A dredged channel separates Mohd.'s farm from the road, and the ferry ride across takes about a minute. He has his big ferry boat up on cement rollers on the other side as I looked from the landing while I was waiting for the ferry to take me across. He had to stop work on it because he was given bad advice about the propellers. The guy assured him that a non-aerodynamically designed keel would be okay, but when the boat was put in the water it could not reverse. It took him quite a lot of effort and money to get it back on land. He has to lengthen the shaft for the two propellers and he cut and re-welded to make the keel in the back no longer square. The boat will be able to carry three vehicles. Mohd. wants to generate income this way and he does not want to always rely on the present ferry because it is small and cannot take really heavy loads. He told me about a guy who tried to take a load of marble slabs across in a pickup and the ferry either sank or capsized. The driver was still strapped in when the pickup went down. He was rescued but not without a struggle since the driver couldn't swim. The ferry boatman didn't think anything of it when he had started the short trip across because he did not see the stacks of marble slab exceed the top of the sides of the bed of the pickup.

I drove along the dirt road that winds to the left from the water. More than halfway to Mohd.'s house there are tall, thin, scrubby trees that line the road and the vegetation increases as I approached the house in my Honda MRV. The road curves abruptly right and the two rows of trees narrow and the road dips down a little and then up to his house perched on a very low grassy knoll. Mohd. was waiting inside the house. I noticed that the swimming pool was clean and full of water. Molly the sheepdog didn't even bark. He invited me to lunch in his bachelor's loft after a climb of two short flights of steps that are a little steep. It's off limits except to servants and his four children. I did not see his Filipina wife with whom he has had the four, the oldest of whom is in year two, unless she is younger than her brother A., who I know is in year one. M. is taller than A. so she could be older or A. is just small for his age. Then there is Muna and the youngest, Mershad. All of them look Filipino because of their big brown eyes. J., Mohd.'s wife, was probably in the kitchen where she had probably begun to prepare a meal for me before I was halfway there (at Kasr Al Ajaban). Mohd. tried to make Mershad greet me in Arabic but he was too scared to do so, the children of Mohd do not see many people because they have no neighbors nearby. The Masood's, a wealthy Emitrati family that has many businesses live in a large, palatial home up the beach, quite a distance. On the other side are two one story houses in which one family has moved in since I last visited Mohd.

I was served "haris" and scrambled eggs with tomatoes and onions. I ate on the carpet with a plastic table cloth spread on the floor. Mohd. and I chatted and watched National Geographic Abu Dhabi on the telly. He talked about the boat and his set back because of the bad advice given to him about the keel. Then we set off for Samha, a small town near Shelaila, and the traffic police station to get the car transferred into his name. Edwin, one of his Filipino workers, accompanied us. We went to the police station first where he withdrew the cash for the payment to me, and then we went to the traffic police for the car inspection. The MRV passed and then we went inside the office to have the car transferred into Mohd.'s name. Before we went inside Mohd. paid me the cash and he gave me 5,000 extra for the car rental. I refused at first but he insisted because I didn't have to relinquish the car so soon. I relented and accepted it. The whole process went without a hitch, even when I thought I didn't have the statement from the bank which stated that I had ownership of the car after having made all the payments on the MRV to it. Fortunately, I had kept all paperwork concerning the MRV in the glove compartment.

We went back to his house and had dinner before which we sat outside overlooking the tidal basin that faces the Arabian Gulf. His house is near the edge of a low cliff. The tide was slowly coming in in the distance, the grey muddy flats, from which an occasional shrub could be seen, laid out at the foot of the cliff. He reminisced about the 60s and 70s when the life was real hard, the grey of the sky and the sand "all mixed up," as Mohd. put it, before Sheikh Zayed had started to develop and make Abu Dhabi green by piping in water. Mohd. said his parents had no a/c and the old people used to lay in bed swathed in damp cloths to keep themselves cool. Water was stored in clay pots inside to cool it down. He talked about his family and keeping his bothers united with each other and the importance of giving. One of his brothers was similar to one of mine in that they both didn't work and were executors of the will. He advised that I try to bring the family together because that's all we have in the end besides God. During dinner he had some interesting things to say about Buddhism, since Nat. Geo. was showing a program about some Western archeologists excavating some old buildings in Tibet. He said that before Islam that the people of the Gulf were like Buddhists, even one family is Bin Buda in the Emirates.

It was getting late, and instead of staying overnight I decided to return to Al Ain, especially since, despite the ferry boatman being in bed by the time Bashiruldeen would get back, Bashiruldeen could spend the night in Al Ain and so not have to hurry back that night to Shelaila. Mohd. gave me some rice and "saloona" for the kids and I began the trip back to Al Ain with Bashiruldeen at about 9:45 p.m.

Bashiruldeen accompanied me back to Al Ain Thursday night so that he could drive the MRV back to Shelaila on Friday, as the ferry boat driver would be asleep by the time he got back. He was going to stay the night with a friend in Sanaiya in Al Ain. Mohd. told me to make sure the sixty year old was shown how to change gears. Mohd. and I had transferred the car into his name at the Samha traffic police station, which is near Shelaila. I had rented a Hertz rent-a-car, a Ford Fiesta, the day before in preparation. Mohd., as he insisted, paid for the rental, since I would need a car for a month. It would have been too hot to wait for taxis, so I agreed, but I did not expect that he would give me 5,000 in compensation for this inconvenience. He had need of a car urgently. He's got a Nissan Dakota and the old driver Bashiruldeen has a tendency to dent the Dakota whenever he drives in Abu Dhabi, which, as I have experienced, can be quite crowded with parked cars, and wending your way through them can be difficult. I tried out my limited pidgin Arabic, which as far as I surmise, is a mixture of Hindi or Hindustani and Urdu and Arabic. (I once remember telling a linguistics major that he should do his thesis or dissertation on this language. Two common words are "maloom" and "mowjoud." "Maloom" means "know" and can be used when asking a taxi driver whether he knows the location of a place, as in "mafee maloom?" which is translated as "Don't you know?" "Mowjoud" is used if you want to know whether a person is present or not, as in asking a secretary, for example, if someone is present in his office, "Latifa mowjoud?" Another common phrase is "mai ijee," which means "not here." Recently my laundry guy, Bihari, was telling me that I had already picked up my laundry, it was "mai ijee." "Ma-" is a negative particle in Arabic, like "ne" in French.) I learned that Bashiruldeen spoke Urdu and Pashto, but that he was not Afghani, but Pakistani. He had worked for a few companies and Mohd. a long time ago before he came back to Mohd., as he was of retirement age and the last company didn't want him. I left him out front of my building in Al Ain and he drove slowly away, the interior light still switched on from my having shown him where the "mulkia" was, the yellow title and registration card. I didn't bother to show him where the hand break was because Mohd. told me he abused it on his Dakota.