The journalists: Nick Leech, Anna Zacharias.

Read the scholar who left: Yasser Elsheshtawy.

Read the writers who left: Yasin Kakande, Andre Naffis-Sahely, Noor Naga. And that’s what’s fascinating to me, that so many of us pretend that we are worth more because we make more. Then find a bench in a park and take notes while pigeons peck bugs. Remove pidgin and low-income labor for a week. Exile the intellectuals, especially those the city imports (like me). Without pidgin-English pidgin, Arabic pidgin, so-so pidgin-the city stops. The value of pidgin, derided by purists and linguists as a nothing-language. What is the most extraordinary detail, one that goes unnoticed by most, of the city? And many of them chose not to because they didn’t want to lose their jobs, which their companies wouldn’t guarantee if they couldn’t make it back. Last year, when the flight bans went into effect across the Gulf states, and the pandemic became legitimately politicized after countries (and vaccines) were put on various lists, arranged and ranked by color and politics, I started asking people I knew, essential workers and others on the frontline (particularly delivery men, security guards, and taxi drivers) whether they were thinking of going home to see their loved ones. What is your most heartbreaking memory in this city? If there is one constant about this place, it is this, that the people on the move (here) all rely on a different set of lies to proceed with their truth(s). Do such places/cities exist? Perhaps we are high, but sometimes we need to be, in order to hope. They want places where the sweeper counts as much as the teacher. They, like me, are looking for cities that permit you to age in peace, irrespective of occupation. We, they say, are not loyal like our parents. The men and women I know, with children of their own, they trust nothing. Back when my parents were my age, I’d hear stories about people who stayed a few years, then a decade, another. What heat does to cats, people, and buildings. And because it is the place of my boyhood, so much is familiar.

Other times it is easy to lose someone like me in the city.

If people look away, I stare at or through them. Sometimes, my mood is somber because I am game for a fight. If each city is like a game of chess, the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire, even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains.Ĭan you describe the mood of Abu Dhabi as you feel/see it?

In the country mia alvar summary