Iran woes
Iran woes
Iran, Seen from Dubai Creek
When Iran flashes across the news now, many people see only maps, missiles and red arrows. I still see water. I see Dubai Creek in the 1970s, quiet and bright, its wooden dhows crewed by Iranian sailors long before the city learnt to touch the clouds. Back then Dubai was a modest town, leaning towards the Gulf like a schoolboy at a fence, curious about the world beyond. Across that band of glittering sea lay Bandar Abbas, close enough, it seemed to me, that a stubborn man with a strong back and a sack of dates could row there if he started at dawn.
Dubai, in those days, wore a gentle Persian fragrance. Many of the abra boatmen were Iranians: lungi‑wearing men with weathered faces who guided the little ferries across the creek as if time, like water, could be crossed without hurry. In the markets, traders with Iranian roots sold American jeans and boots, saffron, dried limes and cassette tapes. They lived between shores, their lives stretched like ropes from one side of the Gulf to the other. No one needed a census to know how many of them there were; you could hear it in the greetings, smell it in the spice shops.
I was a young bank clerk then, more taken with the play of light on the creek than with geopolitics. But the British staff received The Economist and the Financial Times, and I read them in the quiet hours. Through their narrow columns I watched another world nearby begin to shake: protests in Qom and Tehran, Savak’s shadow, oil workers on strike, a bearded cleric in exile whose taped sermons travelled farther than the Shah’s voice. By 1979, the Shah had flown, and Iran called itself an Islamic Republic.
Soon the war with Iraq came, and the horizon darkened. From our side of the Gulf we heard talk of trenches and “human waves,” of boys scarcely sixteen running into gunfire with plastic keys to heaven around their necks. Chemical shells fell. The numbers of dead were so large, two million at that, they stopped being numbers. For me, Iran’s troubles were not just headlines. They were the sudden silence of a friend called Ehsan, who stopped writing one day. I still do not know what became of him.
Another storm rose in 1990, when Iraq rolled into Kuwait. One morning Dubai’s tidy roads filled with large American cars driven as if the brakes had been forgotten — Kuwaiti families and expatriates fleeing, their fear spilling over into traffic. When talk of Operation Desert Storm began and Saddam threatened chemical attacks, we turned our flats into makeshift shelters: doors and windows taped, bathtubs filled with water, first‑aid kits laid out like offerings against the unknown. Western colleagues put their families on planes. Our bank promised us a jumbo jet to Mumbai and a wad of US dollars if things went badly; beyond that we were to fend for ourselves. It was a curious comfort, knowing that at least someone had thought that far ahead.
When the fleeing Iraqis from Kuwait were bombed by superior American firepower, I watched it on CNN: a highway of burnt‑out tanks and trucks, a commentator calmly speaking of seventy thousand Iraqi soldiers killed. The pictures looked almost unreal, as if war had become a video game, but somewhere behind those figures were faces, mothers, small houses emptied forever. Somebody, somewhere, had paid a huge price.
So when I now read of strikes on Iran, of the region “on the brink” yet again, my mind does not go first to strategy or expert analysis. It goes to the abra boatmen and the Kuwaiti families arriving in their dusty Chevrolets. It goes to talk of chemicals, not as theory but as something you might one day breathe. It goes to a young Iranian friend whose name still rises in my thoughts like a bottle thrown into the sea, with no reply.
For the world, Iran is often a story of regimes, sanctions, militias and missiles. For me it is also the story of how ordinary lives in nearby places — Dubai, Kuwait, the small flats where young families taped their windows — are nudged and jolted by decisions made far away, in palaces and war rooms. It is the memory of a man crossing a quiet creek to his bank job while, just beyond the soft line of the horizon, history was already lacing up its boots.
Comments
Post a Comment