History removed and rebuilt in city of transients
Well now, that was a first. It had to happen somewhere, I suppose, and it happened in Dubai. I probably shouldn’t be surprised. Dubai likes to be first. It’s a city that is always seeking to impress, to attract attention, to evince a wow of wonder. It’s boastful, vain and masculine.
Inevitably Dubai has built itself the world’s tallest building, stabbing half a mile into the haze of pollution that clouds the city morning and evening.
And when the sun burns through that haze the mirrored surface of the Burj Khalifa glints and sparkles and a million tourist necks crick backwards to take it in.
At its foot, just as inevitably, lies the world’s largest shopping mall, however many thousand square metres of self-replicating polished floor and artificial light, a nightmare maze of acquisition, thronged by the fortunate who have money to spend.
Though from their faces you wouldn’t guess that they were fortunate.
When I came to Dubai nine years ago to research a book, there were different people at the tower and mall.
Back then the place was under construction and it was thronged night and day with labourers, imported from India to do 12-hour shifts for too little money.
Those labourers and their successors are still in town, for in Dubai the building never stops. And just as they were nine years ago they are still carted round the heat-struck city in buses of bare metal and just as they were nine years ago they’re housed in barracks on the fringes of the desert where the tourists never go.
Back then I stayed with my friends Simon and Dee, though in the book I called them Stephen and Kay in case the things I had to say upset the famously upsettable authorities.
But there’s no need for such caution any more because six-footfour inch Simon, lock forward, middle-order batsman, and devotee of every form of sport is dead, felled by a heart attack three years ago at the age of 54. And Dee has since returned with their two daughters to the English midlands because Dubai is a difficult place for a woman on her own.
We are all of us transients, at all times and in all places, but few places underline that transience like this city. It is impossible to gain citizenship. Even property rights are uncertain.
Within minutes of your departure the wind has blown your footprints from the sand and it’s as if you’d never been. Dubai moves only and relentlessly forward.
Even the history is new. When Dubai’s modern boom began, which is less than a lifetime ago, they knocked down every remnant of the little fishing and trading port that had stood on the banks of the creek.
But now they’re putting it back up, making ancient-looking buildings out of mud and coral. It’s strictly for the tourists of course, for there’s nothing we visitors like more than a little pseudo-heritage, a sprinkle of cultural inauthenticity, to leaven the dull bread of acquisition and indulgence.
Trudging in the afternoon heat through a reconstituted 19th century fort, the damp cloth bunching under breast and armpit, our fat thighs chafing, is a form of penance, a mortifying almost-pilgrimage, a sacrifice on the altar of culture, before we go to eat and drink and shop again.
The metro is another new development since I was last here. Diving down into the sand or standing high on stilts above the traffic it is a marvel of technology.
The trains are driverless, the stations as bright as tomorrow and as clean as Singapore. The metro has made it easier for the visitors to shift from mall to mall, and for the mass of service workers to go from home to work. But the city streets still seethe and snarl with traffic and testosterone, with halfa-million-dollar supercars, with money-lust and out-of-my-way Trumparrogance.
Yesterday the train was rushhour packed and hot despite the air-conditioning. Bodies pressed against bodies, and everyone wore the neutral mask that tried to say it wasn’t so, that every ganglion wasn’t screaming for release. As the train slowed for a station I felt a tap on my forearm. I ignored it. It came again, this time a double tap. An Indian youth, about to get off the train, was offering me the seat he’d vacated.
No no, I said, and looked around for someone who might need it, someone elderly or weak. He tapped my arm again, gestured again. Again I smiled my thanks and shook my head. He shrugged, and then, oh no, he sat back down. The only reason he’d stood up was that I might sit. A kindness I had spurned. But also, as I’ve said, a first for me. One of life’s little milestones, in non-stop, forwardmoving, young Dubai.