Arabia by Jonathan Raban

Author:Jonathan Raban [Jonathan Raban]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780601496
Publisher: Eland Publishing
Published: 2018-08-10T16:00:00+00:00

In the evenings I took long walks along the wharves, where the dhow cargoes were laid out in heaps and bales. The laden dhows, set to sail at first light, looked like floating general stores, festooned with ironmongery and fancy goods. I tried to make an inventory of what I could see on one dhow alone: six Korean refrigerators, four Japanese washing machines, three red Suzuki motorbikes, nine bicycles, five tricycles, a green garden wheelbarrow, sacks of steel wire, some mesh netting (for making fish traps, presumably), a Buick, two dozen Taiwanese motor tyres and – Britain’s only contribution to this particular bit of international trade – a case of Tempest hurricane lamps. There was much more that I couldn’t see or name. The ship’s lifeboats were overflowing cornucopias of interesting things in sacks; more stuff was lashed to the rigging. All down the wharf, other dhows were similarly weighed down.

Just about everything that comes into the Gulf from the Indian Ocean gets to Dubai, where it is parcelled out and shipped north to Abu Dhabi, Qatar, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. The oil boom has simply intensified Dubai’s traditional buzz of water traffic. The tankers and container-ships dock at Port Rashid, at the mouth of the Creek; the dhow trade, based on the Creek itself, is an intricate warren of relatively small-time private enterprise. Every souk on the Gulf depends on it. Independent merchants working out of stalls and cubbyholes do most of their buying and selling through it. If you want a washing machine, a set of spare tyres, a tricycle or a wheelbarrow, it will most probably arrive by dhow.

The dhows made up a small, self-sufficient, waterborne city in themselves – a fine place to wander and pay calls. Invitations were easily come by: I only had to pause in my walk, light my pipe, and look hopefully in over the sides of boats whose crews were crouched companionably round a paraffin stove. Hens squawked in the scuppers, and goats were tethered to the mast. There was always coffee going, and a turn on the hookah, and that wordless amity of smiles and shrugs. A portable Japanese television cast a cold blue flicker over the circle where we squatted. An advertisement for soap powder came up, starring two Egyptian actresses going through exactly the same routine that I’d seen a hundred times before in England. One was in despair over a pile of underclothes which were muddy, bloody, streaked with grease and marked with what are known in the advertising business as ‘understains’. The other housewife, smart as paint in her check shirtwaister, introduced her friend to the remarkable ‘biological power’ of her brand of powder. The vinyl kitchen in which they stood was pure Surrey, so was their pealing suburban brightness. The wording of the advertisement was Arabic, but its grammar was totally English. The crew of the dhow watched it with rapt attention. They showed every sign of being thoroughly impressed when the underclothes were finally taken from the spin-dryer and shown to be immaculately white.

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