All Strangers Are Kin
Page 11
In a more proletarian wing of the mall, I passed a kiosk selling perfume. A sign advised me that the brand name, Shay, “in Emirati spoken Arabic means ‘cool’ or ‘nice.’” If only I had seen this vocabulary lesson before my visit to the ladies’ lounge! I rolled the word over my tongue, but it didn’t feel right. Not only did I, in my sensible linen pants, button-front blouse, and colorless lip balm, not have the authority to coo “Mmm, very shay!” to a stranger, but in Egypt, shay was the word for tea, which was always served hot, the opposite of gamid, the word Medo had taught me for cool. It was just confusing enough to keep me from opening my mouth.
By the time I visited the Sheikh Mohammed Centre for Cultural Understanding, I had given up hopes of speaking Arabic, but at least there would be real, live Emirati nationals there, as well as a good breakfast. The center, set in an old-by-Dubai-standards stucco house from the 1940s, offered Q&A sessions for curious tourists and foreign transplants, over a traditional meal.
Our host was a tall, gregarious man named Nasif, with a sly smile and fluent-English shtick that would have killed in the Catskills: “Religions are like operating systems. ‘Ooh, I’m an Apple! You’re Windows!’ My best friend and business partner is Jewish.” Beat; theatrical shrug. “And an atheist!”
Nasif’s straight man was his assistant, Muhammad, a blinky college student who stood at his mentor’s elbow, pen and notebook in hand. We twenty audience members perched on carpet-covered floor cushions, arrayed around a large courtyard.
“If I shout ‘Allahu akbar!’ at the bank,” Nasif continued, “and you all run away, then I get to be first in line.” Another perfect beat. “You got punked!”
Nasif’s monologue ranged from the healing power of dates, the country’s main agricultural product, to the UAE’s hyperspeed shift to modernity: “The refrigerator, when it came, was like a precious icon,” he recalled, mock-bowing before it. Early in his talk, some in the crowd had tittered nervously at the religious jokes, but by the end, they were enthralled by his stories and laughing in all the right spots.
Nasif called a break, and Muhammad served us breakfast: glistening stacks of puffy bread topped with date syrup; sweet, saffron-scented scrambled eggs with vermicelli noodles; great tureens of chickpeas in broth studded with tiny chilies. More than anything I had seen in the museum, the spices and textures of the food showed the dramatic difference from all the other Arab countries I had visited in the past. Egypt, Syria, Lebanon—those countries edged the Mediterranean and shared a common aesthetic, in food and many other details. The UAE looked north and east, spicing its breakfast with help from Iran and countries across the Indian Ocean.
The post-meal Q&A session was almost entirely about clothing. This superficial turn initially irritated me, but if I was honest with myself, I had a lot to learn. Clothing was part of the unspoken language of culture, and I had yet to feel comfortable in the Gulf’s dialect. In Egypt, even when I wasn’t able to communicate in Arabic, I could read other details—hand gestures, zibeeba prayer marks, wrist tattoos, the music on a taxi’s sound system. Here, though, I was at the remedial level. I still did a double take when I saw a woman in a niqab, the black face veil that was seldom worn in Cairo; the men in their shining white shirt-front robes looked to me slightly unreal, as if they had all stepped out of stock photos.
Nasif called for volunteers to try on the niqab, as well as the abaya, the women’s black top robe that was commonly paired with the shayla, a gauzy headscarf. The woman in the niqab posed awkwardly, her self-conscious smile visible through the fine fabric.
A man in the audience asked why, in such a hot place, Emiratis didn’t wear tank tops. “Have you noticed,” Nasif said, tapping his sleeve and eyeing the man’s sunburned arm, “we live in a desert?”
But why did men wear white and women wear black, another audience member wondered. Wasn’t that unfair, since black was hotter in the sun?
“Do you feel hotter?” he turned to his volunteer models. They shrugged; they had fallen mute as mannequins. It didn’t matter whether the abaya was hot in the sun, because Emirati women were not standing around in the sun. They were walking from air-conditioned house to SUV to mall to office tower.
“Look, it’s fashion too,” Nasif said, indicating that the volunteers could now remove their outfits. He was right about this as well. In Cairo, the style was multicolored hijabs; here, women, like the Versace-and-Dolce ladies in the restroom at the mall, wore giant updos, with the shayla cascading down.
“Everything goes from practical to fashion to extreme,” Nasif philosophized. In the practical era, exposing skin to the sun meant dehydration, which in turn meant certain death in the desert. With modern comforts, tradition could be tweaked. “We live in the extreme era now,” he concluded. “Maybe Lady Gaga will wear the abaya and make it cool.”
As for men’s clothing, the standard robe, the kandoura, was almost always white, Nasif said, “unless you want to look old-fashioned.” Here he smirked and tipped his head toward his assistant, Muhammad, who was clad in sandy brown.
“No, it is the fashion!” Muhammad protested. He reached up and patted his oversized ghitra, the cotton scarf set on his head in complex folds. Unlike Nasif’s plain white gauze ghitra, his was a rustic red-checked design. Muhammad, wearing old-school bedu garb in the city, might have been a little bit of a hipster. In fact, considering what a small percentage of the population Emiratis were, any kind of kandoura and abaya was a marker of a subculture, a way of recognizing members of your literal tribe.
Muhammad had removed the trays of food, and now he lit an incense burner near the front of the carpet. I had noticed similar filigreed brass boxes for sale at the mall, along with the various scented woods and resins to burn in them, but this was the first time I had seen one in action. “We have a saying here,” Nasif said, waving the scented smoke with his hand. “‘When the smoke comes out, you get out.’” With a final Cheshire-cat grin, he gestured to the door.
When Your Ear Hears
After a week of classes, Manal and I had settled into an easy routine, but there was an imbalance in our communication. She usually had no problem understanding me, while I frequently had to ask her to repeat herself. And when she did, I often found she was saying words I already knew.
I wanted to blame her Lebanese accent, but really, the problem was mine. Whenever Manal’s intonation suggested she’d be asking a question, my hands clenched around my notebook. Questions put me on highest alert, and I reverted to the linguistic perfectionism of my childhood. As soon as I missed a single word, my brain stalled. Start over, it seemed to insist, in breathless panic. You’llneverunderstandneverunderstandneverunderstand.
“Manal,” I finally said, “can you tell me some stories? Just some things that have happened in your life here in Dubai.” I hoped that if she talked for long enough at a stretch, my brain would relax and stop interfering.
“About my life here? Well, OK,” she said, settling down in a chair next to her desk. “Let me tell you, I’m very unlucky with maids.”
For once, I had understood the words fine, but I wasn’t sure why she would have said them.
“Everyone in Dubai has a maid,” Manal said when she saw my puzzled expression, “so it seemed like a good idea to hire one. The first one seemed quite good. She was from the Philippines. She was with us exactly one month. And then she disappeared.”
“Disappeared?” I repeated. It was not a word I had expected.
“She went out one day and didn’t return that night,” she clarified. According to law, because Manal and her husband had vouched for the woman’s visa, they were legally responsible for her. When they reported the disappearance to the police, they were subjected to hours of bureaucracy, signing statements that they had not abetted the maid’s escape. They never saw the woman again.
“The second one was Indonesian. She was good, but after a
year, she got pregnant and went home,” Manal went on. “And the third one . . .”
Here she paused and readjusted her sunglasses on her head. “She was Indonesian too. She had been in our house twenty-eight days when she suddenly fell ill. Very ill, with a high fever and a terrible cough. I made my husband take her to the hospital in the middle of the night. Six days later . . . matet.”
I had been expecting words related to health insurance and paperwork, not such a simple one as matet—she died.
It was septicemia, from an ijhad. “When a woman is pregnant, and then she is not pregnant. By choice,” Manal explained as she wrote out the word on the board. Her maid had suffered a bad abortion. The doctors had been quick to say it must have happened in Indonesia—not that it mattered, since the procedure was illegal there as well as in the UAE. I copied the word into my notebook. I had never had occasion to discuss such a thing in Arabic before.
On the metro, I sat in a corner and stared out the window. Billboards advertising new malls and housing developments whisked past. Reading at this speed was a good test of my comprehension. “Koooo-loooob abaaareeeel,” I sounded out. Something about dogs? But the plural of kalb (dog) was usually kilab. And abareel? Was that some alternate spelling of abreel (April)?
The adjacent sign, in English, revealed the answer: Club Apparel. It wasn’t Arabic; it was a phonetic transcription. Irritated, I turned away from the window. At the next stop, a recorded voice intoned over the metro speakers, “Doors closing.” At first I had loved this voice—it spoke incongruously formal Arabic, complete with case endings. Now I was starting to hate it as much as the mock-Arabic billboards.
At my stop, I joined the crowd of giddy tourists streaming toward the Burj Khalifa, in hopes their cheer would rub off on me. But now I noticed the people heading in the other direction, toward the train. In polyester uniforms and ragged jumpsuits they trudged, heads down under the darkening sky, eyes dull after a day’s labor. I noticed tiny cracks in building façades, unfinished curbs, one haggard bed of petunias planted in a median. The city felt precarious, suspended between fable and reality.
At the Burj Khalifa, a fresh team of jumpsuited workers was busy restoring order, vacuuming sand off the bottom of the Dubai Fountain. This thirty-acre water feature was a bit impractical in the desert, but what was practicality in the face of Arab tradition? In the Quran, after all, God says He “created every living thing from water,” so a nafoora, or fountain, became a fixture in Islamic architecture, the center of every courtyard home. Dubai’s famous nafoora was a bit different from other great fountains in Islamic history, such as the lion statues that had once spouted water in the Alhambra in Granada, Spain. For one thing, this fountain shot water five hundred feet high; for another, it danced along with Céline Dion songs.
A voice pierced the air, and the crowd on the plaza rustled, turned to the fountain, raised cameras in anticipation. But it was not the prelude to a pop song; it was the adhan, the call to prayer, a thin, airy voice emanating from speakers hidden in the lampposts.
In Cairo, the adhan was an assertive bellow from every mosque, and a mosque every hundred feet, or so it sounded. The adhan was five minutes of sonic mayhem, five times a day. Come to—, come—, come to pray, the muezzins urged in competing, unsynchronized rounds. To pray, come—, to pray, come to prosper! In response, people put aside their work and laid out prayer mats in alleys and behind shop counters.
Here in Dubai, no one in the milling crowd reacted. This was the first time I had heard the call in Dubai, I realized, and perhaps this was another reason I felt so out of sorts here. Cairo’s version was cacophonous, but it lent order to the day. Its echoing song had paced my morning classes, marked lunchtime, roused me from a nap, and then, finally, beckoned me back into the cooler evening. Adhan, the call, and udhun, ear, come from the same root, a verb that means both to permit and to hear. A good muezzin (mu’adhdhin, one-who-is-calling-to-prayer) with a clear, true voice can cut through the background noise and deposit a harmonious ripple of syllables directly in your ear. I told myself a story to memorize the knot of the root’s meanings: when your ear hears the adhan, you’re permitted to take a break and reflect on the day so far.
I sat down on a bench to listen. Construction cranes made cryptic silhouettes in the darkening skyline. As at the airport and in the campus food court, I felt as if I had joined a great convention of delegates from all over the globe. Golden footlights illuminated faces of all shapes and shades, clothes of every type, and a dozen languages blurred together in an excited hum. The only Arabic I heard was the recorded call, still faint but distinct: Come to pray! Come to prosper!
With a dramatic gust of vapor, the fountain burst into action. A trill of melodious synthesizers silenced the crowd. The water, all twenty-two thousand gallons of it, burst in waves, then shimmied seductively to an Arabic pop hit. Phone screens flashed like fireflies. With each explosion of the nafoora, the crowd gasped in unison, as if in revelation. For a moment, I felt a shared connection—this was a language we all understood.
Then I remembered Manal’s maid stories, the meaningless Arabic billboards, and the exhausted workers heading home. I stepped away from the crowd at the fountain and made my own way home. By the time I reached my apartment, I was in a deep gloom. I turned my back on the Burj Khalifa, glimmering in the dusk like the Royal Palace of Oz, and called Peter. “People here are rude,” I told him. “They stare right past you.”
Peter laughed. “You live in New York,” he said. “You know they’re not rude. They’re just not interested in you. There’s a difference.”
“I’m so tired,” I whined. “There’s no one to speak Arabic to, and I’m not learning anything.” Actually, I was sleeping fine, and I was learning something new every day from Manal. What had really put me in a sulk was that my plan—learn Khaleeji, crack Emirati culture, immerse myself in ancient poetry—wasn’t working out.
“So if you hate it there, why don’t you go somewhere else?” Peter said. “You don’t have to stay in class, you know.”
Right. I was an adult, and I could do what I liked. I had been planning to travel around the Emirates, maybe over the border to Oman, but not until I finished my classes. Why not go now?
As soon as I said goodbye to Peter, I reserved a rental car and texted Manal about my new plans. I would travel into the desert, like the poets of old.
Eau de Facebook
Al-Ain, way out east on the border with Oman, struck me at first as a pleasantly frumpy city: wide streets, low-rise buildings, serious investment in the latest neon-sign technology, circa 1980. The Hilton sported mauve leather sofas and smoky mirrors. But after parking downtown, I saw it was quite up-to-date in one respect. I had not walked fifty feet when out of the shadows sprang a black Ferrari. It screeched to a halt inches from my right leg, its engine growling like a dog straining at a leash.
Across the street, rumbling at a traffic light, was a white Lotus. Out of the corner of my eye, a Rolls-Royce hood ornament flicked up and headlights flashed as the owner sashayed over to the car, keys in hand. I looked up and down the street, and all I saw were more cars—and other men getting into and out of them. I was the only woman for blocks, as well as the only pedestrian.
Next to me was a row of shoe stores. I ducked into the nearest one, which was stocked almost entirely with slip-on sandals. As I was perusing the stock—did I want a heel of zero inches or four?—a young man in a tight striped polo shirt sidled up to me. “Berfume?” he offered, in English, holding out a blue bottle, his finger primed to spritz. The label read facebook.
“No, thanks,” I said, and immediately regretted it. What would eau de Facebook smell like—procrastination, with top notes of forced cheer? But dodging cars had made me jumpy and pushed me into default “no” mode. I backed toward the door.
“Date later?” he asked, subtly flexing his biceps. I blanched.
The road to the top of Jabal Hafeet was a black swath of German engineering with generous shoulders and gracefully banked curves. I was glad it was an easy drive up the mountain, as I wasn’t quite awake. I had arrived in Al-Ain the night before, too late for the sunset. Now I was aiming for sunrise.
Midway up, the perfectly spaced lights illuminating the road switched off, as the glow on the horizon shifted from gray-blue to gray-pink. It was a pleasure to have the road to myself, even if I wasn’t driving a Ferrari.
After the last rise, I pulled into an enormous, completely empty parking lot. A pair of raptors circled on updrafts, and a family of fat quail skittered across the asphalt. At the far end of the lot sat a shuttered teashop; lights blinked on the claw crane arcade games out front, enticing no one at this hour. Later in the day, this place was probably lively with families—friendly families who might chat with visitors like myself. Instead, I had chosen to come at the very hour at which I was guaranteed to not meet another human being.
Worse, I couldn’t even see the sunrise, because the peak of the mountain blocked the horizon behind me. So while the desert below was rapidly turning from rosy dawn to white in the full sunlight, the parking lot was in shade. I hopped from foot to foot in the cold. Better to go back to bed, I decided.
I had just turned toward my car when a white SUV cruised into the far end of the lot. I suddenly felt very vulnerable, alone and so far from the city. The SUV looped around and stopped between me and my car. The tinted window purred down to reveal a man in mirrored sunglasses and a red and white ghitra folded elegantly around his head.