by Joe Bennett
I turn on the car radio for the first time. I find mournful music, presumably still in deference to the late sheikh of Umm al Qwain, then a magnificently fierce discussion of I’ve no idea what in Arabic, but the debate sounds certain to end in bloodshed. I flick through a few stations in what may be Hindi and then alight on Coast 103.2 fm, an English language station. The presenter plays a series of American and English pop songs and intersperses them with a discussion of dog shit. It seems that there’s at least one ex-pat in Fujairah who neglects to scoop his dog’s shit into a non-biodegradable plastic bag. Instead this miscreant lets it lie. And yesterday the presenter of this radio show stepped out of his car and directly into said shit. He is still unhappy.
He doesn’t say shit of course. He reaches for the infantile euphemisms of the media. Poop, he says, and doings and doggy dos, every one of which makes me tighten my grip on the steering wheel.
And he begs listeners to ring in and tell him their own horror tales of unscooped poop. None do, thank God. If there is any justice in this world I am the only listener. He then runs a little quiz competition called the Da Vinci Code, named not after the execrable book but after an Italian restaurant that is offering a voucher as a prize. Today’s question: ‘How many goals did Chelsea score last night?’
There is no justice in the world. Karen is also listening. And Karen knows exactly how many goals Chelsea scored last night.
‘Congratulations, Karen, you’ve just won a voucher for three hundred dirhams to spend at Da Vinci’s. You’ll just love that, Karen. You’ll have a fantastic time. How do you feel?’
I don’t listen to how Karen feels. How I feel can be deduced from the fact that when I turn the radio off I all but snap the knob.
Where do I begin with this offensiveness? With the mindless pap of the music, and the recycled vacuity of its lyrics? Or with the expression here in the desert of a suburban European neurosis about dog shit? Or with the commercial fakery and transparent hyperbole of having ‘a fantastic time’ at Da bloody Vinci’s? Or with the name Da Vinci’s itself, so redolent of art don’t you know, when it’s just – I’ve no doubt – an Italian restaurant, with about as much connection to the long dead Leonardo as I have? Or with the smugness of the disc jockey whose accent sounds as though it comes from a Barratt estate in one of the nicer bits of Leicester?
No. My anger – and it’s true anger, bitter, fuming anger like a vent of magma – surges at the importation to this harsh country of the West’s worst. This thoughtless transplanting of commercial mendacity, of fake enthusiasm, fake music, fake notions of what matters. Fake everything.
If you really suffer from such poverty of soul that you feel the need to follow Chelsea, you should live in bloody London. If you come to live in Arabia, you should live in bloody Arabia. Such radio is a form of colonialism. It’s Brits doing what they complain about immigrants to Britain doing, not trying to fit in, not respecting the place that’s welcomed them. When in Rome, do as we did in Leicester.
Back home in the West I merely sneer at this stuff then ignore it. Here I find it viscerally offensive. It is arrogant, pollutant, transgressive, invasive, witless, ignoble and wrong. I feel ashamed to belong to the culture that spawned it. Come on you Arabs, rise up and boot us out. You have nothing to lose but Coast 103.2 fm.
This seems to matter more here than across the mountains in Dubai. Dubai’s gone. Or, rather, Dubai has willingly embraced all this stuff, is more or less a western city transplanted. Imported crassness is no worse there than anywhere else. But here, where there may remain some integrity, it would be good to be rid of it. No Indians listen to it, I’d guess, and obviously no Arabs, but it simply offends me that it exists at all here between the sharp rocks and the sea.
As I approach Dibba, the weather turns sour. Clouds are swelling ahead of me like smoke from burning tyres. One final hotel clamped to a cove, with apparent plans for a holiday village and shopping mall, and then I’m in Dibba. Beyond here lies only the tip of Arabia, the Mussulman peninsula, most of which belongs, by the sort of geographical quirk that I am becoming used to, to Oman. I shall be making no further attempt to enter Oman.
Dibba’s got some sizeable chunks of recorded history. It’s a small place with the agreeable feel of a backwater but it was not always so. Shortly after the death of the prophet Mohammed it rejected Islam. This did not go down well with the caliph of the time. A battle took place here and according to one report over ten thousand rebels were slaughtered in the name of Allah. It has been Muslim ever since.
Another belter of a battle took place here in the ninth century during the conquest of Oman by the caliph of what is now Iraq. Thousands more men fell. In the sixteenth century the Portuguese arrived, attracted by Dibba’s natural deep water harbour. They walloped the region into submission and built a fort here before being hoofed out around 1650. Since then Dibba’s star has faded, by which I mean it has just peaceably gone on going on, attracting little external attention to itself and raising its children and doing the good things that never make it into the papers.
The town is divided into three bits belonging respectively to Oman, Sharjah and Fujairah, but you can wander between the three without restriction. I’m not sure who controls the bit I park the Nissan in, but am far too hungry to care. So hungry that it seems obvious to me that the nearest restaurant is the right restaurant. Dutiful tourism can wait.
The restaurateur seems to divine my condition and furnishes me wordlessly and within seconds with a plate of pickles and a heap of flat breads. I am not generally given to pickle sandwiches but these taste as though they’ve been prepared by Allah himself, may his name be a blessing. The goat kebabs that follow aren’t bad either.
I have a window seat. As I eat the world darkens. Lights come on. Then the sky simply bursts, as if a great stretched bladder had been pricked from below with a pin. The windows are instantly awash, are sheets of water. The waiters, the diners, even the cook who emerges from his grim little kitchen, stand and watch in silence. Lightning crazes the sky. The thunder is an expression of divine wrath. It seems to threaten the plate glass. The scene would be spectacular anywhere, but here in this land of warm winters and hot summers, of sand and rock, the intensity of this storm feels biblical. I can picture the wadis in the mountains becoming instantaneous torrents. And all of us in the restaurant, an arbitrary collection of people whom I shall never meet again, including a middle-aged Frenchman whom I overheard five minutes ago asking the restaurateur about his carrot juicer, just sit or stand and stare, our faces neutral, but our eyes huge like the eyes of little children.
Dibba cannot cope. Presumably because rain is rare there’s been no attempt to help it cope. Such drains as exist are overwhelmed in minutes. The street is a lake for 4WDs to plough through. Their wash slops against the doors of grocery stores and clothes shops.
A grey and battered sedan stutters into the lake and then dies. The door opens, and some seconds later the Indian driver emerges, his shoes in his hand, his trousers rolled to the knee. He wades, sees a Land Cruiser approaching, tries to run and fails to lift his trailing foot above the water. The effect is of an ankle tap. His weight is going forward but no foot comes through to support that weight. He plants face down in the lake and everyone in the restaurant laughs and none of us go out to help him. He splutters up, his clothes black and clinging, as the wash from the Land Cruiser slaps against him, incapable of doing further mischief. When everyone else has stopped laughing, the Frenchman’s shoulders are still heaving, silently.
The eye of the storm passes over towards the mountains behind us, and we are left with mere rain. The lake shrinks a little but not much. I leave. I’m wearing a cotton shirt, cotton trousers and sandals and have no other clothes in the car. By staying on the top side of the street I stay out of water more than an inch or two deep. The air is still warmish. There is almost no one about. I spend an hour in an internet cafe. When I emerge it’s still raining. My car is just across the roa
d. I cannot be bothered with sight-seeing. I take off my sandals and tiptoe towards the car then give up and just wade. Inside the car I take off my sodden trousers and drive cautiously out of Dibba and back down the coast road to Fujairah in my underpants. I am keen not to be stopped by the police. I am also grateful in the extreme that hitching failed.
I spend the evening in the kippered bar. Near closing time two Indians arrive. They are giggling and walking-into-walls drunk. The only coherent thing that I can get from either of them is that they are both barbers.
14
On This Beach
Cartoons have a lot to answer for. What, for example, do you picture when you hear the phrase ‘tropical island’? For me, automatically, it means a lump of rock supporting a single leaning palm tree. The tree holds a few outsize coconuts, like testicles. Directly beneath the testicles sits the victim of a shipwreck. In the course of the wrecking process both legs of his trousers have been torn off in a jagged fashion just below the knee. His shirt has acquired holes.
It’s a similar story with oases. Because of cartoons, an oasis means a grove of palms amid sand dunes. There’s a well with a low stone wall and a bucket on a winch, and there may be a camel or two around. The whole lot – palms, well and camels – is contained in a thought bubble emerging from the head of a thirst-wracked traveller. He is approaching these phantasms by the traditional method of locomotion in such circumstances, which is on hands and knees. The traveller has also borrowed his trousers from a shipwrecked sailor.
I do not approach the oasis of Bithna on hands and knees. I approach it by Nissan. The oasis is not surrounded by sand dunes. It sits amid barren mountains. And it doesn’t, as far as I can discover, have a well. But it does have date palms, a whole forest of date palms. And peeping over the top of them is a fort, its sandy walls bedecked with scaffolding.
Bithna is only a few miles west of Fujairah on the main highway across the UAE. It sits above the Wadi Ham, a giant natural gulley. And in contrast to the surrounding mountains it is clearly fertile.
Among the palms, there are little plots with raised edges in which maize stands tall, alongside a broad-leafed crop that looks like tobacco. A scarecrow in a tattered dishdash resembles a warning from the Ku Klux Klan. The whole place smells of goats, the little brown goats that live in enclosures knocked up from date palm fronds and date palm timber and corrugated iron. A sign asks you not to leave litter or do anything to desecrate the place because wadis are a gift from Allah. The notice has been emphatically ignored. The wadi is littered to an impressive extent. Indeed it seems that people have gone out of their way to upset Allah, lugging their refuse here from miles around – old washing machines, engine parts, an incinerated car, a hundred yellow fertilizer sacks.
Just up the road from here Swiss archaeologists have unearthed a T-shaped tomb from the second millennium BC. In other words this place predates the Bible. But you wouldn’t know. It consists of a warren of low concrete houses, their flat roofs crowned with satellite dishes. Each house has a wall round it set with a grille of ornate metal and a carport housing a dirty Japanese 4WD. The alleyways between the silent houses are unsealed stone and mud, dotted with puddles after yesterday’s rain.
‘Hello, hello, hello,’ shouts a crowd of kids playing football near the mosque. They are sloe-eyed Arab kids in t-shirts. One kicks the ball to me. I side-foot it back. The kids are thrilled. They urge me to join their game.
The goal is a wall, towards which both sides are playing. In accordance with the ancient traditions of kids’ football, the fat boy is in goal. I’m not sure which team I’m on but it doesn’t matter. There’s no teamwork here. Every player wants to dribble the ball, and the person they want to dribble it past is me. They slither like little eels. I lumber like a tractor. But on a couple of occasions the tractor manages to get a tyre in front of the ball and to wild encouragement I dispossess the opponent and then bear down on the same goal as he was heading for, until foot-tripped by a cynical little eel and falling to the gravel like Gulliver in Lilliput. Unlike Gulliver in Lilliput I am then helped to my feet by little Arab hands and even dusted down by them.
I could happily spend the rest of the day amid this infectious, present-tense energy. But I don’t. I’ve got a highway through the mountains to drive to Ras al Khaimah, the most northerly and reputedly the most backward of the seven emirates. I’m looking forward to seeing it.
‘Bye bye, mister, how are you, bye bye.’
As I make my way back to the car past another silent mosque, a Land Cruiser draws up outside the tiny Al Shabiya Grocery, an Arab at the wheel. He honks his horn, waits perhaps five seconds, then honks it again with a long, awaken-the-dead, blast. An Indian comes running from the shop, takes the order at the driver’s window, runs back inside, runs out again with goods. This is normal practice. I have seen it everywhere I’ve been. It is always an Arab doing the honking, an Indian the running.
The sweeping highway takes me easily over the arid mountains, through a forgettable town called Daftah, through other settlements that seem to exist solely to sell food and firewood and carpets to people passing through, and then briefly onto a sort of upland plain of scrub and sand where for the first time I see hobbled camels. A front leg has been bent up at the knee and the hoof tied tight to the top of the leg, so the camel becomes effectively three-legged. Thesiger repeatedly speaks of doing this to camels to prevent them straying overnight, though apparently they could still be a mile or more away in the morning.
The approach to Ras al Khaimah takes me through a gravelly nowhere with odd patches of development: warehouses and cement factories seemingly airlifted arbitrarily onto the landscape. The whole area is in a state of unbeautiful becoming. On the teeming outskirts of town the highway declines to a pot-holed ruin, passing through an landscape of shacks, loose goats, loose children, date palms, despairing shops, mud puddles, dead cars and an ostrich farm. Downtown Dubai feels an age away. It’s less than a hundred miles.
And I would imagine Dubai’s success must rankle because, a couple of hundred years ago, when Dubai was a tiny nothing of a place squatting on its haunches and eating fish, Ras al Khaimah was busy and thriving and a minor imperial power with the capacity to upset the might of the British.
When I reach the centre of Ras al Khaimah, built like Dubai round a khor or creek, I find a gleaming new bridge and mirror-glass office towers standing alongside areas of rubble-strewn, puddle-dotted nothing. I ditch the car on one such makeshift parking lot and tiptoe round a puddle that’s effectively a lake and enter a strange little cafe, its walls made of woven palm fronds. For the tourists, I suspect, though there aren’t any. I order a coffee.
‘Arabian coffee?’
‘Yes.’
‘You want shisha?’
‘Yes.’
Shisha is the hubble-bubble, the hookah, the strange and awkward smoking device that I associate with Chinese opium dens and mysterious men with drained yellow eyes and time to kill. I’ve never tried one.
To my surprise the man offers me a variety of flavours. I choose apple. The place holds a dozen or so men, all of whom are either playing chess or nursing a cell phone. One grizzled Indian repeatedly presses a key on his phone to play ‘We wish you a merry Christmas’ and stares at the phone as it plays.
The waiter arrives with a tiny brass saucepan the contents of which he then tips into a similarly tiny cup. It’s more grounds than coffee and flavoured with something that I suspect is cardamom. It’s gone in a couple of sips leaving me slightly thirstier than I was before.
The shisha is two-foot tall, like a stretched and decorated hurricane lamp. There’s a glass bulb at the base three-quarters filled with water, an ornate central column, and at the top a metal dish with a sort of bulb in it. The bulb is stuffed with flavoured tobacco. The tray around it holds smouldering coals which burn the tobacco to produce smoke. When you suck on the mouthpiece, smoke is drawn into the water then bubbles up through it, cooling and moistur
izing it before it reaches the grateful lungs. And it’s actually not bad.
I can’t taste the apple, perhaps because of the ferocious coffee, but the smoke is pleasant on the mouth. Even more pleasant is the sense of almost obligatory relaxation. By taking on a shisha you’ve committed yourself to perhaps three quarters of an hour of dedicated indolence, sitting beside your elaborate contraption inhaling at intervals a mild narcotic and mulling over whatever it is that people mull over in smoking dens. You’re detached from the hurly-burly. If ever you’re going to be meditative, it is now. All I need is a game of chess.
And here’s a man in a dishdash catching my eye, then looking down at the chessboard in front of him. I pick up my hookah, transfer to his table, say ‘Salaam aleekum’ at exactly the same time as he says ‘good afternoon’, and then say ‘good afternoon’ at exactly the same time as he says ‘Aleekum salaam’. We shake hands and he thrusts out a pawn.
Chess originated in India but was adopted and popularized by the Persians. The phrase checkmate is a corruption of the Persian shah mat meaning the king is dead, which I for one find good to know. From Persia chess spread through Arabia, and reached Europe in the eighth century with the Islamic conquest of Spain. With its devious malice and its scheming complexity chess seems a fitting game for this part of the world and its long history of war.
My opponent’s fluent ‘good afternoon’ was like an early attack with a lone queen. It looked promising but there was nothing much to back it up. I’d love to chat with the man but my first few sentences elicit responses that are not only hard to understand but also bear little relevance to the question. Ah well, chess is best played in silence. He sucks on his shisha, I on mine. He orders a Coke, I order another coffee and a glass of water. The game is even. I’m not much good at chess but neither is he, and I’m utterly engrossed and happy as can be. With my cup of Arabic coffee and the regular bubbling hiss of my shisha, the chessboard in front of me, and on the other side of it a man who looks like Osama bin Laden run to fat, I feel I’m getting just a little closer to Arabia. And I win. He takes it well.
