169 | The Gas Stations Of Arabia
Al Wusta, Oman
Oman is dramatic. It is big and empty and remote. I cycle towards the northern Al-Hajar Mountains that block my route to Muscat. Last week, I crossed and left behind the southeastern Dhofar Mountains. Between these two ranges is a gravel desert plain covering central Oman and it’s upon this that I write today. In this desert plain, petrol stations are my oases.
The headwinds in Oman have been mean and I have felt like a weather vane on the top of a rural barn with my nose always pointing into the gale. When the gale works against me, my average pace drops to ten and sometimes eight miles per hour, even with maximum effort. When exhausted, I dismount and shout un-writable things at the wind, only for those things to flap like a Safeway bag and get lost in the desert. Shouting alleviates some of the fury which boils in me and it bruises my throat.
In the desert, I often spot other cyclists moving cheerily towards me. As I get closer, they become camels plodding pendulously. The camels wander in ignorance of the white 4x4s, always Chrisler and Lexus, that pace at 180 kilometres per hour along the single-lane desert roads and keep me pinned to the curb. When me and the camels are alone, I stop. We look at each other as one alien greets another: them at me under long eyelashes, having never seen a cyclist, and I at them as if meeting an Eopie on Tatooine. My going-again spooks them, and they fright off, running, picking up both left hoofs, then both right hoofs, floating above the sand.
Every one hundred kilometres or so, or once a day, I come across a service station and a row of shops. Service stations are worth visiting precisely because they are not. They are the antithesis of destinations, a place of transient migration, yet they welcome every strata of society. In service stations, I have met hundreds of people: Omani businessmen, ten-year-old drivers, Saudi princes, tyre repairmen, and air conditioning engineers. Pakistanis, Bengalis, Iranians, Omanis, and Saudis have hosted me.
After a long headwind-burdened day, I wheel into the shade of the glowing red forecourt awning with its acropolis-like pillars. As with the dozens of other gas stations I have visited, on one side, in a white windowless building with a minuet, is the mosque, and, on my side, a promenade of shops.
There is Al Jahuri, a tyre mechanic, with its busy Pakistani men manoeuvring a heavy mains drill at the end of a large hose, removing the bolts on the wheels of a rusty HGV, each bolt on the ratchet da-dat-da-dat-da-dat. Next to it is a boarded-over general commercial — Hamud Super Shop. These are often open but empty of customers, and the shopkeeper is always sitting outside on WhatsApp. At my end and beside my green steel framed bicycle is Farsan Al Wusta restaurant under a neat white back-lit sign.
Everyone in this Pakistani restaurant is watching me. When I walk inside, I say As-Salaam-Alaikum and I am wholeheartedly welcomed. I sit and have milk tea and even though I ask for only a little (“qalil”) sugar it comes sweet like Haribo. Daal and parotta are passed through from a hatch in the corner; most of the room is a carpet with six cushions, where guests lounge and eat with their right hand. Unusually, this restaurant has a couple of black-topped tables and white plastic patio chairs, presumably for Westerners unaccustomed to sitting on the floor. I sit at a table. A short Bangladeshi man with a biker moustache and an immaculate royal blue robe brings me chai without making eye contact and asks for my WhatsApp number. I use up the last of my Arabic and say Shukran.
It’s in restaurants like Farsan’s, eating daal or fried chicken and rice, that I’ve been asked by Afghans about my perspective on the Taliban, by Iranians my perspective on Hamas, and been served by Yemenis hours after Britain and the US bombed their country. “The Taliban are like a snake,” I am told by two Afghan brothers, “if you step on it, it will bite you. But if you leave it alone, it’s just fine.” By these and countless other conversations, it’s clear that we read different stories in our national press; we don’t just hold different angles but different realities.
But I have never felt uncomfortable. There is a mutual disillusion of politicians, and the disillusion has no borders. Around acrylic tables, or sitting on carpets, we are instantly friends. An Omani is as frustrated as a Brit as is a Bengali. With chai and bowls of dates, spitting date seeds into a soft yellow paper cup, dragging over another chair for another nationality — scraping the floor and nobody ever reacting — these are all profoundly simple and human encounters. Ordinary, like a petrol station.
I love petrol stations because a Saudi Prince and a Pakistani labourer from the adjacent construction site refill from the same pump. They use the same filthy toilet without a lock where you should always tuck in your shoelaces. The tidal flow of people at a service station makes them forever new, forever vibrant. The noises are the noises of life; horns beep while Omanis order chai from their car window, and there is the slapping of parotta bread as they are moulded like a chappati. Trucks reverse and tell all about it.
At this service station I slept in the white-walled mosque, on the clean carpet at the back of the prayer room. I woke up at five am by the call to prayer, shouted into the desert. I considered pretending to sleep but instead I decided to walk around the dunes before sunrise. The stars shone so bright that the dunes glowed white and it seemed as if fresh snow had fallen. The sun was down and the air was cool and the tarmac road shone under the streetlights as it would with black ice. It felt like Alp D’Hues or Val d’Isere. As I turned around on the snowbank I had stomped along, I saw the numinous red gem of the service station, a simple and overlooked beacon of hospitality in a sterile Martian landscape.
My week in books…
Read:
Politics On The Edge by Rory Stewart. This book taught me there is nothing honourable nor sexy about British politics today. Is our democracy salvageable? Rory doesn’t think so; he offers hundreds of pages of institutional problems, and no solutions. He is, perhaps, a too pragmatic: too measured and eager to please, or, at least, eager not to hurt. I was left feeling that he didn’t have a vision for where he wanted to take us (do any politicians have a vision? — I think not). Perhaps the modern state is too big, too monolithic, to be distilled to a ‘mission’ (but I actually think it isn’t). But by the end of the book, at the culmination of his leadership bid, he fought for reasonableness against unreasonable and untrustworthy candidates (Johnson, Gove et al). I was left thinking we need a Pitt the Younger.
Writing Down The Bones by Natalie Goldburg. I love a book which inspires me to write. This did, and I now plan to read Natalie’s autobiography. A quote: “We are important and our lives are important, magnificent really, and their details are worthy to be recorded. This is how writers must think, this is how we must sit down with pen in hand. We were here; we are human beings; this is how we lived. Let it be known, the earth passed before us. Our details are important. Otherwise, if they are not, we can drop a bomb and it doesn't matter. . . Recording the details of our lives is a stance against bombs with their mass ability to kill, against too much speed and efficiency. A writer must say yes to life, to all of life: the water glasses, the Kemp's half-and-half, the ketchup on the counter. It is not a writer's task to say, "It is dumb to live in a small town or to eat in a café when you can eat macrobiotic at home." Our task is to say a holy yes to the real things of our life as they exist – the real truth of who we are: several pounds overweight, the gray, cold street outside, the Christmas tinsel in the showcase, the Jewish writer in the orange booth across from her blond friend who has black children. We must become writers who accept things as they are, come to love the details, and step forward with a yes on our lips so there can be no more noes in the world, noes that invalidate life and stop these details from continuing.”
A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway’s autobiography of his time living in Paris after the First World War. Life as a writer in his day is similar to ours today, coffee and coffee shops. However it was also normal — no, expected — to drink alcohol literally all day, and consequently Hemingway’s adventures with Scott Fitzgerald (before Fitzgerald becomes famous for The Great Gatsby) are hilarious. The book contains some of the best writing advice ever written: “But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, 'Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.' So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there.”
Reading: Stalin: Paradoxes of Power by Stephen Kotkin. A Distant Mirror by Barbara Tuchman.
Live well,
Hector