Despite the impression I gave in my last post about my being a sucker for the two movers, it is misleading to think that I would be regarded derisively if I saw them again. On the contrary, they love me and expressed it with avid smiles on both their faces, especially the mutawah when my brother-in-law and I returned to the used furniture souk to hire a truck, though not necessarily theirs, as it was too small for the amount of furniture N. wanted to transport to Abu Dhabi.

They popped up shortly after we arrived. We were dickering with another Pakistani with a mobile phone who was summoning a bigger truck.

N. has a way with lacking words that I don't have in my dumb show of my stammering ESL teacher fluency in English. One must not be fluent in pidgin English but rather in haggling, getting from one hurdle to the next and knocking the opponent's price down without pause and compunction. One must be totally unscrupulous. One must only show impatience for the lack of words that cannot express the audacity of the opponent's high price. One must be aggressive if one is on the defensive and cool and calculated on the attack.

N. is a master at negotiating and haggling, though he was handicapped by my presence, the white boy. The Pakistani mover was grinning when I shook his hand and the mutawah grinned with a girlish sparkle of glee in his eyes when I shook his hand. He probably remembered that profligate gesture of generosity, plunking a dirham coin in a gumball machine at J.'s that day and getting a handfull of chocolate rabbit turds that I gave to him and he munched with relish.

N. expressed a sudden indignity when the Pakistani with the mobile asked for N.'s mobile number.

-- Why you want my mobile number?! I will not give you my mobile number. You will not tell me the price! 'Shoo hatha'! What you want it for?!

N. stood his ground as the Pakistani with the mobile phone grinned at his mobile whose buttons he was pawing with his thumb as he held it in the same hand. N. had a valid point I thought. Who knows when his truck would arrive? It was getting close to the noon prayer-call on Friday, the Muslim day of congregation, and we had no time to lose before everyone would be at the mosques.

The price he had quoted was 400 dirhams to Abu Dhabi for a big truck. N. had looked away in derisive disgust and maintained his hands on his hips.

I told N. we could go to Sanaiya, the industrial part of town, to find a truck, so we left them in the lurch and drove away. No, they did not come running after us with an offer at a lower price. They did not even sniff at N.'s initial offer of 200 dirhams.

I got the idea to call R., who knows his way around town, and get his opinion. He directed me to Buraimi, the sister city of Al Ain, which is in Oman. Before the border check point we found some trucks parked, bigger ones, where he had said. Once I had come to a stop, the car was surrounded by about a half dozen Pakistanis and Afghanis. Most of them were laborers. The driver insisted on two movers to accompany him, but N. just as insistently said he had laborers in Abu Dhabi, that he just wanted a driver and a big truck. The driver said 350 dirhams. To prove his point N. began to caress his mobile phone by lightly touching the buttons with his thumb just as the Pakistani had done. N.'s laborer did not answer his call, however. Nelson compromised by deferring to at least the offer of one laborer at 50 dirhams, to make it an even 400. (Keep in mind that's about $100 U.S. for a trip 135 km. away, from Al Ain to Abu Dhabi. It takes me half a tank in my Honda MRV for the round trip and that's about 45 dirhams.)

We told them to follow us in my MRV, but we noticed that three or four laborers got in the back of the truck. N. went over to the truck and gesticulated with his arms waving no, and only two remained in the truck with the driver. I told N. that perhaps we should have chosen which laborer we wanted. One of the Pakistanis at my window had gently poked my shoulder, smiled and pointed to himself with a nod.

The driver did not lift a finger for the lifting, leaving all the moving to the laborers, which is customary for reasons of spreading the wealth around I suppose. They did their work quickly and finished the loading in good time.

N. gave each of the laborers 20 dirhams and they protested that it wasn't enough to take a taxi from Abu Dhabi, a development I had not forseen, as if N. and I could help it whether the driver was not going to drive them back to Al Ain from Abu Dhabi! N. then gave them another five dirhams each for a taxi in Al Ain and got in the truck in a flurry of gesticulations with his arms and a strident voice of protest against their insoluble plight and looks of dumb despair and jumped into the truck. His laborer had finally called N., so he did not need them afterall. They appealed to me with looks of bewilderment, but I deferred to the master N. and calmly closed the gate on them and returned to the shelter of my flat.

Shortly later I left my flat, a bit apprehensive that they would have stormed my flat and pounded at my door. They had vanished in a matter of minutes, probably hurrying to answer the noon call to prayer.

Perturbation, ma soeur, perturbation
I cannot convey to you the perturbations one is subject to here in "these places" as a former colleague here used to refer to living in Al Ain. Unless I permit myself to be anecdotal. Of course, one cannot always be in the pink of healthy adjustment, beyond the trough following the inevitable high point of cultural adaptation following the initial culture shock we've all heard about. What one tends to forget is that there is a stage after this provisional adaptation. One never really quite accepts the way things are, and one resigns oneself rather than adapt, which has the connotation that one has survived, which one really indeed has, though it is not a survival after a struggle to live. One merely ekes out an existence. This is not really living a fulfilling life, but who does? There are no high points unless little triumphs are considered such. One lives in a hiatus, I suppose, a word that is an apt description of this place.

For instance, here is a little perturbation that has an explosive potential. Most of the drivers at a petrol station do not shut off their motors while the tank is being pumped. (There is no self-serving.) One day I turned the motor off, and after the inevitable click of the nozzle, the attendant who was manning the pumb asked me to turn on the engine because he wanted to see if my tank was full from the gauge on the dashboard. (Duh?!) They are forever topping off the tank, which would drive many a driver in the States or the UK absolutely bonkers.

One wonders constantly if things are done from utter stupidity. I am more forgiving, I say to myself, they really don't know. You are wondering, dear reader, if the petrol station blew up, would I be so forgiving? Maybe their attitude of Enshallah, God willing, has rubbed off on me. How can one have a sense of humor about it either? One mustn't get angry though.

A colleague has had two fender benders within the last two months, both of which were not his fault. In the last one a Sudanese woman on her way to school to drop off her kids rear-ended him at a roundabout where he was fully stopped, or "parked" as he said, that being the proper British way of describing it. He was in the outer lane, the slow lane, ostensibly, the one on the outside, the third one from the inside. I did not want to hasten to comment to my colleague that often times that lane is used as the fast one because a driver at high speed has less of a problem controlling the car since one comes at the roundabout tangentially rather than having to swerve while coming at the rounabout from the inner lane. (You see, I have begun to see the light of this twisted common sense that defies the laws of physics and the regime of bourgeois educated driving.) But my colleague was quite upset, and he remonstrated with the woman, and asked her if she were blind. The woman's passenger, another woman, replied that her friend, the driver, was not blind. Fortunately, no one was hurt, but the woman's car was caved in like an accordian. My colleague's was not dented much, (he has a Cherokee, which is higher off the ground) but, after the police had left, he heard a scraping noise once he drove off, something to do with the rear axle perhaps. I didn't ask him if the woman had insurance. My colleague was recounting this in the morning at work in the office. He was becoming indignant. Two other colleagues, both Arabs, were listening. One humored him by saying, "take it easy". The other said that the UAE's roads were nothing compared to the roads in Syria.

But then a car accident can happen anywhere, so it doesn't count as a perturbation exactly. Wherein lies the perturbation? It is knowing that one may perhaps have to conform to their "stupid", if not dangerous, driving habits, if one wants to survive.

The other day I went to J.'s flat to pick up the furniture he had sold to my brother-in-law and me. J. is leaving after his second stint in the UAE. He has paid off his debts and saved a little. I hired two movers, an Afghani driver and a Pakistani laborer (commonly referred to as Pathans), from the used furniture souk near Al Falah Plaza. I got them both and the truck for 70 dhs., not a bad price, I thought, considering that hiring a truck costs at least 40 dhs to go from point A to point B in Al Ain.

Their truck was one of those ubiquitous, small Nissan pickups. We had to make two trips to get all the furniture to my flat. They did the work efficiently and quickly in time for the afternoon prayer at around 4 o'clock. The Afghani, according to the Pakistani, was a mutawah, which means in common parlance that he is a strict Muslim. He gave a cold glare from his long bearded face that looked mutely fierce without the grimace when a security guard stopped him and his fellow mover from taking the second load down the elevator. We needed permission, a piece of paper signed and stamped from the office downstairs. (We had already taken the first load and come back, mind you.) Permission to remove the furniture from the building. Of course this makes sense because the furniture might be in the process of being stolen, despite J.'s presence, the owner, or former owner of said furniture. J. took it in stride however, and readily complied after a little show of consternation and questioning of the motives of the security guard who did not back off and remained adamant in his righteousness. The security guard expected this from J., his making some sort of a fuss. This is to be expected, of Arabs and anyone in this country that is not a total Casper Milktoast. They went to the office. We waited while the mutawah flashed cold stares at me, since, I suppose, prayer time was fast approaching, and the Pakistani tried to express his impatience by blowing it off as typical behavior of a misri, an Egyptian acting in typical form. I shrugged my shoulders a few times to express my non-complicity. The mutawah agreed, misri, and flicked his hand in a dismissive gesture. J. returned with the paper, stamped and signed in a matter of minutes. They continued with the move and we arrived at my flat with the second load. (This attitude towards Egyptians I may try to explain in another post on another occasion.)

I presented a 100 dirham note to the mutawah, who with an air of surprise, looked at the note held limply in his hand. Two fingers of his other hand went up in the air and he was to have me believe that we agreed that it was 70 dhs. per trip. I owed them 140 dirhams! I did not argue and gave him exactly 140 dirhams. He counted it very slowly, the six notes including three tens, two fives and the hundred, as if he had to decide that he could count that high.

My wife, who never passes up an opportunity to drive a hard bargain, told me after the Pathans had left, that I hadn't been clear when I originally negotiated with them. I hadn't really, I must admit, a sucker is born every minute I am proud to say. It was clear to them at least that I was, and a white boy sucker too.