Hello Dubai

by Joe Bennett

  The jockeys were miniature creatures, aged, I was told, as young as five. They were bought from Indian or Pakistani families who had too many kids and too little cash. The kids were brought to the UAE and housed in camp with their camels until the day when they grew too big to be jockeys, though big meant only one step up from starved. At that point they went away and were not seen again.

  As Dubai’s international profile rose, so did the international outcry against the baby jockeys. Nothing frightens Dubai like a threat to its reputation. The response was typically innovative. They replaced the little children with little robots.

  The robots are strapped to the hump in the same way, they are dressed in the racing silks of the owner, and they too whack the camels. They do so with a motorized arm holding a stick. No one’s been able to tell me whether the arm automatically whacks throughout the race, which would seem a bit tough on the camel, or whether the trainer carries a remote control to turn the whacking on at critical moments. I suspect the latter, and am very keen to see it in practice, but I haven’t been able to find out where to go.

  I know that racing takes place in winter, and early in the morning, but though a much vaunted attraction it seems to be one that Dubai now wants to keep to itself. The tourist office claimed not to know, the taxi drivers either hadn’t heard of it or told me the race track had been bulldozed and even George Appleton, friend of Stephen’s and aficionado of all things racing whom I ring on my return, doesn’t know. But he does invite me to join him for this evening’s horse racing.

  ‘Yes please,’ I say, ‘thank you.’ And I can’t help noticing how spontaneously generous most ex-pats I’ve met have been, how welcoming. More generous and welcoming, I’m sure, than their compatriots who sneer at the soulless superficiality of Dubai.

  ‘Allah give to all people,’ says the taxi driver on the way to the Nad al Sheeba race course. ‘If you put a needle – you know a needle? – in the sea and pull out, it has little drop of water on the end and the sea is less. Yes? But Allah no. Allah is never less. Allah give and give and is never less. Allah is very rich, no? You are cat-lick?’

  ‘No, I’m not. And anyway, it’s OK.’

  ‘You are good man. I am sorry for talking like this. It is fifty-eight dirhams.’

  The car park is close to full. Crowds swarm and the sun is setting like the pink blush on a trout’s gills. Gathered in the lee of the grandstand are thirty or more men, most of them black and African. They stand in silence, looking away from the grandstand, then in their own time they squat on their heels, bend forward, put their foreheads to the ground and stay there a while in prayer, before rising, standing a while longer, then ambling off to watch the races.

  One tall black man in white robe and pillbox hat comes straight from prayer to me. ‘You have copy of Gulf News?’ he says. ‘I want to check selections.’

  I haven’t. The man is from the Sudan. He wonders whether perhaps I can get into the clubhouse to fetch him a copy of the form guide. But the clubhouse door is blocked by a young bouncer type in jacket and tie and George Appleton has yet to arrive to bestow privilege upon me. I tell the Sudanese that I am confident his selections are inspired. He laughs, exposing teeth that in the States would cost thousands.

  He and everyone else gets into the course for nothing by decree of Sheikh Mohammed who, unsurprisingly, owns the place. Free buses are laid on from town for the immigrant functionaries of Dubai. This is only a minor meeting but thousands have flocked. They enjoy the spectacle but they enjoy even more the remote hope of getting rich.

  Islam does not permit betting. When a woman recently found that she couldn’t sell her house she tried to raffle it. But the authorities forbade it.

  Nevertheless, here at the racing there’s an accumulator game that’s free to enter and that can win you a few hundred dirhams, and there’s a more serious Pick-Six competition that can jackpot over several meetings to a hundred thousand dirhams or more. Quite how that gets round Islamic law I’m not sure, but I’ve no doubt that it’s been ratified by the least corruptible of scholars. Perhaps they were the same scholars who found a way to establish Islamic banks.

  When the big race meetings take place later in the year more conventional betting is to be had, serious betting. International bookmakers give odds and all you need to place a bet is a mobile phone. And in Dubai if you’ve got money to gamble, you’ve got a mobile phone.

  George Appleton is from Middlesbrough. He ran away to join the navy the week Elvis died. He was sixteen years old. His mum, he says, took three weeks to notice he’d gone. George’s face testifies to a vigorous life. When he left the navy thirty years later his captain had this to say: ‘It has been my pleasure as captain of a serving warship to transport George’s golf clubs, cricket bats and penis about the world.’ I’ve read worse testimonials. George is understandably proud of it.

  It is immediately apparent with George that what you see is what you get and what you hear is free of linguistic varnish. He sees money as a chance to enjoy himself and joy means sport. He intends to die, broke, at the age of fifty-nine, ‘like Emlyn Hughes and Alan Ball’.

  The syndicate he belongs to owns a horse called Wayne Rooney. I ask whether that means it’s ugly and bad-tempered, but apparently not. The horse just belonged to one of Sheikh Mo’s sons who is a devotee of Manchester United, but he tires of horses quickly and sells them off cheap.

  ‘Wayne’s won in Abu Dhabi,’ says George, waving an owner’s pass at a doorman.

  He leads me to a second-floor box overlooking the course. And the course, floodlit at dusk, is simply beautiful. At the heart of it a lake. Around the lake, a golf course. Around the golf course, gleaming white rails. Around the rails a track of turf as green as New Zealand. Around that track, more rails. And around those rails another track, this time of sand.

  The saddling enclosure in front of the stands is surrounded by hedges trimmed geometrically square. The crowd mills around it. Stewards in what looks like hunting gear patrol on horseback. But for the racial mix of the crowd and the balmy evening this could be an English race meeting.

  The royal box has open air seating for perhaps forty, with chairs of thick red plush. The central seats resemble thrones. The area is scattered with a dozen or so dishdashed scions of royalty and one plump white man in a suit. He cosies up to one dishdash after another and repeatedly flings his head back to laugh toothily.

  The most recent of the stands is a sleek and elegant wonder in chrome and glass, lit eerily blue by floodlights. It was built to great fanfare to commemorate the millennium. And a year from now, after a decade of race meetings, it will be rubble. They’re pulling it down. They’re pulling everything down. And they’re putting up something better. A whole new track and stables and stands and hotel complex are already near completion just a few hundred yards away. The new venue is explicitly intended to out-Ascot Ascot. The main stand will be a kilometre long.

  The history of this sort of racing in Dubai stretches all the way back to the discovery of oil. Sheikh Rashid’s vastly enriched sons travelled to Britain, enjoyed what they saw, bought some horses, won a race or two, got a taste for it, bought more horses, established stables in England, established stables in Dubai, built this track and brought it to the world’s attention in 1996 by hosting, in the proven method of modern Dubai, ‘the world’s richest horse race’. The notion worked as the seven stars of the Burj worked. People loved the flaunting simplicity of the title. And owners loved the prize money. They flocked. More PR for the emirate and a lovely hobby for the ruling family. Though it should be said that Sheikh Mohammed is apparently an outstanding horseman in his own right, and a world champion at endurance riding, whatever that may be.

  The horses are beautiful. Preened and delicate, stepping as if on tiptoe and strung like violins, they look smaller than racehorses I’ve seen elsewhere. ‘Arabian thoroughbred stock,’ says George, who is addressing himself with equal intensity to the form guide and a bottle of Stella
.

  The first race is run on sand. Huge electronic screens show the horses in close-up. The broadcast commentary is fruitily English, rising to orgasmic pitch as they near the finish line, hauling the crowd forward to the rails, then subsiding in a post-coital sigh as the horses slow and the crowd falls back and the balloon of arousal deflates.

  ‘Shit,’ says George, and he pulls on his beer. There are perhaps a couple of dozen people in our box, several of whom also own a bit of Wayne Rooney. Tractors emerge to rake the sand flat, red tractors polished to a gleam, and I am introduced to Chris from Essex, once a banker now a mortgage broker. He’s sanguine about Dubai.

  ‘There will be failures,’ he said. ‘Projects abandoned half-built, that sort of thing, but Dubai is here to stay.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘Oh I think I’ll hang around,’ he says, smiling. ‘It’s a bit more colourful than Essex, isn’t it?’

  Food and drink abound, the crowd below our box are entertaining to watch in their diversity, there aren’t too many races for me to become bored, and I have a lovely argument about Wall Street with an investment banker that we both enjoy because we both think we win.

  When the last race is run and the workers in matching boiler suits scurry onto the grass track to tamp the clods down with mallets, and the poor people file out to the car park and onto buses, we privileged few potter down a corridor and past the entrance to the royal box and out into the arena where a circular bar with a thatched roof is surrounded by women in hats. I don’t know where they’ve been until now. In other boxes I suppose, but there are huge hats, ridiculous hats, tilted hats the size of bicycle wheels, hats like fluffy bowling balls, hats striped like zebras with gloves to match. And five foot six south of the hats, ridiculous shoes. Flimsy things for tottering in, ending in heels that could puncture a lung.

  The men accompanying the hats are in Flash Harry suits, and everyone is clamouring for booze. They’ve been at it for three hours now and the men’s voices are getting boomy and the women are starting to shriek.

  The bar staff are various shades of brown – Sri Lankan, Indian, Filipino, Somali – and they are little more than boys. They knock up cocktails with swift dexterity, flip the tops off Belgian lagers, ease the corks from champagne and present bills that make me gawp. The suits pay without surprise, hesitation or resentment. Money pours across the bar like water. The till is crammed. The drinkers bray and squeal in the warm night air. Meanwhile the beautiful thoroughbred horses that drew the hats and the suits to this place have been led back to their stables to sleep on straw.

  The conversation turns to cricket. George used to play against a mullah.

  ‘You’d have loved him, Joe. Kershid the Mullah from some mosque in Bur Dubai. Mad bastard he was. Had a red beard. When we tossed before the game he used to kiss me full on the lips. I’ve got this Thai girlfriend – not married or anything – and he always used to ask after her.

  ‘And boy could he bat. Whacked it everywhere. I loved bowling to him. I always used to try and wind him up. I’d call him a dirty cheating bastard. And he was, too.

  ‘“You can’t say that to him, they’d say, he’s a mullah.”

  ‘Fuck that,’ I’d say, ‘we’re playing cricket.’ And he never minded. Always used to come back to the bar for a Coke or something after. “Very good game, my friend, very good game”, then off to evening prayers. Proves they’re not all mad bastards.’

  Too energized to go home I take a taxi down to the Creek. Warm air, abundant people, a fizz on the late night streets and an abundance of seedy hotels. They are the original hotels of Dubai, now superseded by the plush corporate chains – Hyatt, Radisson, Intercontinental – and the one-off, show-off Burj.

  The first bar I step into resembles an underground cafeteria segregated by sex. I immediately think of withdrawing but am insistently ushered to a roped-off area where men sit at Formica tables. On each table is a pot of unconvincing plastic flowers. Most of the men are Indian and solitary. They wear polyester suits and no ties. Waiters keep them supplied from the little bar. By the pool table on the far side of the bar the women are gathered. They are a united nations of prostitutes. Gleaming black, honey brown, Russian pale and Chinese sallow, they chat casually among themselves, dressed in cut-off jeans or strappy leather. From time to time they glance casually across at the men, who cradle their drinks and commune with themselves, looking more in need of a laugh than a shag. This is not a happy place.

  One girl is extraordinary. Tall, lithe, walking as if she carried a water pot on her head, she wears jeans and a provocative waistcoat. She has the cheekbones of Mongolia, the lips and teeth of perhaps Kenya, the skin of the Middle East and the enterprise to note my staring and to come and sit down at my table. I don’t know what the form is. She is wasting her time, but my upbringing, while never having been explicit about the correct way to address the unwanted attentions of Middle Eastern prostitutes, assumes its default mode of polite apparent interest.

  ‘I’m Joe.’

  ‘Joe,’ she says as neutrally as it is possible to say Joe.

  She accepts my reluctant offer of a drink by flicking her fingers and catching the eye of a barman, an eye that was already aware of her relocation to my table, and in short order a bottle of Budweiser arrives for her and a beer for me to replace the one that I had decided was the only one I was having here.

  She takes a straw from a glass on the table, slowly peels the wrapping from it with fingernails as long and crimson as you’d expect, pops it into her beer, sucks on it, puts the bottle down, looks at me, then looks away towards the bar and pops some chewing gum into her mouth. She is young, perhaps nineteen. She’s really just a girl. She is strikingly handsome, but she has an understandably hard edge, a bitterness no one her age should be saddled with.

  She wants money. She gets money by getting laid. She’s not going to get laid by me. The kindest thing I could do for her at this stage is to leave.

  ‘Where are you from?’ I say. In my defence, I do actually want to know.

  ‘Uzbekistan.’

  Her accent sounds huskily guttural. She glances assessingly at me as she speaks, and I can sense that she assesses me rightly.

  ‘What’s the capital of Uzbekistan?’ Where that question came from I’m not sure. I don’t know the answer, but neither do I want to know it.

  ‘Uh?’ she says.

  But now I’ve embarked I feel obliged to take the conversational journey. And it’s better, fractionally, than a dismissive silence.

  ‘The capital, you know, the big city in Uzbekistan. England capital London. Russia capital Moscow. Uzbekistan capital . . .?’ and here I shrug my shoulders and splay my palms in a hollow-jolly gesture of interrogation.

  She sneers. She turns away. She makes eye contact with another girl. I get up, go to the bar, pay my bill and leave.

  ‘Good night, sir,’ says the Indian barman. ‘And thank you.’

  Dubai abounds in prostitutes for obvious reasons. Men vastly outnumber women here. Many of the men are too poor to hire a whore, but clearly there are plenty who aren’t and who do. And then there’s history. The Gulf has a long tradition of slavery. East African slaves were shipped through here for centuries. It was often slaves who dived for pearls. Every sheikh had slaves. And every sheikh further inland wanted slaves and he got them through ports like Dubai. From the mid-eighteenth century the British did much to minimize the trade, but it was still going on in the 1950s. And in the form of this Uzbekistani girl and the Chinese girl I met the other night it still is. The exploitation is illegal. But too little is done to enforce the law.

  In its most recent Report of Human Trafficking the UNHCR had this to say:

  . . . women from Eastern Europe, South East Asia, the Far East, East Africa, Iraq, Iran, and Morocco reportedly are trafficked to the UAE for commercial sexual exploitation. Some foreign women also are reportedly recruited for work as secretaries or hotel workers by third-country recruiters and coerc
ed into prostitution or domestic servitude after arriving in the UAE.

  The report acknowledges that the UAE government has made some efforts ‘to prosecute and convict sex trafficking offenders during the year and made modest progress to provide protections to female trafficking victims’ but the report also makes it quite clear that the government hasn’t done much.

  The trade carries on partly because of the fundamental nature of Dubai. The place was born of a western belief system, a belief system that took hold in the Seventies and was championed by Reagan, Thatcher and Wall Street. It was the belief in the free market, or if not free, as unfettered as it could be. It got its moral imprimatur from the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the Soviet Union. Since the Communists had so clearly got it wrong, the free marketeers must have got it right.

  Dubai was and is a crystallization of that belief. It is the freest of free markets. No taxes, no welfare state, few scruples and the chance to create simply colossal wealth. So in they flocked, the banks and corporations, to a new world hub, and the hub blossomed.

  But the same qualities that made Dubai blossom, have also made it shady. The same qualities that have attracted the giant corporations have attracted the racketeers. The parasites and exploiters, the traders in misery, the organized crime syndicates, fell in love with Dubai for all the same reasons and saw all the same possibilities. It was in Dubai, to name just one example, that AQ Khan set up shop. AQ Khan was for years the head of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons programme. But he liked to do a little business on the side, selling nuclear materials and know-how to anyone who would pay. Those who paid included Libya, Iran and North Korea. And as a place to conduct trade Khan found Dubai just so convenient.

  It’s hard to go for a night on the town in any city of the world without meeting, or preferably observing from a distance, a drunk Scot. The one on the steps of this hotel is in the process of being bounced. Three chunky bouncers are restraining him. He wants to fight them. His t-shirt is torn from right armpit to waist and drenched with what I hope is only beer. He is drunk enough to be effectively incomprehensible. The only word I can make out is cunt. He says it a lot. He shouts it. His face is contorted with rage at the blind injustice that life has meted out to him. He looks rabid, impossible. I’m impressed by the bouncers’ restraint. I want them to thump him. ‘Fucking cunts,’ he screams at them, at the unjust world, ‘you fucking cunting cunts.’ I catch a taxi.