It’s 9:30 pm and we’re eating kebabs in a mall. Kebobs help you sleep, Confucious say. Everybody’s at the mall tonight. The stylish Indian mom whose 2 year old girl has shoes that squeak and light up with every step, and she’s wearing a ton of eye makeup. The 2 year old, not the mom. The dark-haired five year old kid who just tripped and sprawled all over the food court floor and he’s sobbing and his bearded dad is super annoyed. The family with a really white mom who is wearing a head scarf, maybe they’re Turkish. Lots of Filipina ladies chasing around Emirati kids while the Emirati parents look bored and stare at their phones.
Baby it’s cold outside. It’s, like, 85. (Dubai, UAE; Nov 2019)
There’s the kebab place, a Lebanese fast-food joint. A Wendy’s with its freckled, pig-tailed mascot in neon up on the food court wall, the writing says “Weendeez” in Arabic script. It’s past our bedtime, my younger girls are sitting there slurping a Pepsi. Me and Shannon parented for most of the day but gave up around 9 o’ clock. You can only control so much. Sometimes you have to just let sugar happen.
Outside it’s nighttime, 90 degrees, colored lights all blending together to paint the city the color of the future. All this modernity is so thick it muffles the sound of time passing. The world whirls on its axis, so shouldn’t we hear space whistling in our ears as we spin past it? Instead we’re cocooned by steel and lights, by all the navy blue hanging up there in the night sky. Thank goodness?
The future always wins in the end. But you can find the past lying around sometimes, breathing shallow, with a look on its old face that says it knows something you don’t.
Unfortunate translation decisions (Abu Dhabi, UAE; Oct 2019)
There are narrower streets in Abu Dhabi set back from the broad boulevards, streets lined with shops with Arabic names that don’t sound quite right translated into English. The store where they make keys is “Prince of Keys.” The Syrian guy with a butcher shop, the Arabic name of which he had unironically and unwittingly translated into English as “Flower of Syrian Butchery” (a more accurate and less politically astute translation would probably just be “Syrian Flower Butcher Shop”). There are typing offices and stationary stores, places that seem a little out of place in this city, in this century.
But maybe the people here, the Arabs and Asians from Sana’a or Damascus or Karachi, moving along these sidewalks beneath garish winking neon signs, feel out of place too. Modernity is like that. It weighs so much, and you carry it like a crown, or a cross, or a kalashnikov. It gives you everything and tells you everything isn’t enough. It connects people and tears them apart. It’s dark out here, but the dark is no match for the big, bright future. Thank goodness?
