A Boy in the Sand, Dubai, 1970s
A Boy in the Sand, Dubai, 1970s
Hestood in the baked earth of a dusty lot, shirtless, hands pressed against his hips in a gesture both defiant and curious — as if challenging the silent universe around him. Behind him stretched a barren landscape; the sand matched the tone of the afternoon sky, scattered mounds of earth like the sighs of a restless city not yet awake.
He had just stepped off a Boeing 747, his first journey outside the world he knew. The heat struck him immediately — dry, sharp, inescapable. Around him, men in kanduras and headgear moved gracefully, figures both alien and regal in the haze. The air carried their stories: of trade, of ancient creeks turned into engineered canals, and of modernity clawing its way through sand and tradition.
The boy was both spectator and participant, magnetic in his stillness. Around him, Dubai was beginning to transform. Crude concrete skeletons of buildings rose from the dunes, port and roads in progress. He had heard of Port Rashid, inaugurated just a few years earlier, and of the gleaming World Trade Centre that would be completed in a few years.
Here, within this liminal moment, he felt both anchored and untethered — like the city itself.
Camels still roamed near the nascent highways, unaware of the concrete arteries being poured to replace sand tracks. One could see camels crossing roads under construction, a faint echo of an earlier world colliding with the next. The boy could almost hear the rumble of change beneath both the hoof and the engine.
The air smelled of dust, of diesel, of promise. There was a mosque here, a slender outcrop of faith, and perhaps a small cluster of low-rise structures—remnants of what Dubai had been before oil reshaped its destiny. Soon, the green would arrive — parks like Mushrif and Safa began to sprout in the mid-1970s, fed by sewage-treated water — transforming sand into vibrant gardens.
In the boy’s eyes were embers of wonder. He, behind that image, viewed progress as both a companion and a stranger. He felt the city’s pulse, slow yet insistent: the rhythm of dredging the creek, laying down roads, welding the city into being.
Perhaps he arrived alone, or perhaps with family, destined to plant seeds of ambition in this arid beginning. Yet that moment — the boy in the dust, still, sun-kissed, alert — would forever mark him: a living emblem of Dubai’s metamorphosis, traced in human form. In the space between past and future, he was both witness and herald, a slender testament to what would come.
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