Three Dirhams to Sharjah
Three Dirhams to Sharjah
“Three Dirhams to Sharjah” is a quietly devastating personal essay set in 1970s Dubai, where a young migrant worker recounts two unsettling encounters during routine taxi rides. Told with restraint and unsentimental clarity, the piece explores the grey spaces of male intimacy, power, and silence among migrant communities, where loneliness, cultural taboo, and unspoken rules allow certain violations to pass unchallenged. It is a story about memory, obedience, and the ways boys learn to carry shame not as trauma, but as a private, unvoiced burden. I believe this piece will resonate with readers of memoir, diaspora narratives, and coming-of-age nonfiction that confronts the undercurrents of vulnerability in masculinised spaces.
After work one evening, I caught a shared taxi to Sharjah from the Deira taxi stand, just outside Deira Cinema. It was one of those old six-seaters – a long vinyl bench in the front, another stretched across the back – built more for practicality than comfort. The drivers shouted “Sharjah! Sharjah!” at the top of their lungs, their voices rising above the blare of car horns and street noise, eager to fill every seat. This was ride-sharing long before Uber turned it into an app.
The fare was three dirhams per head, usually paid in three one-dirham coins. But if you wanted the whole taxi to yourself, it would cost fifteen – an indulgence few could afford on a modest wage.
Being a small-framed youngster, I never got the prized edge of the front bench. Instead, the driver – a Pakistani man with greying hair and an air of practised calm – motioned for me to sit right next to him. This was an era before seatbelts, before air conditioning came standard. The windows were cranked down, both front and back, and the dry desert breeze did its best. The car was a late-seventies Toyota Carina, barely holding together with the stubbornness of old machines.
He pulled forward slowly, inching through the dusty lane beside the stand, still calling out “Sharjah!” to passers-by, hoping to squeeze in a few more passengers before crossing into the next emirate.
His voice stretched into a nasal chant – “Sharrjah, Sharrjah” – the syllables long and drawn out, like a call to prayer gone commercial. He wore a loose shalwar kameez, the fabric bunching around his groin whenever he shifted in his seat. I’d noticed this before. These men, in their flowing garments, seldom wore underpants. It was something you came to learn quietly, in the closeness of shared taxis and crowded spaces.
There was only one other passenger in the back – a middle-aged Indian man who stared out the window, lost in his thoughts. I was seated in front, beside the driver, the wind from the open windows roaring through the car. We hadn’t even crossed the dunes near the construction site of Al Ghurair Centre when, without warning, the driver reached over and placed his hand on my thigh. He began to rub it, slowly and deliberately.
I froze. My body went still, the sound of his voice – “Sharrrjah, Sharrrjah” – now felt distant, absurd. The wind, the heat, the sweat, the smell of his clothes – it all collapsed into that one jarring moment.
There were no words: just his hand, and the slow, unwelcome movement of fingers across my trousers.
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t know what to say. My mind didn’t race – it shut down. The air from the open windows no longer felt like wind. It felt like silence, like the space between what had just happened and what I had to do next.
The other passenger sat still in the back, unaware or pretending to be. I turned my face toward the window and inched my leg away. That was all I could manage – a slight shift, a rejection wrapped in politeness. The kind of response boys like me were trained to give: avoid confrontation, withdraw without fuss, pretend it didn’t happen.
The driver said nothing. He didn’t look at me. He just pulled his hand back and kept driving, still muttering “Sharrrjah,” though with less energy, as if the act had drained even that from him. His left hand was now on the gear shaft, the other back on the steering wheel.
We crossed the city boundary in silence.
I got off at Rolla Square in Sharjah, paid him the three Dirhams with trembling fingers, and didn’t look back. Not at him. Not at the taxi.
I never told anyone. Not for years. Back then, you didn’t. It would’ve been a joke if I had – me, a lad, sitting next to a man in a shared taxi. It would’ve been laughter. Maybe even blame.
But the memory stayed. Not as trauma, not precisely. Just as a moment. A shift. A quiet knowing that the world could change in seconds – that it didn’t always ask your permission.
Not long after that incident, on another day, I found myself once again in a shared taxi bound for Sharjah – this time in the back seat. From then on, I avoided the front seat whenever I could. And I avoided that particular driver too, spotting him easily from a distance. I could never forget his face.
That afternoon, I sat in the middle of the back seat. To my right was a young Arab lad, around my age, dressed in a spotless white dishdasha. He hadn’t said a word. We had barely acknowledged each other. The car moved through the usual dusty lanes, windows down, the driver’s voice still calling for passengers.
Then, without a word, he reached for my hand. He placed it on his groin, then covered it with his own, firm, deliberate.
I froze again—that same stunned stillness. The same silence rwas roaring louder than the wind through the open windows.
Now, decades later, I still remember those rides—the cracked vinyl seats. The shouted destinations. The smell of sun-heated metal, of sweat, of city dust kicked up by tyres older than I was. The ordinary details return first. It’s the other parts that take longer to speak of.
Back then, I didn’t have the language for it – not for the touches, nor the silences that followed. I didn’t know what it was. Was it a violation? Was it some quiet form of initiation into the unspoken rituals of male behaviour no one warned you about? It wasn’t violence, not in the physical sense. But it was something else. A claim. A trespass. And the weight of having to carry it alone.
In a world full of migrant men, loneliness hung heavy in the air, like the dust on our clothes. Everyone lived far from their families, their wives, their women. In that void, odd things began to grow. You saw things in the bachelor buildings, in the pantry corners, in the silence between two colleagues exchanging only a glance. Things no one talked about.
Even now, I don’t speak of those moments easily. But they live in the folds of memory, in that place where the past waits–not with trauma, but with a quiet, unsorted sadness-a kind of resignation. You understand later that there were others like you, that boys and young men didn’t always know how to name what happened, only how to shrink from it, how to keep moving.
I never saw that driver again. But I saw many like him. The hand might be different, the act might vary, but the silence was always the same. That was the hardest part. Not the contact itself, but the space that followed – how normal resumed, how you had to carry it like it hadn’t happened.
And maybe that’s what stayed with me most – not the fear, not even the disgust, but the quiet obedience that life expected from lads like us. The willingness to look out the window, say nothing, pay our fare, and walk away like good passengers.
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