March 2018 – Wonderings of a wanderer

Driving near-miss Dubai

The amygdala is the most used part of my brain when driving in Dubai.

Yesterday I visited a friend who lives in a flat in a gridlock of buildings along Dubai’s overdeveloped seafront. It’s a 7.5 minute walk from my home, but I opted to take my car. Foolishly.

Driving into and out of this labyrinth of plazified skyscrapers is an exercise in patience as one wrong turn, one missed right, can land you at the outskirts of town, surrounded by sand, where no Google Maps satellite can help you. You may wander about in your dinky VW Polo (which is probably the worst buy for the city roads teeming with Range Rovers and Hummers – power – and Maseratis and Porsches – sexy power) looking for signs of life, while moving toward the distant watery blur of high rise concrete as your only hope of survival.

Driving or walking in Dubai has to be one of the best tests of tolerance in the world. You start out with good intentions and leave enough time to make it to your destination. Everything is only 23 minutes away, how mbad can it be? It can be so bad you will want to poke your bellybutton a couple of hundred counts with a kebab skewer because that would be less painful.

Dubai in all her golden glory is annoyed with your self-assurance, scoffs at your temerity to believe you’d get ANYWHERE in 23 minutes – even the corner grocery store – and spites you by spitting you out into the undigested bowels of her industrial district, making you desolate at 40 degrees – and at this time you are inside your vehicle with the air-conditioner on – until the semblance of a sign of a road you remotely recognise rears its familiar self. Ah, you think, I’m ok, I’m not going to die in the desert, dehydrated from days of being lost in Al Quoz (the city’s warehouse repository). However, you aren’t out of the dunes yet so you control your relief, ask Siri what’s going on only to be told “I’m sorry can you repeat the question” repeatedly until you’re back at the baby powder processing plant you passed just under an hour ago.

Megapolis madness or highways of hopelessness?

There are no statistics for people wasting 85 minutes in the desert on their way to a location 7 minutes away, but with the very unscientific support of anecdotes I can guarantee this happens to about 1 in every 2 persons. I have friends and colleagues who mention they’ll be there soon only to miss the meeting and resurface in perhaps the sands of Saudi Arabia. Sending a location pin doesn’t help because it isn’t about the accuracy of the location as much as finding the actual roads that lead to it.

It must have something to do with the diverse workforce. Filipinos, Russians, Indians, Sri Lankans, Afghanis, Koreans, Chinese, Ethiopians, Zambians, Englishmen, Irishmen, Icelanders (there are a few), Iraqis, Australians, Canadians, Costa Ricans, Chileans… the sheer volume of cultures residing within one context in this Middle Eastern oasis needs a single binding force, some regulations, some parameters to govern them all… Something which acts as an adhesive to the collective consciousness in order for all to respect the other’s way of life while being at liberty to keep their own.
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As I walked along the city’s marina last night, lined as it is with trillion dirham yachts, I saw many middle income families out for a stroll, clusters of young labourers on their evening off, laughing in good weather, a few fit couples out on a run together, the abaya-clad aunty with an adored niece. It was 9 pm. In other cities of the world this may constitute crime curfews, where such a mash of ethnicities and earning brackets begin to feel the heat on the street and retreat indoors to the safety of their home. Not so in Dubai (where the street heat is only literal). Perhaps because of the same reason the roads afford no respite from the relentless round-and-aroundness I experience when I don’t take the right exit.

Rules. Rules are the backbone of this society, brimming as it is with people from far flung parts of our planet. Rules here condense everyone together in one cohesive cloud, working jointly at protecting the city while keeping it cool in the shade. And boy are there some rules. Some clearly communicated, some unwritten. And while some aren’t taken as seriously, others are imposed with enough fervour to make a devout Catholic ashamed (actually very little doesn’t).

The metro has strict rules of conduct – no eating or drinking, no chewing gum. Zero tolerance for drunk driving (you need a license to buy alcohol which can only be given once you proffer a no-objection certificate from the closest male in your life – your husband, your father, your boss). Most petty thefts, peddling goods without the proper license etc. can land you in jail with a marked path to deportation. Any licentiousness toward women is a crime and punishable with varying degrees of severity. Heavy fines are imposed for wrongful and/or dangerous road behaviour (from the mild like illegal parking to the bank breaking crossing-a-tram-line). I was once sternly told off for walking through a pedestrian red light (I blame being too caught up in Stevie Wonder’s Sir Duke playing in my ears, I could feel it all over). I have also paid more than half my salary in speeding tickets.

The mirage of closeness. It looks 5 minutes away but will take 55 minutes to get to.

This mentality for strict order probably applies in the urban planning of city streets. Highways are built not to send you to hell whether you’re from Hungary or the Honduras. It doesn’t matter how you drove in your country, if it was on dirt tracks with no marked exits so you could escape just as suddenly as you appeared or you tore through traffic in a tough Toyota Tundra. In Dubai you will drive on roads built to ensure everyone is protected against you, you will take the last exit to nowhere and do 58 kilometers back on yourself, but you will stick to the rules damnit. In Dubai you will jog along the promenade of the pond next to which you live, but should you long to crossover to the other side you may need to factor in about 33,009 additional steps because your path will take you over the ramp of the bridge, lead you up 4.5 additional flights, across the walkway, down another 3.1 flights, onto a sandpit bordering as yet undeveloped property (which will be a high-rise in 22 months) from which you will go under the over, desolate and quiet, to finally emerge where you wanted to be and could have been within moments if you weren’t walking in Dubai.

Hello, this is where I came in. And if you’ve stuck with me so far, you’ll do fine driving near-miss Dubai.

Call to sacrifice

Go forth and bring peace to the world they told us
Yours are the voices
Your hearts will set things straight
(as if in its crookedness we are falling off the planet, us unsung heroines)

Every story you share will resonate
The equality you demand will be met (resistance be damned!)
The respect garnered there to stay

But
They did not consider the onerousness of this call
Heralding a new dawn
Shouting saffron signals across a hopeful sky yet slowly
Twisting to flag red
Robbing us of our own decisions our own choices our own truths

In the service of our children
For love
For quelling the hate that percolates up from the depths of unenlightenedness
Whoosh – like antacid on heartburn
Sacrifice yourselves
For the future

And for ourselves –
Or do we keep being to serve?
In service of parents and husbands and in-laws and babies and loud crashing noises that tell us self first is selfish selfish selfish

No no

No woman no cry
Be not selfish – your service will make you inherit the earth
Make generations after you believe of each other as not marginal
They will grow up with honour for the Other

And in our selfless uprising disguised

We are lemmings lurching off the cliff plunging head first into our own oblivion

We will change the karma of lifetimes

We with our capabilities, our intelligence, our willfulness

Not for naught

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(but not for us)
So

We will serve ourselves up

For peace

For equality

The ones who come later socialized to think their partner as truly same same (but different)

Like egalitarianism does – in all its altruistic blindness

R.E.S.P.E.C.T (and all that)

We will ask ourselves how could we be fooled into this?
This giving in, giving up
Of our persons
For this Greater Good
When the greater god never made us the same
When the one was made from the bone of the other
When she with her coy glances enticed him to eat forbidden fruit
(it was is never his fault)

Oh no, we will tell ourselves…

Was it all then for nothing?

Like night to day

Light a candle and pray

The differences will stay

But perhaps our sacrifices will make the differences beautiful
Because we will be standing as tall
As strong
As powerful
As proud
As from whom we are different
Two back to back, heads at same height, shoulders measuring up down
Bodies unalike

Dubai, Jan 2018

I believe

I believe

I believe each person is equal

let’s not deceive ourselves by creating differences then say they existed before we were born

I believe the colour of human skin differs

but we all bleed red

We all shit and piss the same way

Cry and love and light up when praised

I believe animals heal humans more than the other way round

And we destroy our healers

Sages who accept

who are wrecked by the bullet of pride, greed, something inside which can’t be quelled with trophies

I believe god is in the buzz of a bee’s wings and the autumn leaf

falling graceful slow to Earth’s carpet

In a sleeping infant’s soft wheeze
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And three green lights in a row on a morning I am late to something

Steam warm circles on winter glass, write your name, believe the memory of you will stay long after it’s dry and cold

I believe freedom is discriminatory and has no value without the support of its environment

I believe who you love, who you fuck, what you eat, what makes you cry is nobody’s business

The child you couldn’t, didn’t, needn’t, shouldn’t, mustn’t have had not had had not had had

I believe I am only mine and no weight of guilt can make me love myself less, can shame me, can tell me how I feel

I know what I feel

don’t explain

I believe in a universe of infinite connections, so supernaturally strung as to celebrate or destroy lifetimes of labour

Like ourobouros we reinvent, reconfigure, realign and gain momentum in the many kindnesses around us

I believe there is nothing better than this moment

I believe in this moment

Dubai, March 2017

The accidental refugee and the crisis of accepting who you are: a short essay on belonging.

I exult in the fact I can see everywhere with a flexible eye; the very notion of home is foreign to me, as the state of foreignness is the closest thing I know to home.
― Pico Iyer

Living in Dubai, a city with one of the world’s most diverse populations due to its dependency on a large ex-pat workforce, I am often asked the ubiquitous question, “so, where are you from?”. It’s an impossible one word answer for me, as it must be for an increasing number of people, who like me, have lived half their life across a rapidly globalized planet.

To start from the very beginning – an Indian Hindu man marries a Parsi Zoroastrian woman. Their first born is me. A most inauspicious start to the idea of one person being only from one place with one religion. Mixedness begins in my marrow, it spreads outwards across the rest of my life like a vibrant watercolour.

The Indians themselves are a mixed lot through centuries of foreign invasions, from the Mongols to the Macedonians and every pillaging demagogue in-between. There is no such thing as one Indian alone, just as there is no one pure Parsi. Some Parsis harbour the illusion that their ancestors, who arrived from Iran on the shores of India several centuries ago, managed to keep their loins off limits to the local populace. A fallacy in itself due to the fact that Parsi landowners, given large portions of property by the British – had sex with their Indian servants. Their progeny were indoctrinated as Parsi through a patrilineal rule which allows the Parsi man to call his kid a Parsi. However, my Parsi mother was ex-communicated for marrying a Hindu, barred from entering the temple where she had been confirmed into the faith at puberty and her children (my brother and I) unrecognized as Parsi. Which is just as well, as the notion of the accidental refugee had already started before my birth.

Parsis are refugees. Those living in India believe they are Indian as much as those living in Canada believe they are Canadian. Freddie Mercury, a Parsi, was by that logic, a Zanzibarian. What does “coming from” a place where you have no history of rooting mean in your current context then? Are you really an African American if you’re Black in the States? Are you a British Bangladeshi if you’re Brown in the UK? Are you even Parsi, if your ancestors are Persian? Are you an Argentinian or Portuguese or Israeli if you have light skin, curly hair and don’t match a viewer’s idea of what an Indian ought to look like? If I was born in Shanghai, would I be Chinese? I have been asked for directions to places in Hebrew, Spanish, Turkish and Italian while walking through the streets of Reykjavik, Brussels, Istanbul and Milan respectively. One Beiruti shopkeeper was adamant I was really Lebanese and pulling a fast one on him when I told him I don’t understand Arabic.

Perhaps some people give away a stereotypical assessment to arrive at a judgment of where they’re from in its conventional questioning – for example, Satya Nadela is an Indian immigrant, Salma Hayek, a Latina of Mexican origin. Do they really “look” like anything specific? In the big jumble of global movements, where do they fit, what would they call themselves? What do I call myself?

A typical dialogue between me and a person I just met may go something like this:

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Person I’ve just met asks, “so, where do you come from?”

Me, “how long do you have?”

Also me, “I was born in Mumbai.”

Also me, “I have lived here and there.”

Also me, “I come from refugee stock, and if you ask me again in a few years, I may be just as obtuse then.”

Mixed heritage isn’t the sole factor which disallows me to conform. Having lived in different countries on different continents with distinctly different cultures isn’t the only reason I find myself unconsciously disengaging from someone who wants to box me into one idea. How do I explain that some of my heart’s shattered smithereens are at present hovering in the London air? That an Icelandic passport makes me long to show off the phoenetic ruddiness of the “Rs” of its language? That having a son who is also mixed has me truly believe we will all be “Beige” 50 years hence… a mash of non-ethnicities, determined by multi-DNA, our children able to come together in a wave of love and understanding. Schools will teach “Being Beige” as a history subject, countries will declare “Beige History Month” in honour of all mixed race people.

True belonging isn’t based on the man-made concept of a nation-state. Real identity is not hemmed in with where you were born or what language your mother speaks or how you look. It’s the spirit which moves you to say “I really love New York, so I came back to say ‘hey’” when the immigration officer asks you the reason for your visit (it made him crack a smile). It’s the call of your soul to sway to the beat of that distant drum, far away from the band in which you were told you HAD to sing. Real identity is accepting that your bones are yours, you take them, along with your backpack to anywhere you want to go, because you carry everything that makes who you are within them.