Notes from the Kingdom, part 1

Fragments at the Edge of the Souq

In the childhood days when all of life was a dream, before the sea had been pushed back three miles, before the highways and the bulldozers and the spiraling heights of towering buildings; in those days when the souq was not for tourists but for us; in those days when I was a child and had the knowing of a child I could see the truth of the souq, all the vaunting mythology of its acreage.

All of this knowledge was made clear to me by secret symbols scattered throughout the streets and it lived in the bone-church of my skull. But my tongue, younger than my thoughts, couldn’t articulate any of it. So I stammered and stumbled through the streets agog with its resplendent ecstasies. All I could do was record the signs in my notebook, making a project of it, telling myself that there would come a time when it would make sense. These notebooks began in a culmination of wonder that crested over me like a breaking wave; I was the froth and I was the tidal surge and across reality I would churn.

The first entry was a notation of fact: myth is happening now.

I did not yet know how to speak of the unspeakable so I wrote what it was not. It was not any one thing in particular, not in this world, anyway, but something found in the slippage of these things or the quality of an object in relation to the light around it or the hot-dust scent of an approaching shamal or the movement of bodies as they pour over the pavement. It was not conversation and it was not silence but it could sometimes arise in the strange lull when one gave way to the other.

A new epoch was dawning and there were everywhere symbols of its time.

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Early morning in the souq, when dawn sounds are strange sounds, wet with the febrile sun and coming from mistaken directions - a cough, the ringing bell of a bicycle, the honk of a distant bus. All is cacophony. The sun blazes so sheets go up over the alleyways to make flapping fabric ceilings, rooftops of crimson cotton and violet rayon and patterned silk.

The organizing effect of the souq is a thing for another thing, the rustling exchange of money, the needling pursuit of more, every surface covered in the sale. I have been here longer than most and I know these streets better than many so I know that the souq is mythological, a heat-struck realm of asphalt and coral stone and teak wood mashrabiya caught up in clouds of sighing jasmine.

At the Bab el Bahrain I linger and blow eddies across the surface of the karak in my paper cup and watch the slow spiral of taxis around the roundabout, misbaha swaying from rear-view mirrors. I ignore the drivers who get out of their taxis and gather on the blue benches to smoke cigarettes and eat the mamoul and sambusa someone’s wife sent in a dish covered with plastic wrap, and I focus on the motion of the remaining taxis, the ones drifting around the palm trees on the roundabout’s island, hoping to pick up a fare from the tourists milling under the arches. There is something about this motion, this yearning spiral along the cracked and faded asphalt that used to be sea.

Before land reclamation projects summoned earth from the waves, standing here I would have been able to watch dhows plying the green waves bearing treasures from India and Persia and Oman and the Seychelles - salukis, camels, and cats; figs and honey; medicine and the alphabet and numerals; sherbets, date syrup, boiled sweets; lamps and soap and calligraphy; ceramic tiles fired in salt; sugar, coffee, and cures for warts; even, long-ago, grizzled American geologists wearing thobes who waded to shore during low tide.

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Ahmed at the tea shop said his grandfather told him about the long-ago shore. He said if you stood at the very edge of the sea at the right time on the right day then you could feel something shift at your back, like the shadows had grown eyes.

There are ways to make the world reveal itself to you, Ahmed will say to anyone who will listen. When he tells me this, the other men in the tea shop, knees akimbo spreading great white canopies in their thobes, jeer.

But Ahmed, with his tangle of protruding teeth and sad eyes, insists it is true – or else they are calling his grandfather a liar.

Come and see, Ahmed says his grandfather would tell him when he was a boy. With shaking hands, his grandfather would grip Ahmed'’s shoulders and position him along the pavement between the old customs house and the police station and nod to a point on the horizon, telling him to use his imagination to bring back the sea. Imagine a wooden dock and the scent of marine salt and the glossy sheen of slow-rolling waves. See?

But Ahmed didn’t see. He never saw. He tells me this in the tea shop, his voice flat. He tells me I can try, though, that I can keep trying, that there are many passages but this was the one his grandfather knew, the one he knows now but never found. He gives the information to me and I write it into my notebook and tell him I will let him know what happens.

So what will happen?

At the appointed place, a KFC to my right and an electronics showroom to my left, I stand and dredge up visions of the changeful face of the sea, the salt and the sharks and the pearls – Gilgemesh’s plant of immortality stolen away by a snake – so that I can feel the fundamental change, the roil of the present moment giving way to the deepest substratum of dream logic.

I await the word of the real.

For more psychogeography from the Arabian Gulf you can read my book Drifts, which was a finalist for The Restless Books Prize for New Immigrant Writing.