by Joe Bennett
Jim sounds as pleased to hear my voice as I am to hear his, which I find encouraging because we haven’t met. He’s the brother-in-law of a friend and he’s reputedly fond of a good night out. And by way of showing what good company I shall prove, I hand him the problem of the lost car.
‘What a laugh,’ he says. ‘Where are you?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Right,’ he says. ‘Do you know the clock roundabout?’
‘I presume that’s a roundabout with a clock on it.’
‘Beside it,’ says Jim. ‘Ask anyone. I’ll pick you up there in half an hour, then we’ll fetch my daughter from ballet and then we’ll find your car and then we’ll dump both cars at my place and then we’ll go out for a bit of a laugh and a carry-on. What do you say?’
I grope for the exact phrase to convey my feelings, and find it. ‘Yes,’ I say. It sounds as though a problem shared with Jim is a problem solved.
The first person I ask, an Indian youth, knows exactly where the clock roundabout is and insists on leading me there by walking a yard behind me, which is an odd way to go about it and which rather inhibits conversation, but I’m grateful for his kindness. Jim soon swings by in his standard issue Land Cruiser, honks the horn and comes to a halt not before the roundabout, nor after it, but on it. I think he may have been in this country for quite some time. With his shaven head and angular features he reminds me of that gaunt rock singer from Midnight Oil who went on to become the Australian Minister for the Environment.
The ballet school is in some quiet backwater of suburban expat villas. I wait outside as a series of predictably costly cars draw up to disgorge a series of predictably dressed western women, gym-toned and salon-groomed. And it strikes me once again that one of the attractions of living in the UAE, apart from the weather, the wealth and the freedom from taxation, is the absence of an underclass. Or rather of an underclass that sneers at nice ballet girls, that threatens and swaggers and swears in the street during the day and vomits on it at night. There is an underclass here, of course, a vast army of people from poor countries, but they are unobtrusive. They defer. They smile. They lead you kindly to roundabouts. They don’t wear track pants or scoff burgers or say ‘Who are you fucking looking at?’
Jim finds my car without difficulty, simply by driving me around till I recognize a roundabout. I’m so pleased to have found their purpose at last. Then it’s a simple business of retracing my route into town until I behold, as mute and patient as all mechanical devices, my little silver Nissan. A few hours later I’m installed in a palatial spare bedroom in an ex-pat enclave, I’ve made friends with Jim’s daughters by playing games that exhaust me rather quicker than they exhaust them, and I’ve showered and shaved and am ready to see whatever Al Ain has to offer by way of evening entertainment.
‘So what do you want to see?’ says Jim.
‘The truth,’ I say portentously, and Jim, bless him, says ‘Follow me.’ We take a taxi to a vast hotel. A wedding’s going on. Arrows pointing down separate staircases say ‘Womens wedding’ and ‘Mens wedding’. But we go down a third staircase to a bar where Jim is greeted by the barman – always a good start – and half a dozen pool players, all of whom are young Emirati men. Some wear dishdashes, some jeans and t-shirts. All play better pool than I do and all of them drink. But the man who my eyes keep straying back to is in a far corner of the bar, staring up at a television on the wall. He sits at a table, ostensibly with a group of other men, but he doesn’t speak. He is Emirati, dressed in all the gear. He fiddles occasionally with what looks like a diamond-encrusted cell phone. On the table in front of him are a packet of Rothmans, an ashtray, a glass and a three-quarters-full bottle of Chivas Regal. And he looks too fat to stand. He’s a colossus of fat, a mountain of blubber. His chins have chins. For him a trek to the urinal would be like Thesiger’s trek across the Empty Quarter, which is presumably why he sticks to Scotch.
I feel at ease in bars, always have. The pool players stop being Emiratis and become merely men I’m playing pool with. I’d like to ask them questions about unclean left hands, Islamic burial customs and the significance of roundabouts, but it somehow doesn’t seem the right time or place, and anyway the softening sway of booze makes such matters matter less. One of drink-ing’s many virtues is to quiet the analytical mind and to stress the importance, the vitality, of the present tense. So I just play pool, lose, drink lager, and take peanuts from bowls with whichever hand comes naturally.
‘We’re off,’ says Jim suddenly, ‘let’s go,’ and I follow like a puppy, delighted to have the decisions made for me, my tail wagging.
Our route takes us through a maze of corridors and into a dark car park. The unconditioned evening air comes as a surprise, a warm slap of reality. Somehow we hook up with a chubby man from Cornwall in a pink polo shirt and a Bostonian in glasses.
‘You’ll love this,’ says Jim as we push through doors into sudden noise. I don’t. The noise is an assault. It’s noise that makes me want to back straight out again. The place is thronged with men, most of them Emirati and all of them seated at tables. Waitresses scurry among the tables with drinks and shisha pipes and plates of fruit.
All the tables are aligned towards a stage, on one side of which stands a man. He is the embodiment of sleaze. His white trousers cling like a second skin. His embroidered shirt is unbuttoned to the navel. His chest is a cluster of medallions, his hair an oil slick. He is wailing into a hand-held microphone. The noise he makes sounds like the call of the muezzin performed while undergoing surgery without anaesthetic. The amp whistles with feedback.
In the middle of the stage, girls. Perhaps a dozen girls. Dancing. No, not dancing, jigging on the spot. No, not even jigging, shuffling. Girls of half a dozen different races it would seem, or mixed races: Filipina, Chinese, Indian, Thai perhaps, and a single coal-black African. One wears Levi’s, another a skimpy parody of a sari, another gauze and sequins. Some chew gum. None feigns the least pleasure in what she’s doing. They exhibit all the zest of cattle beasts at auction.
‘Great,’ shouts the Cornishman and he claps his hands and we sit down. The Bostonian leans in to me, cups his hand over my ear. ‘They can’t take their clothes off,’ he bellows. ‘It’s against their culture.’
A plate of fruit slices comes to our table and four small bottles of Heineken. The waitress drops a bill on the table for two hundred and forty dirhams. That’s several times what we were paying in the pool bar.
The Cornishman’s eyes are gleaming. He’s rapt. But he’s alone in his rapture. The men at the tables just sit in silence amid the assault of noise and look on with a sort of vague blankness, a low-voltage sexual assessing.
In one sense it is obvious what is going on. In another I just don’t get it. I particularly don’t get Mr Sleazy. What’s his role?
The girls take a superfluous breather from their shuffling. They repeatedly glance offstage to where, no doubt, some unseen pimp is orchestrating this parody of a show, this seedy debasement. Mr Sleazy takes his cue to come centre stage and make even more passionate love to his microphone. He wraps himself around it. Only he and the Cornishman seem to be enjoying themselves.
I chug my beer and leave. Not for moral reasons. Not for financial reasons. But for reasons of noise. I have never borne noise well. It physically hurts me. I sit on a wall outside.
I know what I’ve just seen but I haven’t quite grasped it. It was sexual titillation, but how much more than that, I don’t know. The women were not Emirati women. They were alien chattels, distanced from motherhood or love or indeed from any form of humanity, just as at any peep show, any strip show, any staged eroticism anywhere in the world. But what was bizarre was their refusal to fake it, to suggest sensuality, lust. Here were no raunchy come-on grins, no coquettish teasing. You would have had to be obtuse not to sense their resentment, or to be utterly put off by it. Theirs was just an honest expression of the dreary injustice of sexual exploitation. They made no effort.
They endured.
And the men too. They let rip no raunchy bellows, no yeehas of the blood. Just a grinding apparent impassivity, as though they didn’t much want to be there either but that they too were powerless to do anything but endure the call of the loins. Lust would milk them of their money and the women of their dignity. And they were powerless to fight it. No one dared to say boo to it. I have never been anywhere like it.
Erotic dancing is nothing new in Arabia, but this was not erotic. It was a pale and wretched simulacrum of the erotic without the zest of disinhibition. Add the strange overlay of Mr Sleazy’s vaguely Arabic wailing, and the whole shebang was as odd as God, and sadder than a wet Sunday afternoon in Luton.
The others emerge quite soon.
‘More?’ says Jim.
‘Different.’
‘Come see.’
We follow ramps that wind and take us further below ground level in the same building. We push open swing doors and noise floods out once again, laced thickly with smoke. This bar is lower, smaller, darker, dirtier, cheaper and exclusively Indian. Not an Arab to be seen. The beer comes in pints at exactly half the price of the bottles upstairs. And yet the scenario is replicated. Men from the Indian subcontinent sit at tables. Women from the Indian subcontinent perform on stage. They show a tad more gusto than the women upstairs. The men don’t.
Again there’s a singer of sorts with a mike. He wails lyrics from a spiral-bound notebook that he holds in his spare hand. The absence of any attempt at theatricality only adds to the grimness of it all.
Stage right there’s a line of chairs as if for dignitaries at some civic event. When the dancing girls stop they sit down. On the far right of the line one of the girls picks up a book from under her chair and opens it to read . . .
Thereafter the evening loses shape. Different hotels, more pool, more girls. I lose all sense of time and location. I just follow and trust and grin. Towards the end of the night, as we cross a patch of waste ground, I trip and fall. ‘Watch out for snakes,’ says Jim. ‘There aren’t any nice ones.’
18
Quivering Dhabi
When I wake, late, there’s a cup of cold tea beside my bed. I lie a while feeling less than loved by life. But the symptoms are familiar, they’ll fade, and I’ve got a mental tape of last night to review and be entertained by. It’s a jumpy thing, speeding up in the final reel, becoming disconnected, mere flashes of vivid isolated image – climbing a wall I would never have climbed sober; the warning about snakes; an Emirati playing pool in a red sequinned glove; bending to tie my shoelaces in a bar, falling against the table, giggling, and being helped up by a worried Indian – but eventually the film dissolves into incoherence and then static and I get up. At least, as far as I can tell, there is nothing excruciating, nothing to wince over, nothing to go back to time and again like a tongue seeking out an exposed nerve in a tooth.
The house is empty, the kids at school, the parents at work, a note on the bench telling me to help myself. The coffee percolator is of a design I haven’t met before, but I have never yet been defeated by a coffee machine. When it fires into life, spitting, coughing through its narrow pipes then dripping joy into the pot below, I immediately start to feel better. One of the few things I disliked about China when I went there a couple of years ago was the difficulty of finding coffee. How else am I supposed to start the day’s engine?
I take the mug outside and sit on a wall in the silent lane. The air is five degrees warmer than inside the house. The place is silent. Perhaps fifty ex-pat windows overlook me. I see no faces at those windows, no twitch of blind or curtain. All at work, I suppose. A ginger cat slides over a wall like a furry Dali clock. Its head appears round the foot of a pillar, utterly immobile, its eyes fixed like lasers, taking me in. Those eyes swing away a fraction of a second before I, too, hear the flop of sandals on concrete, a maid in a light blue apron carrying a green bucket of cleaning stuff. I look back and the cat is gone. Like a thought. Like the swish of a blade.
I smoke, happy to be idle, slowly regaining a toehold on normality, ordering the world after the jangle of the night before. It is an old familiar process. As though the constructed self has taken a thump from the wrecking ball of anarchy and needs to be, if not rebuilt, at least repointed and replastered, smoothed back into its usual form as a bulwark against chaos. I don’t know if anyone else goes through this. I’ve done it all my adult life.
More maids trot by and slip through the front doors of one or other of these silent, terraced, air-conditioned, well-appointed villas. When the owners return the place will have been put to rights, the dishes washed and dried, the clothes ironed, the beds made. What does a maid think as she makes good another’s mess, dealing always with the leavings, the detritus? Does she hope? Or does she accept and get on and get by, one day at a time, one hour at a time, one ironed shirt after another. I do not know. And it would be impertinent to ask, wrong, patronizing.
I mull once more over that thunderhole of a go-go bar, where the girls didn’t go go and the men just sat. How do the girls feel right now? Or the men? Do they feel they had a good time? Or are they battered by Islamic guilt here in their own country that has changed beyond recognition during their own lifetimes? Their country, which has been showered with dollars, invaded by invitation and severed from what it was. It’s won the lottery, this place, Abu Dhabi in particular, and lottery winners are famous for struggling to cope with their luck.
And how’s Fatso doing? Fatso the blubber heap, with the bottle of Chivas and the wham bang American movie on the widescreen telly and the gimmick-laden cell phone? What’s he up to right now? Has he levered his bulk from the mattress yet, planted his feet on the floor and paused to recover from the exertion? How does he fill his day? I don’t know, though I don’t think it would be impertinent or patronizing to ask. Indeed, I think late last night that I did ask some of the Emirati pool players what they did during the day. I can’t remember them being affronted, but neither can I remember what they said. Given the scenario and the hour, I doubt it’s much of a loss.
Back indoors, I look up Islamic burial practices on Jim’s computer and discover that the neglected place I found was indeed probably a graveyard. The funeral rites of Islam are simple. They wash the corpse, wrap it in plain cloth, and bury it without a casket and with its head pointing towards the Kaaba in Mecca. As far as I can gather no holy man is required to officiate, perhaps because in a hot country you’ve got to bury them quick. Like Christianity and Buddhism as originally conceived, Islam is as much a practical social code as a religion.
Women are discouraged from attending burials because they tend to become emotional. The mourners toss soil into the grave while reciting a prayer: ‘We created you from it, and return you into it, and from it we will raise you a second time’, the similarity of the words to the Christian liturgy affirming that the two great monotheistic faiths sprang from the same source, and continue to have far more in common than they have differences.
Having prayed, the mourners slightly overfill the grave to create a mound, then pat the soil down with their hands, and that is pretty much that. If there’s a headstone it should be simple and unadorned, because the Koran discourages ostentation. Though according to Wikipedia, ‘. . . it is becoming more common for family members to erect grave monuments.’ I’m willing to bet that the late Sheikh of Umm al Quwain will get a cracker.
In the centre of Al Ain there’s a Lulu hypermarket. Its aisles are narrow because it caters mainly to the immigrant races, few of whom manage to grow fat. I choose a couple of little gifts, go to a checkout and am offered service ahead of a Filipina who was there before me. ‘This lady was first,’ I say. The Indian checkout girl looks surprised. The Filipina looks flustered. ‘Thank you, sir,’ she says, and she fumbles with her purse to hasten the transaction and she blushes. It isn’t the first time I’ve been offered preferential treatment. There’s something close to implicit apartheid here, or at least an ethnic pecking o
rder, with the local Emiratis at the head of the list, in second place the immigrant professional whites, and then come the rest.
On the top floor a little restaurant serves me more restorative coffee. At the next table a small Indian and a substantial man of Mediterranean complexion are studying a floor plan. They turn out to be partners in an interior design business. The big boy’s from Morocco, the Indian from Kerala. He’s garrulous, confiding, patriotic and opinionated.
‘America, England, is weak culture, sir. India very strong culture.’
‘Then why aren’t you in India?’
He makes the money sign and grins. ‘I am paying no taxes here. If I have two million dirhams here they are asking me no questions. I have two million dirhams in India they are asking me where they are coming from. I am in Saudi ten years, two years here. My grandfather and father before me. When I am succeeding I am bringing over my son to take the business and I am going back to Kerala.’
‘Your wife is still in Kerala.’
‘Of course, sir. Wife is wife and ladies is ladies. You understand me?’ And he grins conspiratorially. ‘Here is everything in UAE, drunk ladies, but it is all covered up. I am finding you everything you want but it is all covered up.
‘In America is blue movie business. Oh dear me, but in America everything is fine with blue movies if they are paying tax. If they are not paying tax they are in big trouble. It is very weak culture, very buggered up. I am not offending you, sir?’
‘You’re not offending me.’
‘You are good man, sir. I am finding you everything you want.’
The Moroccan has not once looked up from his floor plans, marking them occasionally with coloured pens, saying nothing, and chain smoking Marlboro directly beneath a sign forbidding him to do so.
