Dan Fesperman - Layover in Dubai

Oddly appropriate, Sharaf supposed, because that was how Dubai’s newest criminals operated. Except their rules were backed by more money and muscle. The Minister had implied from the beginning that he had backing from the very top, but who could say for sure when Sharaf wasn’t allowed to ask, and when all their conversations occurred in the shadows?

Such worries were part and parcel of Sharaf’s bewilderment over the booming new Dubai. As a young man he had embraced all of the change and modernization, even relished it. But in recent years he’d felt overwhelmed. It wasn’t just the construction binge, with a new Manhattan rising on the skyline every year, or the horrendous traffic with its cataclysmic accidents, or the profligate use of water, or even the prevailing idea that Big was the new normal, and today’s Big would be tomorrow’s Tiny. Nor did he have a particular grudge against any of the new bars and restaurants, with their free-flowing alcohol and their rules against entry for anyone in traditional local dress. It was all of those things, he supposed, plus the fresh hordes of outsiders who had flocked here to build, sell, develop, consume, and party ’til dawn.

Just the other day he had read in the paper that a million and a half people were now living in Dubai, and 90 percent were foreigners. In the workplace, the percentage was even higher, no thanks to the lazy sense of entitlement held by so many local males, his sons included. Sharaf felt as if his country was slowly being pried from his grasp, with full permission and a regal bow. Not that he had ever complained about the free land that the rulers provided, or the giveaway villas, or the manner in which the royal family had so assiduously shared the wealth-first from the oil, before it ran dry, and now from real estate-spreading it generously among the 150,000 Emiratis who could genuinely call themselves natives of Dubai.

Yet, for Sharaf, even prosperity now seemed fragile, threatened by a hovering sense of doom that grew stronger every time he saw another of those SOLD OUT! signs go up at the latest development. In this mood of floating anxiety, nothing seemed the same from one day to the next. Look at his daughter, for example, yearning to dress and act like an outsider. At times he hardly knew her. Modernizing a culture was one thing. Letting it be overgrown by an invasive species was quite another, especially when it was happening at the pace of a time-lapse nature video. Oversleep and you might awaken covered in vines. And now, with this risky new assignment, Sharaf was having to climb the beanstalk of change even as it grew to farther, more dizzying heights. Surely any slip would be disastrous.

The camel’s milk grumbled in his stomach, as ornery as the beast that had produced it. Sharaf’s palms sweated onto the pages. God in heaven. If a cryptic passage of Dostoevsky could upset him this much, then it must be time to sleep.

He shut the book and turned out the light. Amina was snoring, but the sound was reassuring, as familiar as the call of frogs along Dubai Creek when he was a boy. He massaged his belly and sought out a calming memory-his summer on the pearl boat, working alongside his good friend Ali al-Futtaim, that was a good place to start.

Amina was right. Ali was a shameless gossip. Always had been. It was part of his charm, and as an executive at the Dubai Land Office Ali was at the nexus of everything worth knowing. This had always been the nature of their friendship-Ali supplying insider knowledge and Sharaf using it to their mutual advantage. The pattern was established on the pearl boat, when Ali was fifteen and had two years of experience and Sharaf was a newcomer of thirteen.

The pearling fleet put to sea every May, and harvested the reefs and shoals until mid-September, when the skipper of the head boat hoisted a red-and-white flag to signal it was time to return home. During those four months on the water the daily routine never varied. Everyone slept on the deck and rose before dawn for prayers, performing their ablutions with seawater. Each diver gulped coffee and dates for breakfast. Then he plugged his nose with a pin of carved bone, placed a bucket around his neck, tied twenty pounds of India zinc to his ankles, and dropped feetfirst into the sea. He sank ten or even twenty feet while a saib , or helper, tended his rope at the gunwale, and he collected as many oysters as he could before tugging the rope to signal the saib to haul him back to the surface. Up and down he went for three hours, eyes stinging from the salt. Then came lunch-more dates and coffee, another round of prayer-followed by a second shift of diving broken only by a pause for afternoon prayer. Dinner was rice and fish, washed down with a dipperful of barreled well water.

In the evenings everyone pried open their shells, piling them in the middle of the deck while the captain collected pearls in a wooden lockbox that he slept on. Afterward, the divers rubbed themselves with the ooze of a gum tree to keep their skin from cracking. Then they finally relaxed by smoking plugs of shisha tobacco in a water pipe built from a hollowed coconut. Everyone said the evening and late prayers back-to-back so they could go directly to sleep.

It was grueling work, but with Ali’s help Sharaf fared reasonably well, at least until the fleet reached the waters of Al Qarat Island, where the oyster beds were a daunting thirty and even forty feet deep. Sharaf was terrified. With each extra foot of descent, the tropical light faded. Pressure built against his ears and chest, and the creatures of the sea turned spooky and wraithlike, peering from crevices and cracks in the rocks and coral, or casting long shadows from above. In a panic, he nearly drowned during his first dive, after underestimating how long it would take his saib to pull him up. Ali, surfacing next to him, saw right away that Sharaf was quivering like a speared fish. He reacted by breaking into a grin, lips cracked.

“Scary, isn’t it?” the older boy said, smiling hugely, as if the experience had been wildly entertaining. “That’s why the oysters are bigger and the pearls are better. That’s why you must embrace it, make love to it, like a dangerous woman who won’t let you go even when her husband is coming through the front door. Befriend the danger, the same way that an eel learns to love the shadows in his cave. Watch me.”

Ali drew a deep breath and slipped back beneath the waves. Sharaf saw his friend disappear in a trail of bubbles, and he began counting off the seconds. Four minutes passed. Then five. Then six. The captain shouted angrily from the deck at the idling Sharaf.

“Get to work, you lazy slug, or I’ll cut your share!”

But Sharaf had to see this through. Finally, after another agonizing minute, and more taunts from above, something seemed to burst loose in his chest, like a pigeon fluttering free from a cage. Ali’s rope was still taut in the water next to him. Then it shook twice. The saib began to haul it upward. A few seconds later Ali burst to the surface, laughing as he exulted in his saving gasp.

“Forty feet!” he exclaimed breathlessly. “Look at the size of them!”

His bucket overflowed with huge, encrusted shells. The lesson was like a tonic, and from then on Sharaf was never quite as fearful.

And so, as he slid into sleep with his newest doubts and concerns, Sharaf allowed himself to be carried ever deeper, as if again towed by a load of India zinc, while searching the currents of his dreams for answers he might take back to the surface.

Just as he was reaching the limit of his tether, the telephone rang.

Sharaf slowly pulled himself upward, keeping pace with his bubbles until he opened his eyes to the glowing red digits of the bedside clock: 3:37 a.m.