Richard moved to Dubai after two years in golden handcuffs as a British expat in Saudi. No women, no alcohol, no sex, but money, lots of money and almost nothing and no one to spend it on. His bank accounted inflated, his financial safety net secure, life was difficult in a protected species in a wild animal park kind of way; after all, a golden prison was still a prison. One of the few Saudi women he’d managed to have a conversation with, a periodontist, told him, “it’s freeing to know exactly what you can and cannot do, when the law is set, not loose and opaque. To know exactly, without choice or chance.” He couldn’t have disagreed more, but only shook his head and smiled politely.
So after two years of designing expat villas for oil company compounds, he took an offer from a South Korean architectural firm in Dubai, where life looked to be less than difficult. There were bars and movie theaters, and beaches and shopping malls where men and women could mingle freely without the mutawaa, the Saudi religious police, arresting unrelated men and women for socializing. There were no black-curtained booths or segregation of families from singles at the Starbucks. Women were not required to wear the abaya and boshiya that blacked out their bodies and faces from view; instead, British, Russian and Lebanese girls strutted through the malls in tight jeans or shorts with cropped belly-shirts, bare legs and exposed navels, oblivious to Islamic traditions.
The firm rented a two-bedroom apartment for him in Al Wasl, three blocks from Jumeirah Beach Park. The short commute down Sheik Zayed Road to the 9th floor office in Emirates Towers was hellish both morning and evening as expats from the UK, the US, India, Pakistan, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and Egypt jammed the roads in oversized gas-guzzling SUVs and labor buses to compete for space with seemingly endless lines of trucks. The entire city was a construction zone with the skeletons of half-finished buildings, overhead metro tracks, and red and white concrete road barriers everywhere. Road maps were useless as the course of the roads changed every few weeks to accommodate some new construction project. One bridge opened and another bridge closed, and the traffic grew even more congested. The city was chaos, with little planning and less design, but for Richard chaos equaled freedom from the regulations, routines, and prohibitions he’d quickly grown tired of in Jeddah.
He could see the gleaming skyline reflecting the hot desert sun and watch the progress as the Burj Dubai rose up in the sky taller than any building on the planet out his office window. The architecture was modern, all angles and black and silver glass, impressive but aesthetically sterile. He dreamed of designing something like a Geary, Piano, or Nouvel building, something that would stand out as an architectural gem; instead, he worked on CAD designs for labor housing, four and five story beehives crammed with studio apartments meant to house six or eight Indians or Pakistanis or Nepali laborers to a room, out in the desert, out of sight of the rising postmodern city.
He bought a champagne silver Porsche Boxster and a gold Rolex Oyster, as well as a half dozen suits from the Harvey Nichols shop in the Mall of the Emirates. He dined out five nights a week, started dating a young Lebanese woman from Beirut who worked as a secretary in the firm, and embraced the freedom not to follow fixed standards of conduct, not to lounge safely through life, the way he had in England and Saudi.
One night after drinks at Seville with a Syrian colleague, he took the escalator down to the bottom floor of Wafi Center to browse through the bank of jewelry stores located within the glass walls of the underground parking garage. He heard the squeal of tires and looked up just in time to see two black Audi A8s come crashing through the glass and slide to a stop in front of him. Two men in black hoods, Kevlar vests, black combat boots and carrying automatic weapons jumped out of each car. The man on his far left raised his rifle and fired it into the escalator. Then he yelled, “Get down! Get down!” and everyone around him quickly fell to the ground. Richard stood a moment longer, his gaze lingering briefly on the bullet holes, then thought he could see murderous intent in the eyes of the gunman, so he dropped down, too.
The sound of glass smashing and grunted orders in some Slavic language. No one dared move. Richard was afraid to look up, terrified that any motion would be his last. After what seemed a week of slow motion time, he heard car doors slam, engines race, and the squeal of tires on parking garage concrete as the two cars left the mall and raced out into the clear Dubai night. Richard finally looked up, his only thought this wouldn’t have happened to me in Saudi…
Over the next few days, he inflated the danger he’d been in to colleagues, family, and friends. Instead of hugging the ground like a coward, he’d stood up to the masked gunman, who jammed his AK-47 into Richard’s chest, presenting him with the sudden choice between life and death, before knocking him roughly to the ground. Life after that took on new purpose and meaning. His near death experience showed him life could be far more difficult for others around him. Yes, he was thankful he’d made the choice not to be gunned down, and whenever he thought of the poor bastards from the cleaning staff, crammed together eight to a room in buildings he designed, earning 150 dollars a month for 72 hour weeks of hard labor, without the chance or choice for any change, he felt lucky to be Richard and not Rajit or Randeep.