Towers, is grand and imperial, surrounded by gardens, palm trees, and an elaborate fountain/moat assembly that would look right at home on an outlying Star Wars planet.
One Thai prostitute I spoke with in a bar said she’d stayed at the Emirates Towers four or five times but didn’t like it much. Why not? I wondered. Too business-oriented? Kind of formal, a bit stuffy? “Because every time, they come up in the night and t’row me out,” she said.
Returning to the hotel at dusk, I find dozens of the low-level South Indian workers, on their weekly half-day off, making their way toward the Towers, like peasants to the gates of the castle, dressed in their finest clothes (cowboy-type shirts buttoned to the throat), holding clunky circa-1980s cameras.
What are they doing here? I ask. What’s going on?
We are on holiday, one says.
What are their jobs? When can they go home? What will they do tonight? Go out and meet girls? Do they have girlfriends back home, wives?
Maybe someday, one guy says, smiling a smile of anticipatory domestic ecstasy, and what he means is: Sir, if you please, how can I marry when I have nothing? This is why I’m here: so someday I can have a family.
Are you going in there? I ask, meaning the hotel.
An awkward silence follows. In there? Them?
No, sir, one says. We are just wishing to take photos of ourselves in this beautiful place.
They go off. I watch them merrily photographing themselves in front of the futuristic fountain, in the groves of lush trees, photos they’ll send home to Hyderabad, Bangalore. Entering the hotel is out of the question. They know the rules.
I decide to go in but can’t locate the pedestrian entrance. The idea, I come to understand, after fifteen minutes of high-attentiveness searching, is to discourage foot traffic. Anybody who belongs in there will drive in and valet park.
Finally I locate the entrance: an unmarked, concealed, marble staircase with wide, stately steps fifty feet across. Going up, I pass a lone Indian guy hand-squeegeeing the thirty-three (I count them) steps.
How long will this take you? I ask. All afternoon?
I think so, he says sweetly.
Part of me wants to offer to help. But that would be, of course, ridiculous, melodramatic. He washes these stairs every day. It’s not my job to hand-wash stairs. It’s his job to hand-wash stairs. My job is to observe him hand-washing the stairs, then go inside the air-conditioned lobby and order a cold beer and take notes about his stair-washing so I can go home and write about it, making more for writing about it than he’ll make in many, many years of doing it.
And of course, somewhere in India is a guy who’d kill to do some stair-washing in Dubai. He hasn’t worked in three years, any chance of marriage is rapidly fading. Does this stair washer have any inclination to return to India, surrender his job to this other guy, give up his hard-won lifestyle to help this fellow human being? Who knows? If he’s like me, he probably does. But in the end, his answer, like mine, is: That would be ridiculous, melodramatic. It’s not my job to give up my job, which I worked so hard these many years to get.
Am I not me? Is he not him?
He keeps washing. I jog up the stairs to the hotel. Two smiling Nepalese throw open the huge doors, greeting me warmly, and I go inside.
GOOD-BYE, DUBAI, I’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER
Emirates Airline features unlimited free movies, music, and video games, as well as Downward-Looking and Forward-Looking live closed-circuit TV. I toggle back and forth between the Downward-Looking Camera (there are the Zagros Mountains, along the Iraq-Iran border) and Meet the Fockers. The mountains are green, rugged. The little dog is flushed down the toilet and comes out blue.
It’s a big world, and I really like it.
In all things, we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar. There is the idea of a city, and the city itself, too great to be held in the mind. And it is in this gap
One Thai prostitute I spoke with in a bar said she’d stayed at the Emirates Towers four or five times but didn’t like it much. Why not? I wondered. Too business-oriented? Kind of formal, a bit stuffy? “Because every time, they come up in the night and t’row me out,” she said.
Returning to the hotel at dusk, I find dozens of the low-level South Indian workers, on their weekly half-day off, making their way toward the Towers, like peasants to the gates of the castle, dressed in their finest clothes (cowboy-type shirts buttoned to the throat), holding clunky circa-1980s cameras.
What are they doing here? I ask. What’s going on?
We are on holiday, one says.
What are their jobs? When can they go home? What will they do tonight? Go out and meet girls? Do they have girlfriends back home, wives?
Maybe someday, one guy says, smiling a smile of anticipatory domestic ecstasy, and what he means is: Sir, if you please, how can I marry when I have nothing? This is why I’m here: so someday I can have a family.
Are you going in there? I ask, meaning the hotel.
An awkward silence follows. In there? Them?
No, sir, one says. We are just wishing to take photos of ourselves in this beautiful place.
They go off. I watch them merrily photographing themselves in front of the futuristic fountain, in the groves of lush trees, photos they’ll send home to Hyderabad, Bangalore. Entering the hotel is out of the question. They know the rules.
I decide to go in but can’t locate the pedestrian entrance. The idea, I come to understand, after fifteen minutes of high-attentiveness searching, is to discourage foot traffic. Anybody who belongs in there will drive in and valet park.
Finally I locate the entrance: an unmarked, concealed, marble staircase with wide, stately steps fifty feet across. Going up, I pass a lone Indian guy hand-squeegeeing the thirty-three (I count them) steps.
How long will this take you? I ask. All afternoon?
I think so, he says sweetly.
Part of me wants to offer to help. But that would be, of course, ridiculous, melodramatic. He washes these stairs every day. It’s not my job to hand-wash stairs. It’s his job to hand-wash stairs. My job is to observe him hand-washing the stairs, then go inside the air-conditioned lobby and order a cold beer and take notes about his stair-washing so I can go home and write about it, making more for writing about it than he’ll make in many, many years of doing it.
And of course, somewhere in India is a guy who’d kill to do some stair-washing in Dubai. He hasn’t worked in three years, any chance of marriage is rapidly fading. Does this stair washer have any inclination to return to India, surrender his job to this other guy, give up his hard-won lifestyle to help this fellow human being? Who knows? If he’s like me, he probably does. But in the end, his answer, like mine, is: That would be ridiculous, melodramatic. It’s not my job to give up my job, which I worked so hard these many years to get.
Am I not me? Is he not him?
He keeps washing. I jog up the stairs to the hotel. Two smiling Nepalese throw open the huge doors, greeting me warmly, and I go inside.
GOOD-BYE, DUBAI, I’LL LOVE YOU FOREVER
Emirates Airline features unlimited free movies, music, and video games, as well as Downward-Looking and Forward-Looking live closed-circuit TV. I toggle back and forth between the Downward-Looking Camera (there are the Zagros Mountains, along the Iraq-Iran border) and Meet the Fockers. The mountains are green, rugged. The little dog is flushed down the toilet and comes out blue.
It’s a big world, and I really like it.
In all things, we are the victims of The Misconception From Afar. There is the idea of a city, and the city itself, too great to be held in the mind. And it is in this gap
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