alternative use of garments

The Iraqi journalist attending the Bush press conference in Baghdad demonstrated an alternative but effective use of footwear. Saudi men wear sandals most of the time, which may not perform as well as missiles aimed at detested foreign dignitaries. But they have their own imaginative ideas about unconventional use of garments, as reported in two news items in The Arab News of 1 December, 2008.

In one incident, a prisoner sentenced to jail for drug trafficking hanged himself from the prison window while the guards and other inmates were busy praying. The man used his ‘ghutra’, the head scarf worn by Saudi men, to end his life.

In the other, more bizarre incident, a Saudi patient in his 30s went to see a doctor at a hospital. The doctor, a 56-year-old Egyptian national, refused to see him because he did not have referral papers from the hospital administration. Such impertinence infuriated the Saudi. So he locked the door of the room and began to beat the physician with his ‘igal’, the headband worn by Saudi men. Hospital staff and other patients who heard the screams of the doctor and his nurse broke the door open to save the poor doctor. The irate patient was later arrested by police. Good thing he wasn't wearing a belt.

street with no name

I have rented a house. Unfortunately, it does not have an address. If you want to call me I can give you my phone number, if you want to send an email, I'll give you my email address, but if you want to visit me at my house or send me a snail mail, sorry, I can't give you an address.

I scanned the form lease deed in Arabic that I had signed but found nothing that resembles an address. There is no number on the building and no sign on the road revealing its name. I hear that this is common in Saudi Arabia. Most people rent post boxes for their mail. People give directions to their homes from well known landmarks. Turn left after the mosque and then right at the third intersection and then left after the pharmacy and my house is the fifth one on the right, or something like that.

This is a big inconvenience. I am buying furniture at stores and cannot give an address for delivery. Instead, I write down the nearest landmark and my mobile phone number. When the van arrives at the landmark, the driver calls me and I have to direct him to my home, which is not an easy task when do not share a common language.

I thought maps might help. In Japan, every house has an address, but since the roads are not always neatly arranged, finding an address can be difficult. So they rely a lot on well prepared detailed maps. I prepared a map of the area surrounding my house with the landmarks marked. But the delivery people, it seems, are not accustomed to reading maps.

For a telephone connection, I was told I need to give the telephone company my water connection number. I was confused because I could not see any relation between telecommunications and water supply. Now I know that the water meter number, which is prominently displayed on the water meter and visible from the road, serves as a surrogate address. If you can get to the general location of a house, you can track it down by looking at the water meters.

So if you want to visit me at my place, let me know and I'll give you my water meter number.

mind your language

The official medium of instruction at our university is Arabic, though the use of English is encouraged. I have no figures, but my guess is around half the faculty are Saudis. Among the non-Saudis, most are Egyptians and there are some Syrians as well. We belong to a tiny minority who are linguistically handicapped. We use English in the class room. The students endure us with blank faces (well, some of them, if not most). A senior South Asian colleague advised me not to take any exams in the graduate course that I have been assigned, because he’s afraid the entire class would fail. He suggested awarding grades based on assignments instead.

But assignments they submit are often little more than a collage of cut-and-pasted documents. Another colleague told me that he once found a term paper liberally sprinkled with chunks of German passages. The student didn’t even notice the language of the document he was copying from.

Yet another colleague once tested the students by switching to his native tongue (not English or Arabic) in the middle of a lecture. There was no reaction among the students.

Saudi Arabia is probably the only place in the world where university professors deliver three-hour lectures to classrooms packed with attentive furniture. Education here is not coeducational, and within the same university, there are separate facilities for girl students. If the instructor is male, the girl students sit behind a screen, out of his sight. The girls are smart enough and often quietly slip out of class instead of sitting through three hours of gibberish

early bird's driver's license

There is almost no public transport in Dammam-Khobar. If you live in the middle of the city, you may easily find taxis to move around. But if you live in the outskirts, like I do, you cannot do without a car. And to drive a car, you need of course a Saudi driver's license. So, early this morning I turned up at the driving school in Khobar. Judging from the crowd there, it seemed half of Khobar was also there, and the other half was probably on its way, given that it was not yet 7 am.

I was in a state of confusion. I don't speak Arabic, and the few fellow South Asians I found within talking distance didn't speak either English or my language. So I headed for the door of the room from where I had collected the application form a few days back. A WASP was standing there with his snout almost pressed against the door to ensure that he would be the first to enter and the first to be served once it opened. I asked him if I was supposed to handover my filled in form in that room. He tilted his snout a few degrees upwards and asked whether I had gone through the driving test. I didn't think it mattered, but anyway, I said I hadn't. He said the room full of people had passed the test and had come to get their licenses and that somebody would soon hand out a token to all those seated. If I couldn't find myself a seat I need not bother waiting. I didn't get my answer, but thanked him anyway.

When the door opened, the WASP was indeed the first to get in and I followed soon afterwards. I took an instant eye test and was dispatched to the driving school for the test. Since I had a license from my (South Asian) country I am required to pass a parallel parking and a computerized road signs test. If you have a European or US license, you don't need that.

At the school I was told to come back tomorrow at 6 am for the test. Sigh! I have to get up at the crack of dawn once again!

the sojourn begins

“In the desert you can’t remember your name
‘Cause there ain’t no one to give you no pain”—America.

To get a work visa to the Holy Land of Saudi Arabia, it’s almost like you have to take a fulltime job at the embassy. For two weeks I visited the embassy almost everyday. That’s in addition to the intermittent visits I had paid earlier. I was thinking of pitching a tent outside the embassy gates. Only the sight of the Saudi guards who are prone to gurgling incomprehensible expletives (I guess) deterred me from doing so.

It was a job with no payments, though. Instead, I had to pay the Saudi government loads of my hard-earned cash for visa processing, certificate attestation, internet registration and what not; not to speak of the enormous amount I had to dispense with for medical tests, Arabic translations, attestation, police clearance, notarization. I had to travel to my school town for attestation of certificates and send copies of my University of Tokyo certificates to the Land of the Rising Costs for verification, with due payment, of course, amounting to a hefty share of my monthly paycheck. And don’t forget the fuel cost for the daily commute to the embassy. I haven’t converted my car to CNG yet.

When they finally handed me the sticker affixed to my passport, I was euphoric to the point of losing my senses. Once out of the embassy compound I regained my composure and inspected the visa sticker more carefully, and noticed that the inept clerks had misspelt my name. Worried that this might lead to problems upon arrival at the Kingdom, I hurried back inside to voice my concerns. They assured me that it would be no problem because the guys manning the immigration gates at the Saudi airport are equallyl callous and would not notice the difference.

Fast forward to Dammam Airport. The guy at the immigration gate was visibly too bored to care if George Bush’s name were printed on my visa. He took my photograph and finger prints, stamped my passport, and yawned 18 times during the process. The customs guy was more alert. He opened my bag to inspect my data CDs to see if I was carrying anything that could lead Saudi youth morally astray—like video clips of raunchy women flashing their bare elbows. At the gate of the airport I was greeted by a horde of shady taxi drivers with their flowing white robes and red headdresses with black bands. Their cabs looked totally out of sync. A pack of camels would have appeared more natural. One of the cabbies dropped me at my hotel at Khobar city. Inside my room I flipped on the TV to sample the fare the channels were offering. I expected to see bearded men and women in black dispensing moral sermons on every channel. Instead, I saw a European movie showing three full human figures, without a shred of clothing on their bodies, involved in hot, steamy action in bed. That’s something I had never seen on satellite channels in our land of lesser Muslims. I turned off the TV before the smoke-detector got activated.

The next morning found me at the Hospital for another round of medical tests. The guy who processed my papers copied my name from the visa sticker, but decided to mutate it even further. I spent the rest of the day at the hospital responding to calls for somebody who was not really me.