The Mirage... of Relationships
Well, I was a away for sometime to give the finishing touches to my book, THE
MIRAGE, which is based on multitude of characters found in Dubai and takes a dig into the stark realities of relationships...
The book is available on Apple iBook (US) Store or you can buy by clicking on the link...
The Sharaf Developers owned by Sheikh Abdul Sharaf rags-to-riches story...
…he was born out
of abject poverty - living in a two room shack with his father, mother, three
step mothers and fourteen siblings including ten step-brothers and sisters.
Tens of miles in either direction from whatever they called a house, was golden
brown, hot and serene desert with absolutely no vegetation and no hope
whatsoever. For the family of twenty living in complete wilderness was a matter
of daily survival. Hand-to-mouth, as a figure of speech, just didn’t apply to
the Sharaf family. More often than not, the hand would not even reach the
mouth. There were times when they had to survive on dried dates, the only food
item that could be stored for some time in such extreme climatic conditions.
Mostly they would live in the same set of ragged clothes for months as washing
was a luxury they could not afford further compounded by scarcity of water.
Most of them had only one set of clothes anyway. They lived a life oblivious to
the comforts of human inventions.
Roger Stevens, a monogamous Scot male, looking for
true love eventually finds it in Avigale, a cherubic Filipino girl or does he?
He approached the check-out counter and silently
cursed the long queue as he absent mindedly looked at the lithe hands of the
salesgirl moving from one item to another. He kept staring at them for a long
time. It seemed to him as if it were some magician’s hand doing a trick. The
movement was light & smooth as the hand picked up an item, scanned it
against the barcode reader and slid it across to the helper. The timing was
perfect, if one were to measure the time taken between any two scans.
Subconsciously his eyes rested on the hands which were pale white but smooth as
a feather. The skin was clean and free of any blemish. His eyes moved slowly up
the slender arm as it crept inside her store uniform on to her face and he
found himself looking at an angel. She was beautiful to the extent that it
hurt. His heart trot gradually changed to a stride and then abruptly to a
gallop. He feared he was about to get a heart attack but it was not so.
An investment banker party animal, Jonathan Brown from
South Africa
Within a few days, the tremors of the said crisis were felt across the
globe. This was a not a small pebble in the lake, it was as if a volcano had
erupted under it. In the era of technology & globalized economy, the spread
was fast and furious. Financial institutions & Banks crashed one after
another like a deck of cards. Every employee of any bank, right from the peon
to the Chairman, who would earlier proudly say “I am a banker”, now shied away
from any known face. Soon enough, the
impact was felt across all industries especially the real estate sector. Dubai
A hunk laborer from Pakistan
The front wall doubled as a dressing area and a make-shift kitchen. The
dressing side boasted of a mirror, broken from one corner and a crack that
zig-zagged across, in a pale green plastic frame. There was a wooden shelf
under the mirror that had a couple of filthy combs, their colours invisible
with the dirt between the teeth, and half a dozen glass bottles of varied sizes
& shapes filled with oils of myriad colours. The wall on both sides of the mirror was
lined up with multitude of clothes hung on wooden hooks. The kitchen side had a
gas stove, black with soot, along with a small red LPG cylinder. Steel utensils
adorned the aluminium rack hung precariously over the gas stove. An ancient
window air conditioner rattled loudly, trying hard to keep the air cool in the
windowless room. The room had not been painted since it was constructed six
years back, as was obvious looking at the dark cooking smudges, the oil-smears
on the walls wherever the occupants rested their oiled heads, and the numerous
telephone numbers noted on the walls all around. The room reeked a confused
smell – surely a French perfumer wouldn’t be able to unravel the blend of
spices, hair oil, cheap deodorants mixed in large volumes of human sweat &
fart.
Beena Nair, a middle-class woman from South India is
looking for the “Real” Dubai
There was this weird chemistry between Beena & Farid and whatever
was the chemical reaction, it always resulted in her hands getting soaked in
sweat. One day, she jokingly mentioned this to Sarah and regretted it the same
moment as Sarah gaped at her.
“Oh my God”, Sarah exclaimed in a hushed tone
“What?” Beena knew what was coming next
“Oh my God”, Sarah couldn’t contain herself as her whisper changed to a
subdued shriek, “You are in LOVE”
“Shhhh”, Beena shushed her
“Sorry, Sorry”, Sarah lowered her voice
“Are you stupid?” Beena said unconvincingly
“Why?” Sarah asked, “Of course, you are in love with Farid”, she continued
as a matter of fact
“Hey come on” Beena defended, “just because I sweat when I shake hands
with Farid doesn’t mean that I am in love with him. This is absolutely stupid.”
“Look at you” Sarah pointed at her face, “You ARE blushing woman. And
why would you blush if whatever I said was not true?”
“I am NOT blushing. Don’t pull a fast one on me”
“OK, I am a fool” Sarah smiled cunningly, “but why are you trying to
fool yourself”
“Sarah, I am a married woman”
Carole’s family moved to Dubai
from the war-ravaged Lebanon
A single mother from Uzbekistan
The camp was a large circular set-up lined up with small tents on the
edge of the circle. A couple of masticating camels sat hunched on the entrance
offering free rides to the tourists. The tents inside offered henna painting, Shisha,Gahwa and fresh dates. One of them even offered traditional Arabic
dresses for both men & women to wear and take photographs. A wooden
stage-board adorned the center of the circle promising some performance later
during the evening. Soon enough, a beautiful and well-endowed girl, wearing a
costume straight out of the “Arabian Nights” danced her way onto the stage.
Nurhan knew immediately that she was a compatriot. The belly dance was a real
entertainment. Nurhan and Ibrahim laughed till much later at how the girl
managed to move different parts of her body in highly inconceivable motions.
The answers lie in THE MIRAGE which, as the title
suggests, looks into each relationship from close quarters only to find the
reality looking so different from what it seem.
The book is available on Apple iBook (US) Store or you can buy by clicking on the link...
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