Deserter

My taxi reached the airport as sunset call to prayer began to sound, and I gave the driver his fare plus ten and I would have given him another ten if he hadn’t hovered over me offering to help me with my luggage, polluting my comfort zone with the smell of tobacco and cardamom tea each time he said, “Blease,” but I was in a rush, he’d double parked and a black beret was blowing his whistle and pointing at me.

Every summer for many years I depart Dubai and arrive somewhere else, preferably a place with wide loopholes in its culture of vices and virtues; in the morning I would arrive in Bangkok where I planned to exchange a hundred U.S. dollars for thousands in Thai Baht to pay taxi fare and to buy ten codeine tablets to help me revel in my morning nap in my boutique hotel room, curtains drawn. The day after tomorrow, I would purchase at Morchit terminal a one-way bus ticket for the Thai-Cambodian border.

Since marrying someone with a lower tolerance for my bullshit than an American woman might endure, I could get away from Dubai, get very lost in Southeast Asia and always count on a terse reminder after a several weeks, be it text message or Email saying it’s “Time to return to Dubai.”

Dubai is an exotic archipelago of high finance and high buildings. The surface of its crust is covered by a thin veneer of marble and concrete, glass and steel. It is surrounded by an ocean of sand. It floats on a sea of petrol dollars. It's an “only one of its kind” city which points out the flexibility of its rulers whenever they green light blue prints. Although this outer core gives the appearance of a fluid acceptance of many architectural styles and life styles, its inner core is composed of granite traditions that have been inculcated into a hundred generations and will not wear out their welcome anytime soon. Dubai has an incredible amount of limitless perspectives and prospective opportunities.

Dubai is a society whose moral compass is a whirling dervish. This is a society straining with one leather sandal planted firmly in the austerity of its fiercely protected antiquity and the other sandal placed in the sumptuousness of ravenous appetites and creature comforts. 

Me? I like creature comforts. Life here can be a dream for those of us who dream of a home with a garden that constantly needs grooming. For others it's a place that with each exhalation of breath, they pray that it's all a bad dream and that soon they'll awake with a start to find themselves surrounded by family and earning a decent wage for an honest day's work. 

Sumptuous living and creature comforts not withstanding, I need to get out and travel far away whenever the opportunity presents itself. I need a break from me and others like me, a mob with master's degrees, people with pallid complexions. Over pints of Guinness we swing our jeering hammers and crack the thin veneer of modern living, comforted knowing that those who employ us will never completely leave their venerable wilderness as long as they can outsource the grunt work of building them a glitzy new world. We khawajas make it possible for them to come down off their camels and climb onto the the cushy seats of the latest Hummer. 

Sometimes, it works my last nerve when we point out things like Googling Boticelli's "Birth of Venus", pulling up a warning which reads, "This site has been blocked because it contains content of a pornographic nature" while there are legions prostitutes from as far north as the northern suburbs of St. Petersburg, as far south as Zimbabwean savannas, as far east and as far west as the slums of Manila and Brazil, trafficked in each night, crowding the disco dance floors in seven star hotels.

Come on. So what?

The black beret blowing his whistle turns around as I set my guitar on the luggage trolley first; its neck jutting out like the ramming beak of a Roman warship. The heavy backpack rests on top of the guitar case and secures it, a two step process easier to do myself than to try to explain to my taxi driver. "I have it," I said to him, "Thank you. Shukrun, ma'salama."

I am well rehearsed in the sequence of steps which take me from taxi, through the hubbub of the airport, to the bar next to my departure gate. I entered the airport through doors nearest the Thai Airways ticket counter and as the doors closed behind me, they silenced the call to prayer.