Bahrainis want to hear the sound of talks, not gunfire

Manama: The staccato rat-tat-tat-tat made us jump. Turn. Look.

More shooting?

In focus: Unrest in the Middle East

A mechanical digger had begun to rip up the pavement near a coffee shop where elderly Arab men sipped strong Turkish coffee and sweet mint tea poured bubbling from a height.

"Wallah," one says in a sign of relief. They go back to their newspapers and stories.

The tea is cheap at this backstreet cafe.

Some tubes on the garish red-and-green neon lights are fizzing, blinking at the Al Awol Hotel, and a street sweeper is busy picking up litter.

At a municipal building, three middle-aged, portly police officers lounge lazily on white lawns chairs.

"All quiet?" I ask, striking up a conversation.

"Yes," one says. "No more trouble. We talk now. It is good for all Bahrainis."

"Go where you want now," another tells me, laughing.

Mallorca Gifts sells watches, perfumes and mobile accessories.

"Come in. Welcome," the Indian owner says. A Keralite.

Ask a small businessman how business is and you'll always get a tale that it's never good enough. Such is the case here. No business. Nothing for the last three days since the trouble began.

"Very bad for business," he says in one breath.

"You want mobile phone?" he asks in the next. "For you, special price today."

I admire his entrepreneurial spirit, never missing the opportunity to make a dollar. I do not part with my dinars.

Further down a side street, at the Al Saeran coffee shop, a police officer plays snooker on his laptop, his mouse in one hand, a sheesha pipe in the other. Others too share sheesha and stories. I cannot understand their conversation, but they are cautious of me, a stranger in their midst who lingers too long and listens too much over tea.

The tea is also cheap here.

At Pearl Roundabout on Monday, anti-government protesters were handing out cups of "freedom tea".

"How much?" I ask, wrestling with the fils coins.

"Freedom tea? Free," the man behind the picnic table says, as others encourage me to take bread, water, fruit. I politely refuse.

I walk through the many people sitting on carpets, in tents, am offered sheesha and refuse again politely.

"Mr Mick," a man shouts. I recognise him as Ibrahim Wasa, an accountant, who had been demonstrating at the Pearl Monument since Tuesday.

We sit and begin to share stories of these past few days, two strangers linked now as friends by a common thread of events.

On Wednesday last, which feels so long ago now, shortly after I landed here, he and a friend drove me from the roundabout to my hotel so I could file web, newspaper and radio reports.

He said then that he was at the roundabout for his family, for a better life.

"That hasn't changed," he said. "But now I am here more determined than ever. Now I will not leave."

He had left on Wednesday night around midnight, hours before the encampment was besieged by police forces firing tear gas, rubber bullets and stun grenades.

"My cousin was hit in the leg by a rubber bullet," he tells me. "He still cannot walk."

We had both been at the same gatherings at Sulmaniya Medical Complex on the same days, at Dana Mall at the same protest - he as an activist, I as an observer, and at the roundabout shortly after police and security forces left on Saturday.

"It is good that we are talking now," he tells me. "I am not a brave man. Like all Bahrainis, I am a peaceful man. What has happened over these past few days has changed us all, Sunni and Shia, forever," he says.

"I am Bahraini first," he says, a tear running down his rounded grey stubbled face from tired blue eyes that have seen too much and missed too much sleep.

"We do not need all this that happened in these past few days. This is not Belfast. This is Bahrain. We need to talk, we need to sit, brother with brother. We are all Bahrainis. We must talk. We must talk for my family, my wife, my daughters. Sunni, Shia, we are all Bahrainis."