The Expat Life: Ajman Museum

Museum Entrance

I finally managed to haul my lazy self to the Ajman Museum. I've been meaning to visit it for couple of years now, but somehow kept delaying the trip. The museum is situated in a central place very near to the Ajman bus stop. It isn't a particularly large one - you can probably complete the museum tour in an hour. But it is quite well maintained and gives us a peek into the history of Ajman. There were only a handful of people apart from me so I could really have a look around at leisure and take lots of photos without worrying about crowds. Entry fee: 5 AED per adult. Timings: Daily - 9 - 1 & 4 - 7. Closed on Fridays.

Narrow staircases

One complaint I had was that there didn't seem to be any museum guide to explain things to visitors. Of course, there were boards that explained stuff in both Arabic & English - but it would have been good to have a knowledgeable person who could answer a few questions that I had. Also, the museum is not very accessible to differently-abled people. There were many narrow steps that would have made it difficult for people with disabilities.

The museum is actually an old fortress. It consists of several rooms housing old photographs, official documents, weapons, musical instruments and also several tableaux representing scenes from everyday life of yore. One can learn a lot about the various traditions and trades of the Arabs through these lifelike scenes. Here are some pictures that I clicked in the museum. 

A tableau depicting a village scene

The evolution of weaponry: from bows & arrows to spears to daggers to guns

A domestic scene

The Arabic spice souq

An old-fashioned cafe replete with hookah et al!

A doctor of traditional medicine. Am I glad for advances in  the medical  field!

Arabic crockery & jewelry

Old official documents: Driving License & Passport. (Notice that it says Rs.5? Not sure why!)

Various traditional trades: Upholstery | Pearling | Rope Making & Basket Weaving

Various traditional trades: Blacksmith | Baker | Barber

The Bedouins in the desert

                                                           Arabic coffee anyone?

                                                         Musical instruments

                                                                          A Wooden Door with Carvings

A quaint Arabic tradition:

When a person is sick, a religious leader is requested to write verses from the Koran onto a plate using a  mixture of saffron & rose water. Then the plate is washed with rose water and the solution is given to the person who is ill to drink or is applied on affected body parts.

The Expat Life: 5 Things I Like About Living In Ajman

I often find myself cribbing about how where I live in the UAE – Ajman: how hot it is, how boring it is, how dusty it is or how nothing ever happens here. But then I paused and thought, surely it can’t be all bad? There must be some advantages of living in Ajman; afterall every place has its own positives and negatives. Also, I get a lot of enquiries from people around the world asking me how life in Ajman is. So, today I decided to try to be an optimist and look at the bright side for a change. Here are 5 things I like about living in Ajman:

1. Home delivery of groceries: makes it to the top of my list by a huge margin! As any home cook – or atleast a sloppy one like me - will tell you, running out of that one vital ingredient when making a meal is a frustrating experience. Usually, this means that first I have to change out of my curry-stained-and-faded-pyjamas, brush my straggly hair, and run to the grocery – thus interrupting my hurried cooking process and disrupting my routine. But the great thing about living in Ajman is that you can simply call your neighbourhood grocery and even if it what you need costs just a couple of dirhams they will bring it to your doorstep in no time!

2. Living near the beach: I’m a Piscean and I’m from Chennai – how can I not like the beach huh? The majority of my life has been spent in a city near the beach and I never tire of it! I have many fond childhood memories of the beach and I’m really happy that Ajman has a nice beach. It is the perfect place to spend a pleasant evening with the wind ruffling your hair and feet sinking into the soft sand.

3. Small & compact: Ajman is rather small. This means that it takes only a short time to get from one place to another in Ajman. In fact, most of the time, my husband comes home from work for lunch – he gets a fresh and healthy home cooked meal and we get to spend our respective lunch hour together. Since we need to cover only short distances there is hardly any irritating traffic jams either to delay you.

4. Affordable rents & uninterrupted utilities: When most people back home complain about suffering in the sweltering heat due to frequent power cuts, I am so thankful that we have uninterrupted power over here. Touchwood! Further, I have lived through several of Chennai’s severe water shortages where we had to constantly worry about running out of water, remembering to fill every available container when the water comes only during stipulated time slots and running like mad to get to the Metro water tanker when it comes around sloshing half its contents on the road. So trust me, it is truly a relief that we also have uninterrupted water supply – which is kind of a big deal since Ajman is a desert, albeit a developed one. Plus, the rents are far more affordable than in the neighbouring emirates of Sharjah or Dubai – which is why a lot of people who work in Dubai prefer to live in Ajman.

5. Feels a bit like India: Ajman doesn’t feel “foreign”. It doesn’t have the glitz and glamour of New York or the sterile orderliness of Singapore – it does not even have the quaintness of an English suburb. What it does have is, kids playing gully cricket, men lounging around in tiny tea stalls, Hindi or Malayalam conversations carried by the wind, restaurants around every corner serving fish curry or chicken tikka and loads of people from the Indian sub-continent – now surely, an Indian wouldn’t feel out of place in Ajman would he?

So, there we go! 5 things that make Ajman a – well, I still won’t say great – but yeah, nice enough place to stay! What do you like about where you live?

One Amazing Thing

One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is an uncomplicated tale of humanity.

One Amazing Thing by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the story of 9 people who are thrown together by an act of nature. Nine different characters – Uma, a young Indian woman brought up in the US, Jiang, an old Chinese-Indian lady settled in the US and her granddaughter Lily, Tariq, a young man of Indian origins but brought up in the US again, Mr. & Mrs. Pritchett, an elderly couple with a strained marriage, Cameron, a black man with a past, and finally Malathi and Mangalam, the staff - find themselves trapped by an earthquake at the Indian Consulate in America. How they hold onto hope while learning about each other and coping with the predicament that they have suddenly found themselves in, forms the rest of the story.

I guess I always try to find a little bit of myself in the protagonists of all the books I read. In this one, this particular sentence about one of the characters, Uma, caught my eye: “When flying, she always chose a window seat so that when the plane took off or landed, she could look down on the tiny houses and imagine the lives of the people who inhabited them.” Yep, sounds like me alright!

I am a big fan of Chitra Banerjee after reading The Palace Of Illusions. I enjoy her writing style and the thoughts that they provoke in me. In One Amazing Thing, I also enjoyed her sense of humour. For instance, “The pain in her wrist was still there, but like a nagging old relative to whose complaints she had grown accustomed.” -  Don’t we all know that relative!?

I also really liked the way she describes several names – Farah: “…like a yearning poet’s sigh”, Flurry’s: “…a delicious name that melted in one’s mouth like the lightest of pastries.” Lovely, no? I went back and repeated the names to myself – marvelling at how appropriately the author managed to capture the spirit of these names.

To keep up their flagging spirits and for want of anything else to do, the group starts sharing stories. Each person tells a story from their life – through which we learn about the hopes and fears, the dreams and disappointments, the plans and mistakes that fill each of our lives. 

Each story gives us a peek into the lives of the protagonists and makes us understand the reasons behind why they are who they are. Of all the stories, I found Jiang’s and Mrs. Pritchett’s to be most moving; the former for being a victim of unfortunate circumstances and the latter for seeming like she had it all – only to discover belatedly that she didn’t in fact.  Malathi’s story was rather predictable, while Tariq’s was quite expected in today’s Islamaphobic world.

One thing that I didn’t like in the book was its open ending. I hate open endings – be it in movies or in books. I do not like it when the author leaves readers hanging in the balance, wondering whatever happens next and left to draw our own conclusions!

But apart from that, One Amazing Thing is a relatively simple story. The Palace Of Illusions was a complicated book  - given that it was a woman’s point of view of the great epic Mahabharat, which explains the multiple layers and dimensions. One the other hand, One Amazing Thing is a straight forward book that reiterates the fact that life- and people - is never black and white. 

P.S: Around the time that I was reading this book, a major earthquake struck Iran and we felt the tremors all the way here in the UAE. This is the second time I've felt an earthquake, but that was a spooky coincidence indeed!

Beyond The Blossoming Fields

Beyond The Blossoming Fields is an awe-inspiring story of one woman’s struggle to overcome gender inequality and senseless stereotyping.

Beyond The Blossoming Fields is a novel based on the remarkable real life story of Japan’s first officially certified female doctor of Western medicine. Originally written in Japanese by Jun’ichi Watanabe, it has been translated into English by Deborah Iwabuchi and Anna Isozaki. 

Ginko Ogino comes from a respectable family. The novel is set in the 19^th century and as is customary to those days, she is married off in her teens. Unfortunately, she contracts gonorrhoea from a wayward husband and puts up silently with her suffering for several months. Without advanced medical care, her condition worsens, until finally one day, she can no longer bear it and she leaves her marital home. 

On the advice of her childhood mentor, she proceeds to get treated by a doctor of Western medicine. Sadly, there aren’t any female gynaecologists around in Japan at that time. Any woman who has had to endure a gynaecological exam would readily vouch that it is hardly something that one looks forward to. And for a young girl who has grown up in a secluded and protected environment to be subjected to an invasive, personal examination by a brusque and clinical doctor, is beyond dreadful; especially because it isn’t her fault that she picked up the terrible disease in the first place. 

The trauma that she undergoes during the course of her treatment, spurs Ginko on. She embraces the idea that she would one day become a doctor. For a woman to wish to be educated and to work as a doctor in the conservative and patriarchal society of the 1800s was definitely no joke. Even today, there are girls all over the world who are denied the right to education. One can then imagine how challenging it must have been for a woman to aspire to become a doctor during Ginko’s time.

Fighting a restrictive society which is impassive to her fate and is impervious to change, Ginko faces frustration, ridicule, contempt and even threats on the path of her dreams. One cannot help but be amazed by Ginko’s spirit and determination as she struggles to achieve her goal. From having to use the male restroom in college since there are no female restrooms, to running from pillar to post in the hope of being allowed to sit for the medical licensing exam, and being humiliated for being “just a woman” who thinks too much of herself, Ginko faces all her tribulations with a single-minded sense of purpose. 

Although I cannot claim to have undergone such harsh challenges as Ginko, as an Indian woman reading her story, one can still very well understand and identify with her struggle to prove herself. As it is the case with many translations, the prose is somewhat stilted at times. Nevertheless, Beyond The Blossoming Fields is an inspiring read indeed.

Henna For The Broken-Hearted

Henna For The Broken-Hearted is an autobiographical modern day love story of Sharell Cook, an expat living in India.

I had been meaning to read Henna For The Broken-Hearted for quite some time and finally managed to get my hands on it. To begin with, I really like the title of the book. I think it is so poetic – and also, aptly captures the spirit of the story in just a few words.

Henna For The Broken-Hearted is narrated in first person. It tells the story of how the author led a seemingly complete, but apparently empty, life in Australia. Faced with some life altering changes, Cook decides to volunteer in India – where she rediscovers life and love, and in the process, herself.

As I started reading Cook’s description of herself, I thought, “Oh that sounds so much like me!” For instance, she says, “Despite what some would call an idyllic childhood … I grew into a shy, closed and introverted teenager … used to spending time by myself among nature and absorbed in books.”As she goes on to explain her career choices and other expectations from life, I was hooked.

But of course, that is really where the similarity ends, for I am no white woman trying to find the true meaning of her life while struggling to accept India’s idiosyncrasies. And that is where I have a problem with this book. Although the premise of the story – the search for love and peace – is universal, the story itself isn’t. I am assuming that the target audience of this book is predominantly foreigners. A lot of everyday, common things which the average Indian needs no introduction to, are described in detail. Even the prices of stuff is first mentioned in rupees and then duly converted to dollars. Hence, at times, I wanted to just skim over the oh-so-familiar details of Ganesh Chathurthi and arranged marriages. 

The book does give one an insider’s perspective of life in India – as Cook eventually settles down in Mumbai – but it is also peppered with the typical clichés about Indians; how we don’t stand in queues, how we push and shove in crowded places, how everything is plagued by bureaucratic red tape, how we make a fuss about grand weddings, how we wobble our heads and so on. Yes, yes (and I’m wobbling my head here), we know all that. Now can we move on?

But, apart from the done-to-death details about India, Cook’s story is a remarkable one indeed. One definitely has to admire the fact that she was brave enough to venture into India at a time when she was down in the dumps in her personal life. Afterall life in India is far from easy and needs a lot of “adjustments”, especially for those who come from orderly and follow-all-the-rules countries. Even many Indians like me, who get used to a comfortable lifestyle, would find India quite demanding, regardless of whether we love the country and consider it our home or not. 

I felt sorry for Cook, when she found herself in an Indian style squat toilet, clueless as to how to proceed! In her initial accommodation, when she is kept awake by an army of mosquitoes, I was reminded of my recent trip to Chennai; unable to sleep because of incessantly swatting mosquitoes that no amount of Odomos or Good Night could drive out, I indeed found myself longing for the cozy comfort of my bed in Dubai for a long and restful sleep!

Henna For The Broken-Hearted, is somewhat similar in theme to Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love. But I enjoyed reading Eat, Pray, Love more than this book. It could be because, Eat, Pray, Love takes us to Italy and Indonesia, apart from India, and since I am fascinated by both these countries, I found them exotic enough. Another reason I think Eat, Pray, Love, is better, is that although telling a personal story, it somehow managed to look at the bigger picture in the larger scheme of things. But Henna For The Broken-Hearted, is an intensely personal story, which focuses almost entirely on the author’s ups and downs. Although, the author’s courage in sharing her innermost fears and thoughts are to be admired, why would anyone want to wade through nearly 300 pages of a book detailing the nitty-gritties of a random stranger – especially if you already know how it all ends, since the author is quite popular in the blogosphere as she runs the Diary Of A White Indian Housewife site? In that sense, I felt that something was missing from Henna For The Broken-Hearted. A good read – but going beyond the personal, would have made it a great one.

9 Life Gyans @29

These days, everyone seems to think that they’ve attained nirvana. The kind of people who spout “life truths” and the kind of gyan that is being lapped up by one and all led me to believe, that I too can spout my own version of life’s “hidden truths”! After a decade of disastrous decisions, surely I can do this, no? Since I’m turning 29 today, I thought of sharing 9 lessons learnt from my not-so-short life! So here goes nothing!

1) Never say never: Many of us, including yours truly, do this. When we witness someone doing something which we opine is outrageous, we are prompt to judge and say, “Oh I would never do ___!” But do we really know that for sure? What makes us so confident? Have we gone through the same situations and emotions that the person in question has? If we were in that same position, God only knows what we would do. Several times, I’ve been quick to say Never! Only to discover a little way down the road, that I spoke too soon. So, let’s not be quick to jump to conclusions – and then find that we have to eat our own words.

2) Love yourself first: I am not asking you to be selfish – but a little self-centeredness is really not a bad thing. Love yourself, treat yourself, pamper yourself, indulge yourself, celebrate yourself, improve yourself – because the most important person in your life is you. And if you don't love yourself first, you can not love anyone else truly.

3) The truth is you only have you to depend on in this life: Yes. Parents, teachers, spouse, friends, colleagues, pets, neighbours, strangers – everyone will come only so far in life. Beyond that, you have only yourself. But, you have you – and that is the most important relationship of all. Nurture it.

4) Get to know the guy/girl before marrying him/her: I don’t have anything against arranged marriages and of course know a lot of happy couples who’ve had arranged marriages. Nevertheless, if possible, try to have a “love” marriage. And I am not talking about the typical Bollywood type of love marriages – boy meets girl, Bam! Cupid strikes, they fight, they cuddle, they sing and dance, they beat up some villains, they get married and live happily ever after. No sir. Spend time with each other, do things together, discover each other’s positives and negatives, learn about each other’s likes and dislikes, grow together, share your thoughts and interests, talk, laugh and cry together, become friends, go on dates, travel together, volunteer together, watch movies, listen to music, read and discuss, fight and makeup, be there for each other, give it time, atleast a couple of years – and then, if you think that you want a lifetime more of the same, then get married. Of course, I agree that it is not possible to know everything about a person but atleast you’ve laid the foundation for a solid relationship, that is meant to last through thick and thin.

5) If it doesn’t work out, it’s ok: Sometimes – well, who am I kidding – most times, life doesn’t go according to our plans. At the risk of sounding cliched, there are no guarantees in life. People disappoint us and we end up being hurt and angry. Let it be. Cry your eyes out, mourn for a while, be glum and dejected and mope around eating tubs of ice-cream. But, move on, after a while. If it is meant to be, it will be; else simply let go. Don’t waste your time, energy and emotions on would-haves and could-have-beens, but don’t regret the experience either. The fact is, every person we meet in our life, teaches us something – about ourselves, about life. Learn from it. Smile and get on with your life. Don’t let bitterness pull you down and make you cynical; open yourself to new experiences.

6) Travel: I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. Travel truly broadens your horizons and gives you a new perspective. Travel as much as you can, and see yourself in a new light.

7) Live by yourself: atleast for a couple of years. Fend for yourself, do chores, run errands, pay the bills, wash your clothes, cook your meals, clean your bathroom – learn to be self-sufficient. It doesn’t matter if it was your dad who was doing all this earlier; it doesn’t matter if someone else will do it for you later. Atleast, you will know that you can do all that – and much more – if the need arises.

8) Earn: I believe that every woman should have worked for atleast a short while. Relocation, marriage, kids or other such responsibilities or even lack of interest might not allow you to continue to work. But atleast for a short while, go to work – meet new people and keep learning. Save some money – just for yourself.

9) Have a hobby: So many people complain that they feel bored when they are by themselves. But practically speaking, no one is going to be with you 24/7. That is why it is essential to keep up a hobby – anything which interests you. Don’t give it up – it will sustain and refresh you.

My Happy Place

Do you remember the Friends episode where Phoebe tries to make Monica feel better through some meditation and relaxation techniques? Of course it is hilarious, I mean come on which Friends episode isn't, right? But apart from being funny (“listen to the plinky-plunky music"), she mentions something about her “happy place”. And I wondered if I had one. A happy place… a place to retreat to when you need some cheering up; a place you would go to gather strength and succor when you feel down in the dumps. Sounds nice, doesn’t it?

Yes I do have a happy place and it happens to be the quaint little chapel in my school. Whenever I feel sad or depressed, I can just close my eyes and be virtually transported to this spot. I can vividly recall every detail - the quiet that envelops you as you step in, the coolness of the mosaic when you lay your cheek on it, the framed photograph of Mary Of Perpetual Help, the smooth hardness of the wooden benches, the gentle sunlight that filters in, the far-away sounds of carefree children’s laughter, the soothing cooing of the mynahs…. It is truly a beautiful place that calms me and restores tranquility deep within me. I don’t think I chose this place for its religious significance. But, rather, it feels like a mother’s womb – safe and protected.

I haven’t actually visited this chapel for many years now. I have no clue if it is still the same. But in my heart and mind, it will forever be a little slice of serenity. Do you have a happy place?