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.