6There are only two places in the world where the sky reaches down to touch the earth as it does in a child's painting, the middle of the sea and the middle of the desert. Light hot blue of the sky blurs away into the red of the land shimmering away into an endless mirage. Every direction you look all you can see is horizons, and suddenly you realise how small you are, when the world has the space to make everything as far as you can see and further flat and empty as the surface of the moon you know you're small.
Remember you're manners: sit down quietly, don't be rude, say 'shu kran' (thank you), and say grace. Eat with you're right hand, don't take all the cream.
A low wood table with the family kneeling down by it on colourful patterned cushions. We bow our heads while they say a quick prayer in a language we don't understand, no silence like there is after our prayers, just a smirk and a nudge from my friend to the right as her little brother dives for the bread. The bread is round and flat, long as my arm and still warm from the baker's oven. We tear it into pieces, an expert magician's motion turning a chunk of warm bread into an edible spoon. There are beans with tomato, and cream, lovely smooth cool cream sweet from honey. (Don't eat all the cream!) We scoop the food on to the bread, and eat it whole, shoving chunks the size of fists into small mouths.
My friend laughs at all the cream on my face, the adults roll their eyes. The beans are good too, chunky and tangy like Indian chutneys but with out the overpowering aftertaste. But cream! Camel milk cream, with that swirl of honey on freshly baked bread! A fist sized chunk of heaven on earth, half of it smeared on my face.
The Bedouins have lived on this land unchanged for thousands of years like the desert itself, although the sands shift and the wells dry nothing really changes. Where the land rises and the desert becomes rocky, huge tan mountains of impossible shapes reaching up to the sky, (or are they Alah's fingers reaching down?) the bones of animals ancient and modern lie scattered for anyone who cares to take them. The shells of long extinct animals tell me this place once had no shortage of water. For anyone with a keen eye who looks long enough history is here, in the empty shells, the petrified fish and wood, the desert diamonds glinting like crocodile eyes, the crusader's jewelled dagger or cross, the bones of a camel, sacrificed yesterday or decades ago it is impossible to tell.
Remember when Nadasa almost stepped on a snake? She screamed so loud they'd hear her in Bahrain! And the gate guards came running thinking someone had been murdered just to find that pathetic little coiled creature hissing from the flower patch! It was tiny, but it did look like the garden hose, and it's poisonous so she's lucky she didn't step on it really.
Remember the gecko's that used to come to our house? Those little fat yellow lizards with bulging eyes and hands that stick to the ceiling and eat mosquitos. How we used to try and catch them, but they were always too fast for clumsy child's hands, whenever we got close their tails dropped off and we got left with a little stump bleeding and wiggling like it had a life all it's own.
Remember the wild cats that used to sit on the compound walls and howl ever night? How my Mum threatened to buy a ri fle and shoot them all down? And the gate guards persuaded her not to by buying all those wire traps. We used to take the food out of them or let out the cats whenever we could, so the cats kept yowling and Mum kept ranting.
Remember how we used to catch jellyfish at the beach? Sneaking up in the water with a plastic bag or a bucket, trying not to get stung, carrying a heavy bucket back to the shore and showing off the glutinous prize to anyone who cared to look. They were small white creatures, with rounded caps and triangular tentacles jutting out at strange angles like a bad hair style. They had those strange blue markings on their caps that looked like an ornate Templar cross; remember how we used to shock our siblings by touching the jellies right in the middle of those crosses? Remember how amazed they were when we didn't get stung?
The cities sprung up in the desert where the wells were deep. Now you walk through the sprawling streets which pass like time itself. The buildings are the city's map. The beige mud-brick from before the Middle Ages, before the Crusades, small and square corners rounded by the wind. The sueks, some open some covered, in their mosaiced main square, the men shouting, buying, selling, haggling with an energy that begets belief. That back alleys stuck somewhere in between times, a strange intoxicating mix of old and new. The reflective high-rises, built to blind any who drives down the main street, taller, and shinier every year, as if tall buildings and billboards will bring the desert a sense of time. In the top floors of one of the tallest towers there is a revolving restaurant. We went up there one day, and looked down at how the city spreads outwards, back in time until it fades away into the desert and the endless sky.
The bustle of the sueks, the atmosphere, the smells, the sounds! Oh you keep you're life-less supermarkets where everything is dead under one roof and no body cares about the price of eggs, they will never replace the joy of an open street market. The jewellers used to come out of their shops for my Mum,
'Madam, Madam, you'll love this.' 'Madam, Madam, this would suit you so well.' 'Madam, Madam, only three hundred rihals!'
The men who sold the trinkets, fake antiques for westerners to give to friends, always liked me and I got free camel-bone-boxes, pestal and mortars, Arab teapots, and brass camels for smiling sweetly and talking while my Mum eyed the heavy gold jewellery a Yemen was trying to laden her with.
There were always certain people with more flair for haggling then us, indispensable people who were always permanently taken shopping by others since they meant at least a thirty percent discount everywhere. Always go at least five rihals lower, always tell them you can get it somewhere else cheaper, come back and say that the man on the other side of the suek has it for fifty rihals less, smile, he does not have a hundred dieing grandmothers to support, never ever tell the price you are willing to pay. And hours later the driver gives us a bemused look as we stagger back with more then we can carry, and more then we will ever need.
Do you ever notice the smell of a place? Something you live with all your life, something so basic and so primal that you never notice until it is gone. Then you curse yourself for never truly appreciating the small things that make a place home. The smell of heat and dust, sweat and incense. The warm wind, the singing from the mosques before prayer time, which Mum cursed because it meant the shops would close for prayers, cutting through the bustle of life like a voice from the past or a birdsong in the city. Those stupid dusty bushes outside our house, with the flowers that children plucked to suck out the nectar. Fake grass. Dusty desert weeds that suddenly burst into rainbows at the slightest sign of moisture. The rows of cords hanging down from a palm, carrying dates or pollen like beads knotted on a string. The cries of wild cats. The silent bug eating presence of a gecko in the corner of a room. Endless sunshine, boundless horizons, beautiful heat, and that feeling you get when the wind is changing.