A Nomad Among the Bedouins

The traditional markets in Oman are a noisy affair. One such market I came across in Salala was an animal trading market. The Bedouins from near and far had come with their sheep, goats, cows, camels, and other four legged creatures. Sweating profusely, the buyers and sellers yelled their offers, heaped each other’s offers with scorn - only for new buyers and new sellers to step in. Business was brisk. The raw energy and passion flowed through the sleeves of buyers and sellers. Human that I am, even I got caught in the frenzy and heat of the moment and the next thing I know I nearly bought myself a brand new camel.

There were more interesting events to occur. I was to venture into a desert – a desert which I came to know about from Wilfred Thesiger’s writings some years back. Thesiger was the first European explorer to have crossed and mapped the entirety of the Empty Quarter (or Ru’b al-khali) about 60 years ago. Empty Quarter is the world’s most forbidding desert and stretches from Oman into Saudi Arabia. This red sand-duned landscape covers an area more than the combined land mass of the Netherlands, Belgium and France. Rumor has it that the western backed Saudi monarchy once in a while quietly drops a dissident in the middle of it via a helicopter. It is a slow and painful death, as the condemned man spends a few days walking aimlessly in sand and battling intense heat and thirst in a landscape devoid of water and shade.

My goal was quite modest compared to Thesiger’s - I really just wanted to go far enough in the desert to get a feel of it, without causing too much stress to myself or, god forbid, to my loved ones. And so under the shade of a moonlit night and after an arduous and ball crushing journey over camel back through a desolated landscape, I arrived at a bedu tent.

Oh, who am I kidding. In reality, I rented a 4x4 jeep from Hertz which came with a driver and we began our long rollercoaster drive over steep sand dunes and valleys. These dunes in the heart of desert can go as high as 1000 feet. But here on the fringes, they are no more than a 100 feet high. During the course of that drive, we would often come across a steep slope of a dune and I would say to myself ‘surely driver wouldn’t take the jeep over it!’...but he managed to prove me wrong every single time. All that up and down driving over dunes for a few hours is enough to make your head spin and give you a feeling that you are about to vomit. To driver’s credit, only God knows how he kept his bearings straight without the aid of a map or compass in that uniformly desolate desert with no visible markers to guide.

A word about my driver. He was a bit incredulous about me having a desire to spend time with bedus. More precisely, he could completely understand why a blonde European or an American would want to see a few ‘broken buildings’ (ancient ruins) or ‘wretched people’ (bedus). But he could not understand why a Paki would get the same itch. I suppose years of colonization has left an indelible mark on our psyche whereby we don’t even expect ourselves to indulge beyond certain capacities…kind of like a ghetto mindset. A blonde German man conquering K-2 for the 5th time does not make news in Pakistan. But a Pakistani conquering it for the first time does. We colonized people do not have the psyche to go out and explore. If we did, perhaps we would have been the colonizers. Given leisure time, we rather sit down and watch a good movie over nihari (in the case of Pakistanis) or bhaji (in the case of Indians), than go out and explore the wilderness.

And then on the moonlit landscape of the desert, a structure appeared. It was a cluster of Bedouin huts.

Huts were made of the most basic thatched structure. Inside the hut which I was to share with a few men, there was only one piece of any value – a huge wooden chest. From its worn looks, it appeared to be a family heirloom that was probably passed on from generation to generation. Huts in bedu life are for temporary living. Not much of any value is accumulated, except for pots and some thin carpets that are spread out on the sand inside the hut.

Besides the immense hospitality and graciousness of those bedus, I came to admire their women (surprise surprise!) in the 3 days that I spent with them. I found bedu women to be much more open in their interactions than their gender-mates living in the cities. There was no inhibition and seclusion of women that you see in the cities. Here the women were right in front of you, talked to you with their piercing eyes focused on you from behind their facial masks. They were loud in their conversations, merciless in beating their children, and every bit as rugged as their men. It was also pretty common for them to shake hands with other men. The hand that I shook was a hand hardened by years of toiling in the desert, yet the style of offering handshake was every bit as womanly as that of a girl in Boston. Married women put a beautiful colored mask on their faces that only covered their nose and lips. Thankfully, the unmarried girls did not wear any facial mask. And this last cultural practice would play a key role in my thoughts and day dreams over the next few days.

Safeena was the kohl-eyed daughter of Abu Muaz. The moment I laid eyes on her in the early hours of one morning, I felt as if rain had begun to pour down on the dry and parched land of my heart. Kohl was something both men and women used, apparently for its cooling effect on eyes in the desert sun. However, men used a lighter shade of it than women. That morning, Safeena and her father began to prepare a camel for me to ride on and to explore the surrounding desert. The preparations included putting multiple layers of thin cushions on camel’s back and tying it all up. Sitting on the bare and bony camel back for a long period of time is very painful, and not advisable to single men like myself who are planning to father children at some point in future. With her father holding the reins, Safeena managed to bring the camel down in a sitting position using a combination of verbal threats and physical cues. It is important to make the camel sit before one can ride it, otherwise it is too high and is prone to walk while you are still trying to sit.

I tried to give out an impression that riding camel came as natural to me as morning shave – hoping that my camel riding skills would sweep Safeena off her feet. Camels have a strange way of standing up. They do so in stages. First they raise their front legs half way, then their hind legs, and then stretch their front legs fully. For a person who has never ridden a camel, this could be a rocky experience. And so if it weren’t for Abu Muaz’s timely intervention, I was well on my way to slip down from camel’s back and land on my butt in the clear line of sight of Safeena. A cryptic word of wisdom from bedu was loosely translated by my driver as ‘If you fall from donkey’s back, it could hit you with its legs. A camel does not do that’. Very comforting. Really. As I explored the desert on camel that morning, I learned that there was a reason why camel was called the ’plane of the desert’. When you are standing on the ground and looking at the camel, it does not look that high. But when you sit on it, you realize that you are very high and you can look far in the distance over the top of smaller sand dunes. It’s a good thing that there is sand all around, a fall could seriously hurt a person’s butt.

Even at the fringes of Empty Quarter, days are numbingly hot. Thirst is never far from your mind. Like a toothache, you are always aware of its presence. Its intensity is compounded by the fact that the drinking water in desert is brackish, warm, and offered in small quantities. Between noon and mid afternoon it is miserably hot. However, things begin to take a refreshing turn around sunset. With nights fall, a city dweller like myself is awestruck by the millions of stars that make their grand appearance in the sky. Their sheer number fills every inch of the sky. It is a mesmerizing sight.

My last night, the whole family and I sat in a circle around a big pot with a thick portion of lamb in the middle and rice all around it. As camp-fire flickered near by, everyone got down to eating. Meat was a bit tough to chew, but that is how bedus make it. Fuel is too precious to be consumed in cooking meat to perfection. With stars appearing so close in the clear and crisp air of the desert night, surrounded by people who Thesiger called ’the perfect specimen of human beings’, I felt the peace you feel when you come out of a crowded and noisy subway station. Time held little value in that timeless expanse. There was a stillness, a quietness, and a calm in the dark of the desert – something one rarely experiences in the corporate driven life of a world that seemed so far away at that moment .

I looked across and saw Safeena busy with her dinner. The shadowy light of camp fire had accentuated the softness of her face. While the men around me chewed and talked their way through the dinner, I saw myself talking to the kohl eyed Safeena while sitting atop a sand dune and looking at the stars. I would tell her in whispers that I was willing to be the camel of her life, if she could agree to be the kohl of my eyes. And then Abu Muaz’s youngest toddler’s shriek brought me back to reality...a reality that was as stark as that desert’s landscape. In that reality, I found myself to be a man who was softened by a life of cushiony couches, comfortable shoes, soft bed, purified water and air conditioned existence. A life where the perfection of meal was more important than the saving of the fuel. A life where planning for life often overwhelmed living the life. A life time of such existence had rendered me too soft and too unfit for that desert bred damsel. She was a girl to be admired and wished for, but from a distance...much like her people, who I could occasionally visit to break free from the monotony of my life, but could not be them.

Unlike the hero in Paulo Coelho’s Alchemist who went into the desert and found his destiny, I perhaps had many more places to go ...