Last December I went on a trip to Doha - the city I had spent many years of my childhood in. The journey began with embarking on a 14 hour flight from JFK to Doha on a Qatar Airways carrier. When one flies east, in the direction of the rotation of the earth, the awareness that you are losing time faster than ever is fairly palpable. You do not , for instance , carry the extension of sunlight and time unlike the journey westwards. An hour into the ride, I reached a point of altitude which gave way to the blue vacantness of space only mildly spotted by foaming white clouds underneath, a scene passive enough to prompt me to draw down the window blinds. Before I drew them though, I cast one distracting glance at the sharp wingborne engine which had garnered the strength of a billion horses to disintegrate this time-warped space I was navigating in.
I had indeed begun recently to marvel at the longstanding great engineering feats accomplished by modern aviation. The aeroplane's proficient superstructure - body, wings , engine allows one to transport body and mind to the farthest flung corners of the earth with the consolation that one can return at will. Windows were an appended luxury to view the cosmos when you were furthest from your abode, though aircrafts could in fact do better without them to maintain their high cabin pressure.
The plane buckled for a bit, and I had to shut my eyes,and clasp my tongue with my teeth as that's what I always did. The turbulence lasted in varying spurts for over an hour, but it was something I couldn't get used to.
We landed finally and the winter in Doha greeted me with a comfortable and moderate chill. The evenings spent there were cool and breezy, and even though one tended to keep the air conditioner running during the afternoons, they could be enjoyable even without it. Most importantly, during the day the sun shone with a radiance I hadn't seen for in many months. The weather in San Francisco is something you would often find me grumbling about. Inner Sunset in SF, where I live, is shrouded in the conspiracy of the sun and the fog to exercise the wildest plays of fluctuating dance rhythms that any clime beast can afford to indulge in. The wind has a severe tunnel effect, even out in the wide open - is sharp and cold - and inside my pre-war walk-up home I am treated to the music of singing radiators blowing steam into the rooms to cancel the wavering effects of the philandering weather. I'm always cold in this city, and look it , or so I have been told. In New York, real cold warrants more sophisticated heating, and the aggressive heating leaves one hot but dry, and I usually wake up with a parched throat scratching itself into a windpipe-irritation and kicking into a dehydration cycle. In northern India in winter, the day stays welcoming as long as you are out and about in the dilatory sun. When eventual fatigue kicks in, you retreat to the cold abodes, cold marbled floors that make you feel barefoot even when you are not. Houses are never fully carpeted here, and you are constantly cold feet, and there is no escape from it. Given my trip to all these places in the last month, how perfect was the weather in Doha, I mused - just so right, that it almost didnt exist as an external entity - or did so completely, so fully, that you felt you were an invisible part of it.
Growing up in the Middle East left you with very little resistance to lower temperatures. The first East Coast winter in the US was a formidable challenge for me, and reason to worry if a creature of habit could fix its thermal adaptation to suit the story. I timed a business trip to Washington DC last summer to deliberately coincide with some of the hottest days of the year. I was out reveling in the humid fierceness and hot wet air percolating my skin, accumulating the heat and humid sweat as if I were in a sauna, or as if it would remain in my body like water remains in a camel's. It was after a few months of total temperateness in San Francisco and a sudden blast of summer heat that my body remembered how much it needed the humidity.
I fully attribute these dispositions to the heat in Doha I grew up in, even though out there it was surely something to be wary of. Every year the mercury would hit 50 celsius and kill you, remind you of the last year you swore you would never step out during the day again, followed by months of ridiculously dry loo in the day and hot humid drifts at night. You'd step out for 10 minutes in the evening, walking your way from a shop to the car and be drenched in humid sweat in a matter of seconds. An air conditioner was the lifeline and bloodline for the citizens of such situations. I would always stand in front of the AC trying to dissolve my sweat in the lambast that originated from it - ah the life giving heaven. Dad happened to be a Mechanical Engineer specializing in AC design and construction, and as a child I would be peppered unsolicitingly with his meanderings on the mechanisms of the HVAC systems of the world, particularly the ones he made happen. No amount of scientific deliberation on the thermodynamics, fluid dynamics and heat transfer arithmetic, however could account for the pure unadulterated bliss of being indundated with drafts of cool moist air in the midst of the most scorching heat on these most baking parts of the planet.
And so I would not choose to go back in the summer if I could help it. After the move to America, and 7 years of forcing the body to get out of the rut of slipping back into the heat trap, it was vital agenda to stay away, in order to survive in one zone at least. The last time I circumvented it 2 years ago, returning to the desert, I was amazed at the degree to which I had become unaccustomed to it. Every sweltering day felt like physiological dysfunction. I could feel the heat generating from my very self, even amidst the force of AC units in every room at home in full blast. Vomit would make a friendly guest appearance every now and then. Was it really that bad or was my mind tricking me into a guilt-ridden roadshow of what its like to lose touch with one's most prominent pasts?
The desire to forgive and forget the relentless heat or the weather was only part of the desire to make insignificant the Doha experience. Not only was it a country I did not belong to, but one where the reigning zeitgeist did not permit any semblance of fawning or endearing. Even though expatriates from all over the world formed majority of the population, outnumbering even the locals, for the most part communities were segregated and siloed ,and if you were Indian, you felt like you were living in an offshore mini-India with a lot of extras all over the place. But parents, teachers, friends, uncles and aunties would never forget to remind you how back in India, the real world beckoned - real life, if you will - as if, you lived in a bubble of - what - artificial life? Back there kids climbed mango trees (ate them while they were at it), played cricket in lunch recess, memorized entire logarithm tables and braved mean streets on the way back from school. Frequent and long annual trips to India only partly confirmed these narratives, and not without the realization it was merely the difference of landscape, the infrastructure and the rituals that commanded them. Also, little did it occur that how recounting their own childhood experience and nostalgia was such a powerful drug for these elderly clients of immigration. But coming back to the point, if we were living this artificial life - replete with the luxury of gasoline cheaper than water, desert safaris, camel rides on remote sand dunes, and an inland sea getaway - why not get out of it sooner than later? I decided pretty early on that in my mind, I had moved on - left Doha far behind, even while I was there - never to return, to hasten my ascent into the real world, real life - which probably looked more like a Tarantino flick, maybe. So if I couldn't really physically leave it right then and there, I had at least left in my mind. Many years later, when I left India to pursue career opportunities in the US, I left Doha even further behind , even though I visited every once in a while to meet my folks who were still there. Having spent over half a decade in New York, moving to the West Coast most recently provided another opportunity to uproot myself even further. Every place I lived in for over 5 years felt home, yet it was getting increasingly difficult to keep track of where to return to when one had the time. Visiting family was a priority, so you let that drive the agenda for a while.
Due to the inability to conduct frequent enough trips back to the places I had much inhabited, I started to replace them in experience with others I did happen to visit. A recent trip to Rio de Janeiro reminded me of India. The composition of roads, the texture and general appearance of the city, barring the people, was not far from comparable; I witnessed a sudden downpour of torrential rains which could easily be equated to the Indian monsoon, and when they blocked the city's drainage and managed to get pedestrians fleeing for sidewalk cover and sent traffic into a jam, I was convinced I had a one-on-one analogy going. Even the favelas, though grossly dissimilar in social constitution resembled on the surface the villages of Delhi - in Kotla Mubarakpur, Ber Sarai, Shahpur Jat or Munirka - mom and pop shops, concrete pebble-ridden paths, rundown grocery stores and exposed electric wires studded in shanty looking narrow alleyways with the rains forming downstream paths for groups walking. A couple of my summers spent working in Germany had invoked a similar skewed comparison with Doha. Being very different however the two places were, German towns screamed of over-mechanization and an adherence to the 'artificial' - perfect houses, perfect roads and brand new streets in the wake of reconstruction and homogenization of architecture. They were strikingly uniform from the need for speed to rebuild and renovate - in one country they were revived from the tragic destruction of war, in another from the abundance of a fiscal infrastructure budget.
So what was real anyway? Crooked alleys, dust, filth, heat, struggle, sweat or a few potholes that scared you in the dark? That didn't explain New York, which felt realer than real, even if it resulted perhaps from the constant drill of contemporary propaganda and a television which never failed to remind you it represented the epitome of the concrete universe. And so, with inconsistent theories of why I situated certain places higher in the hierarchy of significance than others, the journey to Doha last december was meant to be merely routine, seasoned only with the delight of meeting loved ones.
This time had felt different though, from the very moment I had landed. There was a nip in the air that kindled a cool Arabian Rosewater-like fragrance, and the traffic was exponentially more aggressive, yet stimulating. I think for once, I decided not to dismiss my own presence there, for after all I couldn't keep coming back forever. I'd heard enough about the booming economy and the double digit GDP growth rate and the insane pace at which infrastructure overhauls had been implemented in recent years, even witnessed demonstrations of the same in an earlier visit, but was more keen and receptive this time around to bridging the gap since my departure more than a decade ago. Home still rang of comfort and lingering sweet and sappy childhood memories, and the constant assurance of the calm sun was a delight. There was a buzz in the air. The Corniche sparkled with everything but the Sheraton, which in my day, was in fact the only piece of architecture that apportioned the attention of the entire seascape. Pearl Qatar, a massive 4 million square metre rivera-style artificial island had sprung up by the West Bay Lagoon and boasted of allowing foreign nationals freehold ownership for the first time in history, along the lines of Dubai's real estate early glory story. There were to be 13 islands in the shape of a Pearl, drawing inspiration from Qatar's historic lead in the pearl trade before the Japanese took over that advantage, and the Qatari estate took to oil for sustenance for the major part. Sports stadiums, museums and tourist venues all over the land had been renovated for the Asian Games of 2006 and flaunted an even grander agenda for the games scheduled in 2011. There were talks of building one of the largest airports in the world, and one the tallest towers in the world, along the lines of Burj Khalifa. Souq Waqif , the standing market - renowned for selling traditional garments, spices, handicrafts, and souvenirs, and home to tens of restaurants serving cuisines from all over the world, as well as Shisha lounges, had been restored from over a hundred years of existence to its traditional glory. The old urban centre - the Musherib district -was undergoing redevelopment into a mixed-used district inspired by traditional Arabic & Islamic architecture -in a project named Heart of Doha. According to the mission statement of the real-estate company undertaking the project, it "aspires to regenerate the historic core of the city and to act as a stimulus for future wider city renaissance. Its ultimate objective, however, is to propose a new paradigm of architecture and planning for the cities of the Arabian Gulf." Shara Kaharaba or Electricity Street as is more colloquially known, was a much frequented outlet known for its electronics stores, south indian jewellery shops and sundry gizmos. All of it was now undergoing massive overhaul in the name of re-development.
There is nothing new about development in the Middle East or anywhere in Asia these days, surely not in a country that boasts the third largest natural gas reserves in the world or the highest per capita GDP. It would be quite an antithesis to the rhetoric in fact if the massive changes sweeping Asia so visibly weren't as prominent as they are today. The part where I stumbled on a thought train the week I was there was, I suppose, the same part I latched onto while being in awe of the engineering marvel of an aircraft. And a recognition through realization of the fact that the influences that mould your beliefs - about people, places and the places to be - the place where the action is, or onto which a certain characterization is imparted - are mostly the result of an amplification of collective voices, however uncertain, concurring and reinforcing each other - and are subject to change with tide and time.
Also the myth of eternal return as implied by Nietzsche attributes a quality of foreverness to places, people and events. Or to put it simply, since time is infinite, and the inertia of the universe is a constant - mass , thoughts , memes et all - a recurrence is guaranteed. You can freeze entire moments and run them in your memory forever, if a human being could afford to live like that. My memories of Doha had become memoirs of a past that was bathed in idyllic chronicles of a constant reality. These were immersed in a sunset of dissolution, where everything was kindled by the aura of nostalgia. What lay ahead of me at the moment now - the bridge on an unrecognizable island of nameless skyscrapers - was a brand new identity puckered by a verisimilitude that demanded recognition and attention. Old soul, new clothes, fast car? I smiled to myself at the thought. That,Ya Habibi, seemed to be the order of the day.