, says a sign by the road. It’s a poor choice of verb. There’s no green to keep. The township squats amid the Hajar mountains that stand stark and naked of vegetation, tawny-red, and looking from a distance as if they would slice the flesh from your feet. Parking in front of a substantial mosque, I step out into midday silence. I am perhaps fifty miles from non-stop Dubai. It feels a lot more.
For all I know Hatta may have been settled for thousands of years, but the only obvious relic is a crudely circular watchtower standing high above the township from which an eye could be kept on the pass. The houses are mainly cubes of contemporary concrete block with satellite dishes on the roof. They are almost windowless, with walls of thumping thickness painted white, and white only. They look to have been built to withstand heat. And even now, under a hazy winter sun, the place thrums with warmth, collects it in its valley, holds it.
A baker, a vet, an abattoir, a laundry, dim little shops selling household oddments – all of them closed, deserted and silent. Even the 4WDs are asleep.
The only place to stay seems to be the Fort Hotel. It has the obligatory barrier arm and the first human being I’ve seen in Hatta. He steps out from his little hut to quiz me, sees my white face, switches on a smile, says ‘Good afternoon, sir’ and raises the barrier arm. A sign by the driveway offers lessons in archery. And here amid the barren Hajar mountains, the hotel plugs the service with the line, ‘Want to be Robin Hood?’ This is an occupied land.
The Filipina receptionist tells me that they have an exciting special on rooms. I can spend the night and have breakfast for only twelve hundred dirhams.
‘Thank you so much,’ I say, and drive on into the mountains in the direction of Fujairah, the one major city in the emirate of, astonishingly, Fujairah.
The sweeping highway scoffs at the hostile landscape and the little Nissan sings along. I have to slow only when I fetch up behind a truckload of camels. There’s little traffic and I could easily overtake but I choose to follow the camels for miles, engrossed by the sight of these strange creatures crammed together, their heads and necks showing above the truck sides like the heads and necks of ancient sea monsters, swaying with the truck like seaweed. When I eventually overtake they follow my passage with cud-chewing indifference.
On my right, in nowhere and for no apparent reason, there looms a building advertising cheap insurance. A little further on a whole office block, sprouting all alone in rock-strewn terrain, is also devoted to insurance. Then comes a barrier. I slow down but am waved through by a man in uniform. A few hundred yards after that I reach another barrier at which stands another man in uniform. This one does require me to stop. He is standing beneath a sign saying ‘Welcome to Oman’.
‘Passport,’ says the man.
‘I don’t want to go to Oman,’ I say.
‘Passport,’ says the man.
I give him my passport. He looks at it and hands it back.
He walks round the back of the Nissan, bangs on the boot and says ‘open’.
I open the boot.
I hear him unzip my rucksack and rummage. He moves to the front of the car with the slow and menacing smugness that officials enjoy, and taps the bonnet. I open it. I doubt that he’s seriously looking for contraband or bombs. He’s just relishing the power that his position and uniform confer. He is indistinguishable in manner from, say, a parking attendant in Walsall. Which comes first, the uniform or the attitude? Is there a type of man who gravitates to jobs like these? Or would most of us turn out like this if we were given the accoutrements of petty power?
‘Car,’ he says, and holds out his hand, presumably for insurance papers available back up the road.
‘I don’t want to go to Oman,’ I say again. ‘I want to go to Fujairah.’
‘Paper,’ he says.
‘It’s a rental car.’
‘Paper.’
‘Rental car, hire car.’ He does not understand. Neither does he smile. He is wearing, inevitably, a gun.
‘You go,’ he says, pointing at an official-looking building over to one side. ‘Car here,’ and he indicates a parking bay. I drive the car there and sit a minute. I must have missed the turning to Fujairah, probably while engrossed by the camels.
A part of me is tempted to go along with serendipity and pay a quick visit to Oman. I know less than nothing about the place. But I am daunted by the rigmarole of getting the right papers, I don’t want to deal with uniformed officialdom, and I’m uncertain whether the conditions of my car rental allow me to cross the border.
The camels have reached the barrier behind me. The petty tyrant is talking to their driver. Will he insist on fossicking among the beasts in the back? If so, I hope they hoof him. Then spit.
A couple of cars come up the road from Oman. The barrier on their side of the road seems permanently raised. I start the Nissan, perform a swift u-turn and swing in behind them, hunching as I do so to avoid the gunshots. None come. In the rear-view mirror I see the border guard standing hands on hips. Wrongly but irresistibly I raise him a couple of fingers of farewell.
A few hundred yards further on I have to stop to re-enter the UAE. The cars ahead of me are swiftly processed and waved on.
‘Papers,’ says an Indian man in a box. I hand him my passport. He riffles through it, then riffles through it again.
‘Oman visa?’ he says.
‘Well now,’ I say, doing my best to smile, ‘I haven’t actually been to Oman. I have come from the UAE.’
The man looks at me in exactly the way I would look at him if the situation were reversed. Then he says exactly what I would say.
‘You are coming from Oman.’
‘Well, yes, but actually I am coming from the UAE. I turned round, you see, at the border.’ I say it without much hope.
The man smiles. In my experience, a smile from a man in uniform can be a very good thing or a very bad thing but nothing much in between.
‘So you are coming from Oman but you are not coming from Oman.’
‘You’ve got it,’ I say. He pauses.
‘Then welcome to the UAE,’ he says, beaming like the sun, and up goes the barrier arm. Quite what such a pleasant and cheerful man is doing in such a job, I can’t explain. But it’s nice at the age of fifty-one to have one’s preconceptions overturned.
The turn off to Fujairah proves to be a few miles back. The road swings up and through narrow valleys of gaunt rock, dotted with shaggy, flop-eared goats. The goats have better road sense than camels.
The afternoon sun lights the rock crimson, purple, or brown as chocolate. It’s harsh but lovely. Again in places there sprout inexplicable crops of modern buildings, their purposes unclear. I cross several wadis, all as dry as everything else, but with warning signs of
their potential to flood. The road is glistening new and quite deserted. It’s good to be moving. I sing. The songs prompt memories. Music’s good for that, as evocative of memory as the sense of smell. I wallow in distant times and places and then suddenly I notice that the bonnet of the Nissan is tilting down and I sweep round a long wide bend and there’s the coastal plain and I behold the Gulf of Oman with the Indian Ocean beyond it. From this distance it looks not hugely dissimilar to any other stretch of sea, but I feel a mild geographical thrill. What’s more, I’ve crossed an entire country in a day. Indeed, if I hadn’t got lost and stopped at an assortment of places to pootle around or tangle with uniforms, I reckon I could have done the whole journey from west coast to east in ninety minutes or less. The United Arab Emirates is not big.
Nor’s Fujairah. Indeed after the heaving sprawling edgeless metropolis of Dubai it’s agreeably human in scale. So agreeably human in fact, that I find that I’ve driven right through it in a few minutes and am emerging on the road north. I swing into the Fujairah Beach Motel. On its veranda stand two leather sofas in startling pink. At reception an Indian in an old-fashioned dentist’s jacket is shouting fiercely down the phone in what I think is Hindi. His fury is impressive. When he slams the receiver back into its cradle the fury does not abate.
‘Yes,’ he shouts at me.
I smile to help him off the boil, to bring him down to the standard employee-meets-customer mode. It seems to annoy him further. He rents me a room as if I were a multiple axe-murderer.
For three hundred and thirty dirhams I get a big ugly room with stained tiles on the floor, a puddle in the bathroom lying just to one side of the grille that is supposed to drain it, a synthetic zebra skin blanket, joinery of Stone Age crudity, and high on the wall above the bed a vast and clattering air-conditioning unit, alongside its vaster and presumably even more clattering predecessor which has been left in situ after disconnection by a pair of wire cutters. The snipped wires dangle. And I feel infinitely more at home here than in any five-star swishness. This place sings with the sweet sadness of the gulf between aspiration and achievement. It feels human.
The walk into town takes me past acres of construction sites, not on the scale of those in Dubai but with the same sense of modernizing ambition. Apartment blocks are rising, their crude slab skeletons exposed to inspection. It is good to be on foot once more. You see little from a car. In the Nissan I would not get the delicious sense of dusk that I have now, the sun dropping below the Hajar mountains and silhouetting them like the teeth on a shark, and the sky shifting by imperceptible gradations through pink, violet, grey. The minarets of a half a dozen mosques become visible, lit with the sort of neon blue lights that kill flies in butchers’ shops. And the muezzin sounds, a wail of tragic commitment that has been discreetly banned in some parts of Dubai for fear of distressing the ex-pats.
Past a floodlit fort on a mound, and I’m in the higgledy-piggledy heart of Fujairah on a mission to eat something. It is not a hard mission to fulfil. The place abounds in little restaurants. The one I choose is fronted by a Pakistani man of tartarean gloom. He hands me a laminated one-page menu, sticky and stained. I ask if he can serve me a beer. He shakes his head. I choose a dish. He shakes his head. I choose another. He shakes his head. I ask what he recommends. He shrugs. I asks what he’s got available. He shouts something to the kitchen out the back. From behind a plastic curtain a voice shouts a couple of syllables.
‘Chicken biryani,’ he says, and takes my menu. The biryani arrives in seconds, along with a bowl of yoghurt and another bowl of what looks like distressed paint. It is delivered by a man old enough to be the waiter’s father.
‘My father,’ says the waiter.
I tell the father that I am pleased to meet him and he gravely shakes my hand in both of his, says nothing and disappears back behind the curtain. His son picks his teeth and watches me eat.
Chicken biryani consists of coloured rice and the bits that remain after a chicken has been eaten. The yoghurt’s nice but I can’t bring myself to dip into the paint. When I’ve reduced the food to more or less what it started as minus rice, the waiter asks me where I’m from.
‘New Zealand.’
‘You have passport?’
‘I have passport,’ and I extract it from the knee pocket of my trousers. He is magnetically drawn to it. He puts out a hand. I give him the passport. He handles it as one might a religious relic. He looks carefully through the pages, studies my various visas, looks from the identification photo to me and then back to the photo.
‘How I get job in New Zealand? You get me visa?’
I explain that it isn’t quite as simple as that.
‘Business bad here. Very bad,’ and he goes on to tell me, as rather a lot of people seem to do, the story of his life. I don’t mind.
He runs this restaurant with his father and brothers. It doesn’t make much money. The majority of workers in Fujairah are Bangladeshi and they don’t like Pakistani food. Races stay separate here. No Arabs ever dine at his restaurant. And it’s too hot in summer. There is much better weather in South Africa.
‘You’ve been to South Africa?’
‘I work in cell phone shop. Beautiful weather and much freedom. But too much crime. No can live there with family. Here very safe with family. No crime. But too strict. And business no good. In South Africa they come into shop with guns.’
‘Did that happen to you? Did they come into your shop with guns?’
‘My shop next to police station.’ And he smiles for the first time. He is a chunky swarthy man, chest hair sprouting densely through the throat of his polo shirt and ceasing only at the arbitrary point where he chooses to start shaving.
The man hands me back my passport as if giving up a child to adoption.
‘How much do I owe you?’
‘You are very good man,’ he says, and indicates that the meal is free, thereby demonstrating once again the old truth that people think you’re a nice guy if you let them do the talking.
Central Fujairah is pleasantly peopled, with shops still open at eight in the evening, but I feel drained from the day’s driving and hail a taxi. The driver has a beard that could house an aviary.
‘Fujairah Beach Motel,’ I say.
‘You want whisky shop?’
‘No no, Fujairah Beach Motel.’
‘You want whisky shop?’
Where was it that I read that strange travel suggestions are God’s invitation to dance?
‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I want whisky shop.’ And I sit back to see where he takes me.
He takes me to the Fujairah Beach Motel. But having driven in through the gates he takes me past the lobby, past the barracklike building in which I’ve got a room, round a couple of corners and then stops by a row of rubbish bins.
‘Whisky shop,’ he says.
‘Where?’
He gestures into the darkness beyond the bins. Curiosity very much aroused, I nose down a covered alley and catch a glimpse, before she slams the door, of a woman washing her feet in a laundry sink, her blue dress of cotton hitched around her waist. I pass through a hallway lined with broken furniture, swing to the right and discover that God’s dance invitation is a bar.
As I enter everyone turns to assess me. Their heads move like the heads of cattle.
‘Good evening,’ I say.
‘Good evening, sir,’ says the cheery Indian barman. None of the other drinkers greets me. They sink back down to their beers. There are six of them, four Emiratis in their blinding dish-dashes, and a couple of what turn out to be Russians.
Without trying, this bar has matured to a closer approximation of what I think of as a pub than any place that does try. Stuff has simply accreted. A mirror advertising Allied Breweries Double Diamond Beer, which I doubt they make any more, has stayed where it was affixed I can’t guess how many years ago and been so regularly polished that the lettering is wearing off. The top shelf holds spirits bottles that look untouched in decades:
Canadian Club, Ricard, and a bottle of Pimm’s with an inch remaining. On what occasion was the rest of this bottle, this English summer drink of Wimbledon and frocks, ordered and drunk, here on the Gulf of Oman? Who last said, and in what accent, ‘I think I’ll have a Ricard’?
The ceiling’s low, as it should be, and kippered by smoke. A little stage has chairs stacked on it and microphone stands without mikes. The plastic ashtrays have burn marks on their rims and the bar itself, thick, wooden and darkened with age, is as sticky as one could wish. When I shift my elbows they make a noise like tearing paper.
I order beer, receive beer and peanuts, and wait to meld into the place, to become a part of the accepted gathering. The Emiratis drink Scotch and grumble in Arabic. The Russians sound bitter. It is partly the language, all spits and gutturals, conjuring images for me of grim apartment blocks and dirty snow and short fat babushkas in headscarves cooking cabbage. At school, unthinkably long ago, I studied Russian for long enough to hold a reasonable conversation. Now I can make out only odd words, including several times, to my great surprise, the Russian for bicycle. In the last few weeks I’ve hardly seen one.
No one invites me to join them, but I don’t much mind. I like it here. I like the sense of absurdity, sitting in an Indian-run bar alongside Scotch-drinking Muslims and wondering what induced these gloomy Russians to come to this place of all the places in the world. I may have left Dubai but it seems I have not left the world of immigrant hope.
I chat briefly with the barman, who is so deferential that he repeatedly echoes whatever I say. No amount of prompting can get him to say anything remotely interesting, but he does name, in batting order, the entire current New Zealand cricket eleven.
