The Shuttle Driver

Sameer, my old shuttle driver was chatty and friendly and became something of a friend to me. He’d take me down to the bakery, or once he stopped so I could pick some dates from the palms on the side of the road. Whenever we went to town, I’d pick his brain for a different kind of date: Arabic words. Sometimes it was because I would try to read the Arabic road signs and wanted to check my pronunciation of the letters, or sometimes I was just curious to know how to say something. His English wasn’t great, but he had enough so that I could develop an amiable relationship with him. In the morning he would have the radio on and it would be playing middle-eastern music.

“That’s from Beruit,” he’d say, or “That’s Kuwaiti” or “Who is that singer? Remember Mr. Ken? I tell you twenty time! Remember?”

“Fay- Fay-“I’d try to remember.

“Fayrouz! Mr. Ken. Why! Why you no remember? Number 1 singer in Middle East! I tell you and tell you!”

“Bad brains.” I’d say apologetically, pointing at my temple.

“She come here—two, maybe three month ago. Emirates Palace.” Then he’d say, appalled, “2-3000 dirham! One ticket to see Fayrouz. Is too much! Too too much!”

That would be somewhere around 700 to 900 American dollars. I was impressed. And here I had never even heard of her and was lousy at remembering her name. But I did like her voice and her music.

Sameer is from Palestine. He is 57, smokes, has rather course skin on his face, a crudely trimmed moustache, and kind of squinty eyes. He wears a white shirt and an Al Ghazal stripped tie, (which looks just like one I wore in the cub scouts when I was a kid (not the neckerchief). He seems to be separated from his wife (I wasn’t too clear about that, and sensed I shouldn’t really ask.) He has a sister who has visited him here, and several children. One is a son who lives in Jordan. I didn’t find out too much about the rest. He had a nephew, I think it was, who was killed by Israeli missiles not long after he had married. “Why? Why they do?” he asked.

Sameer lost his job because he says he was getting too old. Mandatory retirement here is 60 and it is rather ambiguous why they let him go three years early. “What I can do?” He said to me resigned to it. I had lots of questions and shouldn’t have asked them, really, but I was concerned for him. "What will you do? Will you go back to Lebanon? Will you go to your son in Jordan? Do you have retirement?” He didn’t know, smiled sheepishly, and I was aware that my questions may have served to increase his own anxiety. He said he would get 10,000 dirham (1000 for each year of his ten years of service with Al Ghazal). He may not have known the meaning of the word “retirement”, but workers here, in fact have no social security or retirement in general. Businesses in the UAE hire cheap laborers from other countries, pay them a straight pre-negotiated salary, give them no raises, work them for twenty years and send them packing when they are too old to work, and they do this according to UAE labor law. Unlike foreign workers in America, who can apply for citizenship and reap the benefits that go with it, workers here go back to their countries with what they have saved, a ticket home and their yearly bonuses.

And so, Sameer has been replaced by Nasser, who is a much better and safer driver, but who speaks even less English, is very quiet, and has the radio tuned to a Hip Hop station—nothing Middle Eastern at all--not even Indian music or Bollywood. I’ve wondered if he plays it because he likes it, or if he thinks I will be more comfortable with American music. He drives me to the very back door of my villa, whereas Sameer only drove me to the curb. I kind of get the feeling that Nasser expects to be treated as a servant, and with the impersonal distance that goes with it. But that’s not what I want. I came here to teach English, but I really came here to find out about people and their cultures and to make friends with people from every station in life.

I’ve tried to chat with Nasser. Perhaps he is shy, I can’t say, but I don’t think I’m going to be able to make friends with him. He is from Southern India and speaks a language I’ve never heard of. I asked him to repeat it, tried to pronounce it, butchered it badly, until he finally said, “I speak Hindi.” I’m guessing his language is close to Hindi, but he was trying to save me the trouble of butchering it. But, somehow, the way he said it brought the conversation to and abrupt end.

So I sit in the passenger seat of the shuttle, where I always sat when I drove with Sameer. I sit in silence, without worrying about getting into an accident, the gears of the van not winding up to a near explosive level as when Sameer drove, not nearly being hurtled through the window every time we approach a speed bump as I did when Sameer drove, and in silence I watch the Palm trees along the road, as I listen to Hip Hop, which I can’t stand, and I find that I am very upset.

There is a graveyard on the landscape of my heart that seems to be ever expanding and full of people who haven’t died, but have moved on to another world all the same. They are empty graves with tombstones. They are empty because there is nothing to fill them with. They have tombstones because I must remember.

The life of an ex-pat, ESL teacher is the life of a loner, but human beings require relationships. Those relationships sometimes happen before we even know it. As if invisible tendrils flow out of us all the time, without our knowledge, and catch, somewhere, with someone--and then, suddenly the someone is gone and we feel the tendrils snap, and we didn’t realize we had become so attached, but we know it now.

So it has been with me and Sameer.