It was the hottest month of the year, the time when tires explode in a mix of indiscipline, text messaging, speed and heat, and Ali was throwing up all over the highway between Saudi Arabia and the Emirates as he arrived at his first accident. There wasn’t much left except for the remains of a car driven into a truck, and bits of passengers strewn around.
Ali takes a long draw at his buri, the long, thin bedouin pipe, on a little finger of land jutting out into the sea. Here in Ras ar Ruways – the ‘ras’ means head and ‘ruways’ little – the talk used to always be about escaping to the big lights of the city, far away from a future caught between fishing and harvesting dates. And, when Ali Musabba Jumma al Saadi was 17, that city was Abu Dhabi. “We didn’t care how much salary we’d get. We just wanted to be there.” And so he went, along with a generation of others, staying on across an easy border where all you have to do is flash your ID card, working for decades, returning home to a fishing village with Lexus’s.
But it was tough work. After seven years in the army he switched to the Abu Dhabi police rescue unit and now does 24-hour standby duty for four continuous days at a stretch. There might be no emergencies to attend to, or many. But experience tells you that the summer is always worst. And you have to be ready to jump into action at a moment’s notice. So after each 4-day shift he gets 8 days to recover, when he cruises across countries to the village by the sea, whipping out his buri, parking his Lexus in the shade of the wall, playing with his youngest daughter Dabia (named after a gazaala, or gazelle), walking over to the corner shop for a chat with his friend Hussein.
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