What a shame – and friends keep telling me Dubai has changed. The article brought three memories to mind. It was Ramadan in Sharjah in 1992 and a couple of friends and I were playing basketball at the make-shift basket installed in the parking lot of our building. An Arab resident decides to overlook other open spaces and park his car in the space right under the basket. Tells us it’s time to go home. Even as (Indian) kids we knew we had no room to argue. However, one of the two balls we were playing with was stuck between the rim and the wall that served as the board. So, once he’d apparently left the scene, I used mine to try to dislodge the other… and failed. I still managed to catch the ball, though and it didn’t hit the car. Regardless, the driver comes back and prompts me for the ball. Naïve that I was, I thought he wanted to have a go at dislodging. “How kind”, I thought. Handed him the ball. Next thing I know, he simply hands me my ball back and struts off. I didn’t know what to make of it until I felt my basketball melting in my hands. He’d used a key to puncture the ball. In the month of Ramadan, when he was theoretically focused on cleansing his spirit, the guy decided that he should puncture the ball of a child because the child did not obey his command. My second memory is my mother’s reaction to the event. My mother is a pretty formidable person and I was terribly apprehensive about telling her that the basketball, which was the most expensive “toy” I owned, was now useless. Well, I didn’t have a choice and I explained what happened, fully expecting punishment and to be told how it was my fault. I also expected her to head to this neighbor’s place and demand an explanation. Wrong on both counts. What I saw in her eyes was fear and helplessness. She asked me to forget about it. We moved away to Dubai a couple of months after (for unrelated reasons) and my third memory is from then. Friends pooled money together to buy me a new basketball. It was an extraordinarily kind gesture and one that’ll never forget. So a bittersweet mix – Local Arabs crazed with (physical) hunger and power and n-th class citizen Indians but awesome friends. Haven’t been back in Dubai in ages – that’s fine by me. bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-23355233
Posted on: Sat, 20 Jul 2013 02:05:59 +0000
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