The expat's cry

When I first moved to Dubai, I hated this dull, dusty brown city. Back in 2002, everything was miles away from anywhere else (especially the nearest supermarket), the buses never ran on time (particularly the No21 to Al Quoz) and I was forced to speak a language I studied at school but couldn’t express myself in (although Hindi is considered India’s national language, I’d grown up speaking English).
Worse, my paltry salary meant I lived in a room with plastic chairs and a cheaper-than-Ikea bed in the bowels of Bur Dubai. As for my employer at the time, the less said the better – except that the company would find a new excuse to dock my wages each month.

For someone who had just been running a healthy dotcom start-up and had moved to Dubai on a lark, the city was a far cry from the international capital it is today. It seemed cold, unwelcoming and rather disappointingly, just like a provincial Indian capital. Dubai is the cleanest suburb of Mumbai, people would joke, and I’d tell them they’d obviously never been to Mumbai and didn’t understand the easy camaraderie it engenders.
I’d tell them, instead, how much I loved super-efficient Singapore, where you can depend on the system to run to time, where the response to most situations is determined and communicated well in advance, where people aren’t quite as lackadaisical as they seem to be here.

Looking down my nose at the city of gold could never have worked, I realise now. Besides, quite obviously, my being in the wrong place at the wrong time. So when a friend dropped me off at the airport six months later as Tracy Chapman whimpered Gimme One Reason to Stay Here on the radio and my friend begged me to reconsider, I simply shrugged and took that jet plane home.
A year later, circumstances – and another job – brought me back. My feelings for the city hadn’t changed, but this time round, I wisely chose a travel job, so that I could get away every six weeks or so – particularly to countries with museums and theatres, where I would spend my entire allowance nurturing my soul.

Imagine my shock, then, on the flight back from one of these trips, almost two years to the day that I returned to the brownlands, when I was hit by a startling realisation: I was glad to be home. Dubai had suddenly become the city I wanted to return to most of all, the city where I wanted to lay my head. Suddenly I was saying “we” and “us” and “ours” instead of “they” and “theirs”.
That the shiny emirate could ever be home to me — and that I could enjoy living here, as I was beginning to do — was a radical paradigm shift, one that I wrestled with for months.

Part of it had to do with the development of Dubai at near-breakneck speed. As towers sprung up on Shaikh Zayed Road and a mass rapid transit system allowed people to take the train to work and yes, even count on bus schedules, the emirate was transformed before my very eyes. It was like that moment when you plug in your laptop again: everything is brighter, clearer, better. Suddenly everything worked.

An organic arts movement has thrown up plenty of entertainment options, and as the relentless construction work all over the city has slowed, with projects being completed and handed over, there are also many more things to do and many more places to go. For instance, I find myself in Abu Dhabi a lot more now; the emirate has morphed from a sleepy capital into a bustling arts hub in the space of a few short years.

And if the financial crisis has had one upside, it is that people have become friendlier, that chasing a fortune now seems to take second place to building relationships. I’ve made more friends of more nationalities since the crisis hit than I did during the boom years.

A close mate tells me two years seems to be the watershed moment for most people, when everything sort of magically falls into place. You’ve made friends and influenced people, you’ve got your utilities sorted out and internalised the system, you’re over that intense homesickness you feel on your first trip home and you’ve made your peace with the Emirates. If you cross the two-year mark, she says, it all comes together beautifully.