essay about a city and something else.
from a writing workshop a year ago – the prompt was to write an essay about a city and include one element: a person you'd never met, but somehow encountered, indirectly, in this city. [cont]
[cont]
the organiser of the workshop asked us to send our essays to her over email and never replied. despited repeated emails and in person reminders, there wasn’t anything from her. i took that really hard, as i do with everything surrounding writing, and because it was the first long form thing i’d written in years. if someone i’d paid to care about something i’d written wouldn’t care about it, it must’ve been really bad.
so here it is. you guys can read it and if you have any theories about why i was ghosted, i’d love to hear them.
That summer, I needed a lot of things – my mother’s apology, a job, and maybe something to journal in. I would’ve settled for a pair of walking shoes.
A month before this summer, I had called my parents from another city with exciting news – the internship I’d bagged right after graduation was turning into a full time opportunity. It was an un-glamourous job and the office was all people much older than my twenty one years at the time, but it was going to be the thing I struggle through before I start doing the thing I want to do for the rest of my life. I had friends and relationships entirely my own in this city, once I’d forged from the hard work of being new. I told them about the rumour that this was the highest paying of all offers made to those who graduated from my class. They didn’t need to worry anymore, I’d done this all on my own.
They said I couldn’t take it, and I needed to come home. I hung up on them. A little later, my sister texted me. She didn’t want me thinking that they didn’t want me to be happy, but my mother was sick.
I cried all the way to the airport. When I reached home, it was dizzyingly hot. Summers at home have always been on the verge of unbearable. Like the rings of a tree, you can tell how old a shop is by how yellowed and browned the shop signs are.
My mother was up and about, just the same as when I left. I thought she was being so brave.
My parents' home had seemed to grow around me. There was no place in my old cupboard for my new clothes, and my bedroom, that I shared with my two sisters, crowded me. Most nights, I slept on the couch.
I was devastated to have to let go of the thing I believed I had earned, but glad to be here in time of need.
That golden relief was short-lived. My other sister, the one who hadn’t texted, accidentally revealed to me that my mother had been sick, a few months ago when I was in the thick of my last semester. I was not informed then because they worried that I would needlessly worry and ruin my graduation. They chose to tell me now, and chose to leave out the past tense. I couldn’t make sense of it, and at 21 I didn’t have the sense to talk about it with them. In my head I made them out to be the anchor that feared I was growing apart, and outgrowing them. The relief curdled into oppressive, combustible rage, matching the dry heat of the city.
I’d left behind friends and relationships I’d made in the coming-of-age-movie-like last of my teenage years and the beginning of my 20s, for a lie. It felt like the credits were rolling way too early, with no sequel in sight. My Kannada has just now begun to move the needle from ‘swalpa adjust madi’ (could you adjust a little - useful on the bus) and ‘kannada gothilla’(I don’t know kannada - a phrase that infuriated the locals, for good reason) and I found myself with no practical use for my ‘Intro to Kannada’ books.
The city’s mundane took on a sinister aura. The brown, gray and beige palette of an urban block like Sharjah drained me, like everytime I looked out of the window I was losing the memory of green. The endless heat was smothering me. Nothing I wore was thin and airy enough. My wardrobe was built for cozy Bangalore winters and weak summers.
To recreate the last moment I felt like my life was on track, when I held an offer letter in my hand, I started applying to all kinds of jobs. A light operator at the only Opera House in Dubai, guide at the largest indoor aquarium, a barista, a coordinator for the world’s largest scavenger hunt. The rejection emails piled on, oftentimes with no reason, just automated regret.
My friends were either studying in different countries, or working jobs they loved. I felt completely alone, and everytime I tried to talk about it, the painful lump in my throat – the one you get right before you burst into tears – returned. Everything I tried to write was angry and bitter and somehow morphed into a tirade against my family. There’s no right way to say you’re angry that your mother isn’t sick.
When I wasn’t braving the job market, I was going on long walks. Between three to four in the afternoon, when the sun felt and looked white-hot, with no destination in mind & without telling anyone, I set out.
The streets of Al Nahda aren’t designed for a leisurely stroll. They exist alongside busy roads and car parking lots to get from Point A to Point B. There’s nothing enjoyable about walking on a footpath with the stinging smell of exhaust smoke from a speeding car to keep you company.
Al Nahda, where my family and now I lived, is known for being a hanger-on to Dubai. It’s separated from the glitzy Emirate with one metal fence. The people who live here are the ones who work in Dubai but can’t afford to live there. At most times of the day, there’s bumper to bumper traffic. The buildings are so close to each other that there have been multiple instances of fires starting in one block and spreading in a line. What I want to say is that nobody dreams of living here. It didn’t feel like anything could begin here, least of all the young adulthood I’d imagined for myself. You only came here when you’d exhausted everywhere else and your rent money didn’t add up.
Armed with only kitchen slippers that were no longer in use because they were so worn out, I went thwap-thwapping on long, angry walk during which I talked to myself. These walks often ended in the nearby children’s park. It was the only green spot for miles, and the only place that felt a little like the one I had just left and was mourning.
It wasn’t remarkable - a childrens’ playground with an adjoining basketball court, surrounded by grass.
Kids were either still at school or napping after school, and the ones who were too small to go to school would not be out at that part of the day, when it seemed like you could feel every single of the 40-ish degrees burning a hole in the very center of your body
It was never a conscious decision, but having grown up here I knew that the afternoon was the peak of a summer day. In a gentrified desert, this could easily be mid 40 degrees. In fact, a common rumor is that sometimes it’s inching 50 degrees and above, but the official weather forecast wouldn’t report it because that would mean they’d have to halt work on the many construction sites around the city.
I walked in this unforgiving heat, my black hijab slipping off my head. No sunscreen or sunglasses or umbrella, I’d walk myself into a headache. I’d walk lines in the ground going round the small park. Besides me, the park was inhabited by scanty green plants that seemed like they were one hot day away from crisping in the sun, and the metal of the children’s playset that was too hot to touch, making the whole thing useless. Patches of brown peaked through the grass which was balding because of excessive trampling.
If you looked up, there were two kinds of trees – skinny nondescript trees that seemed to struggle to stand up in the heat, and majestic, towering date palms. The hotter the day, the heavier they were with fruit. They would drop the little brown dates like offerings to the ground, where the constant trampling of passersby would turn them into a mushy paste on sidewalks and in the grass, becoming a dark stain. Even after the tree was gone (the sudden uprooting of something that has taken years to grow is common in urban areas) this mark on the ground, of the fruit of the fallen tree, would mark the spot like X.
During these walks, I noticed the cards for the first time. Scattered on the ground in parking lots, stuffed behind the windshield wipers of cars, decorating sandy lots, piled in out-of-way bus stops.
They were the size of business cards, with scantily clad women posing suggestively next to a number in a big, bold font. Sometimes there would be details and action words like ‘Massages’ or ‘Call now’ but most times the only information you would get is a picture of a girl and a number.
When I spotted these, I always thought about the person whose job it was to distribute the cards. I’d be perfect for the job, if I knew where to apply. The only job prerequisite was to walk a lot, and to scatter cards as noiselessly and surreptitiously as you could.
The cards were usually cleared up by the municipal cleaners in the early hours of the morning, on a priority basis. The interior areas, those where the streetlights are dimmer or absent, and usually populated by immigrant bachelors and construction workers, are last on the list of places to be cleared of them. Here the cards accumulate on sidewalks, blemished with boot marks. They collect around manhole covers, a gaggle of girls waiting around unsuspecting corners.
I imagined the card man (because it was definitely a man) and his girls walking out of Al Nahda, to the opposite side of Dubai, maybe to somewhere around Wasl Gate. There were metro stations and trams that took you there, where Al Nahda had one main bus stop. It had residential complexes with a community center and a green area inside these compounds, so the grass here wasn’t beaten down to a hairless carpet. Al Wasl was an up-and-coming area, so it was important. It wasn’t completely urbanised and annoying. There were sandy patches of undeveloped land that were a reminder of the desert over which this whole city was built. These sandy areas are so vast and abandoned that a friend spotted a man defecating in the middle of one, then getting up and walking away with seemingly no care in the world. The kind of behavior that would never be possible in a place as crowded as Al Nahda.
My walks continued, amongst the scattered cards and the scant grass, longer and longer till I came home smelling like the muggy heat and the sun. My muscles would feel like liquid rubber, too hot and easily foldable. I returned only to collapse, everything feeling too much, my thoughts barely coherent and light like wisps in my head. I could finally stop thinking about everything that I was thinking about that summer.
I was giving myself heat exhaustion. It wasn’t my intention to, but I also didn’t try to stop it. I went out at the hottest time of the day. I rarely carried a bottle of water or any money to buy one. I never used sunscreen.
“Every photograph that's taken here is from the summer, some guy won Olympic gold eight years ago, a distance runner / And that makes a lot of sense, this place is such great motivation / For anyone trying to move the fuck away from hibernation”
This folk-pop-sy composition is by an American musician about rainy New England, a city on the opposite of the spectrum of Sharjah; it seems homes you’re trying to get away from are a worldwide, weatherproof part of growing up.
It’s hard to maintain a state of hurt for long and healing often happens without your permission. The desert’s punishing summer gave way to a balm like winter, and walks were enjoyable at all times of the day. The CAA was passed a few months later, and Bangalore erupted in sectarianism protests. My parents felt vindicated by this, as if what transpired was parental premonition, and they had nothing to be sorry for. I got a job and started to make my own money, which always opens up doors in a city like Dubai. I went on walks in the evening now, when the park was full of screaming, tripping children. The part where the grassy area met the playground was bordered by a ledge, which often tripped the smallest children.
That was my new route. I enjoyed picking up the fallen and wailing kids who never said thank you, and helping over other little ones who stood staring at the ledge, not sure of what to do.
The cards still show up, with different women every season. Newspaper reports say these numbers belong to organised gangs. A soft-spoken lady will answer your call, and she'll direct you to an apartment where men with knives will hold them against your throat until you give them what they want.