Long Read: White collars and knotted ties

Dubai - Network, net worth well in place — yet many expat professionals in Dubai have sought out physical distances from familial comfort. To live and let live. Never mind occasional lapses into loneliness and dysfunction

Valentine’s Day came and went, and yet, in a sense, this really had nothing to do with the ways in which true love devolves. On that day, my techie friend who works for a blue-chip company in Internet City refused to catch up with me for dinner, a masked one, with fist bumps exchanged before appetisers are served, because he had a movie date with his wife.

“Oh yes,” I WhatsApp-ed, “silly me, how could I forget, it’s the 14th day of February — of course you need to spend time with her.”

There’s a logistical glitch. His wife, a doctor, lives in Washington DC, inhabiting a lagging time zone, nine hours behind GST. She invariably gets up late on Sundays, fixes herself breakfast in a daze, and from thereon it’s a struggle to set herself in front of the TV, activate Netflix, and press the play button in tandem with my friend (the title is pre-fixed to ensure it’s available in both territories) who, by then, is laying out his dinner plans.

“It could be the Ides of March,” he typed back. “Sunday evenings are reserved for movie dates, remember?”

He had explained this (what I thought was a) sweet habit they formed, sometime in the swathe of pre-Covid times, right after their big fat wedding in India. There was a tiny dash of bitter: none of them wanted to budge from respective areas of work and life, he in the UAE, she in the US of A. They were too firmly entrenched in well-purposed careers and had mutually decided to take a call on physical togetherness when gates of a watershed beckoned. Like when and, more importantly, if they wanted to raise a family. Or when either of them snagged a job in the other’s home turf that would be worth a relocation.

Till then, other than alternating quarterly visits by each party, there was virtual reality — watching reel in real-time.

“I like to sleep early on weekdays, and Sunday is a working day for me, so if it’s a long movie, I start nodding off. We can’t do it on my weekend because she only has an off on Sunday. Yeah, it’s a bit of a pickle, but we are trying our best to savour it.”

Someone else tells me the story of this top corporate honcho, a family friend, who lived in Dubai for nearly three decades. His wife, a practising lawyer, stayed back in Chennai, India, with their two children who were in “elite schools”, wouldn’t have been a good idea to uproot them. He visited his family often enough; they, in turn, came over for annual vacations consisting of desert safaris and sand-dune bashing on the fringes of a city that grew, exponentially, in leaps and bounds.

By the time he retired and returned for good, both sons, now grown-up men, were settled elsewhere. His marriage — despite surviving a long-drawn-out long-distance tenure — finally fell apart, and he moved out to Bangalore. “He was too used being a certain way, as was his wife — and neither were willing to adapt. In fact, he confided in me about how, by staying away, his life had acquired an entirely different construct, and that he could never see himself back — mentally, emotionally — where he was before he moved to Dubai. And that he’d never trade his story so far for an alternative one: he was happiest when he was an expat in the UAE.”

In 1972, when Neil Diamond wrote Song Sung Blue, he introduced it to a live audience with a disclaimer: “This is not a sad song,/A sad song to sing when you’re alone./In its way, a glad song,/Yes, a glad song.”

The bedrock of narratives of high-earning, white-collar expats who have chosen to veer away conventional straitjackets of homesteads, family units and comfort zones have been subliminally contrarian to socio-economic tugging-at-heart accounts of blue-collar migrants. Most playbooks have explorations, new lessons learnt, absolution, and a happily ever after — at times, an inverted version of it.

‘Every day turned into an adventure’

British expat Brian Salter used to be a broadcast journalist at the BBC in the UK for a long time, where he was trained to speak in “the Queen’s English”, the posh accent. He also fancied himself as being a sort of first mover of the Internet revolution — intellectually (he had a bunch of books on the subject to his credit) — back in the day when online was a buzzword offline and Sandra Bullock acted in a seemingly-dystopian film called The Net.

One rainy day in London, he espied a job advert in The Sunday Times for an Intranet manager in sunny Saudi Arabia. He applied, for a lark, and was offered a 10-month contract. “But I found the whole [Middle East] experience so enjoyable that on my return to the UK, I looked for more opportunities and secured a prospect: doing PR for a defence company.”

He landed in Riyadh, this time with no fixed timeline in mind, leaving behind his then-wife and two children — who had no desire to leave the green fields of England for greener pastures. Whenever they visited on vacays, they thought it was a strange, “male-dominated” and “dangerous” place. “I was actually getting a perk that fattened my paycheck every month: danger money,” Brian laughs.

He moved to the UAE in 2008, when he got an offer “he couldn’t refuse”, first to Abu Dhabi, then Dubai. By now he had realised that once he’d beaten down occasional bouts of loneliness, he’d hit the most creative stretch of his life. “I started discovering so much about the world in general — stuff I had never fully appreciated up till then. With so much around me, there was little time to get bored, and I’d set myself the ‘task’ of discovering something/somewhere new every day. That grew into an obsession whereby I started blogging and writing more books that kept me fully occupied outside of my work time.” Most of his expat friends exhibited a similar trait of enjoying an unreal experience whereby one was not constrained by the norms of society ‘back in blighty’ and “every day turned into an adventure”.

On the other end of the spectrum was that “you literally become a stranger in your own country. On my occasional visit back to the UK, I simply couldn’t fit in with going back to the ‘old ways’, and mixing with people who had such an insular view of the world.”

For Brian, the expat way paved his life path. He never returned to the UK, except on visits — like the time when he popped by, a few years ago, to walk his daughter down the aisle. He forgot his posh accent, bid toodle-oo to Dubai, found his way to Beijing before finally “settling down” in a new world, in the Philippines, feeling a lot like Columbus, the discoverer.

‘Guilt is an emotion I try not to cultivate too actively’

Nerry Toledo is profiled in the UAE media every now and then. The Filipina expat is a successful yoga instructor, who chucked a corporate career to get into the business of wellbeing. It’s her “calling”, she maintains — one she was able to give shape to because life as an expat acted as an enabler.

“Growing up, I had heard about Dubai and its many attractions. Later — 12 years ago — as a young woman, I came here to chase a dream: build a better future for my family.” A few years down the line, she was sorted, and bought her own place in Manila — but she hasn’t considered moving back.

Life as an expat has pros and cons but, the way she sees it, the pros far outweigh the cons. “This place has given me far more than I ever expected, allowed me to see the world, live on my own terms, given me space, got me going on the job front… I went from fronting a falafel chain to handling the Burj Al Arab account — but that was only the beginning. I am grateful I could afford to discover my true purpose with yoga. Now I’m set.”

Nerry misses home terribly though, especially her ailing mother. “She doesn’t recognise me anymore” when she visits twice a year, and that breaks her heart. “At one level, I do feel guilty — but it’s an emotion I try not to cultivate too actively.”

There’s “a sort of pull here” that the expat experience accords. “You know, Eat, Pray, Love should have been set in Dubai, it’s so all-encompassing — most days, I just feel complete, no frayed edges. But then life is so fast here, you wake up one day and realise 10 years have passed by in a flash.”

Is that a bit scary or not?

“Yeah, if you dwell on it too much. But, then, I’ve learnt to be accepting, that’s what yoga teaches you.”

She’ll take it as it comes.