Help, I'm still at the restaurant

on staying

me at my post-graduation dinner with my friends, May 2017

When Taylor Swift released the deluxe version of Evermore (2020), she included two bonus tracks, one of which is still my favorite song. 

Help, I'm still at the restaurant

Still sitting in a corner I haunt

Cross-legged in the dim light

They say, "What a sad sight"

– Taylor Swift, “right where they left me”, Evermore (2020) 

Swift mentioned that “[right where they left me ]is a song about a girl who stayed forever in the exact spot where her heart was broken, completely frozen in time.” via twitter when the tracks were released. However, when I first listened to the song, I see myself sitting alone at the same spots in Abu Dhabi where I once made memories with my high school friends or family. 

I know that as Gulf kids, we often talk of leaving the homes we made in our respective gulf cities. If I were to write about leaving, I might have led with the other bonus track “it’s time to go”. However, I have yet to leave and therefore cannot talk to that experience.  Till then, I want to talk about staying.

Initially, I too was focused on leaving and the preparation for it. In high school, I had applied to universities in the UK and gotten in. The excitement of potentially moving to the UK quickly waned when money came into the picture. As gulf families, it was a shock when we cannot leave at the time we chose after spending years preparing for it in every way, whether it be physically, mentally, emotionally, financially etc. Applying to NYU Abu Dhabi was playing roulette but the game worked in my favor. A full scholarship. My family could breathe a sigh of relief about expenses. 

 At Graduation, as they announced the schools and majors people would be pursuing, I was among perhaps twenty people that stayed. We were a graduating class of around 60. A teacher (whom I will not name) came to me in excitement, talking to her husband of how I would be going to the UK. When I said I chose NYU Abu Dhabi, she stepped back in shock. After the photos, she took me aside and told me I was being stupid to stay. “What can you make of yourself here?” She asked. 

If I were in my Indian primary school, going back to India for higher studies would be the norm. I graduated from an international school and the goal was to move to the west or Europe. The common stereotype both communities believed was that staying in the UAE was for the people who were not smart enough to study abroad or get admission to good universities in their home countries. I am not sure how that perception came to be because during my last five years here, I have met more incredibly smart, driven people, who dreamt big and made their marks as they stayed here. They stayed due to many reasons but none of them are to be shamed. What that teacher and many others have not realized is that perhaps leaving is not as affordable or the only option for us anymore. Just because many of us stayed, does not mean our lives came to a dead end. It became a turn into a road we did not foresee. 

The first winter holidays after me and my friends started university, my friends would visit the NYU Abu Dhabi campus to hang out with me. They came to me with stories of new cities, of unfamiliar roads and talked of their new friends whom, for the first time, I did not know of. They talked of new found freedoms: the travels, the people, the food, clubs, the alcohol, the taste of illicit romance and all. In the unfamiliarity of their stories and learning of the new aspects of my friends, it felt like I was knocked off my place in their lives. They also talk of how they were treated as tourists when coming through Abu Dhabi airport and how Abu Dhabi has changed, becoming a bit unfamiliar to them. They tell me to take them to new spots in Abu Dhabi, that I know better than them. 

In a previously published essay “Vathil”, I write about doors being the site of my memories:  “When your friends come to visit, you wonder if you have become your Amma and Ammuma, waiting and watching the vathil for a return.” I was receiving my friends when they came back from their travels and saying goodbye to them when they left again. In the gaps, I was right where they left me. I visit the Tim Hortons on Najda St. and sit alone while a continent away, Nidhi, my best friend, is drinking the same coffee she used to drink with me at a Tim Hortons in Waterloo University’s campus. I walk by the Burger King on Salam St. and think of the many times I have waited at that restaurant for the school bus, sharing fries with Ann while the boys argued over a new marvel movie. I stand alone now as the public bus comes. I haunt the city now that I am left alone in it.  My parents had moved to Dubai due to my Acha’s job transfer. We talk about always being at the precipice of leaving, waiting till the event that pushes us overcomes by. Growing up, I was told there was an end to the waiting but so far, it has not ended for me. 

I thought waiting would end after NYU Abu Dhabi and I would leave the country for my Masters degree. However, I ended up in Dubai with my parents, completely drained from senior year and the pandemic after having rejected my grad school offers to rest. I stayed in bed, watching my university friends post photos of new lives in the countries they left. I was still her and at the beginning, it felt like defeat. I did not achieve the goal of leaving as the Gulf Dream once told my parents and me.

On the flip side, I beat the odds the Gulf dream had set for me. I was still here.

Eventually I got an internship at the place where I work full time now. That transition shook me because all my time here in UAE, I was a child, constantly looking up at the buildings, the adults, the teachers, the authority figures, constantly feeling small. Add that with the constant narrative of leaving, it felt like there was no space for me. For the first time, I was seeing my home as an adult and occupying a space in it. I no longer had to reach up to pay the grocery store owner. My hands are no longer too small or too sensitive for a hot cup of karak from the cafeterias. Men drive by screaming cat calls when I walk on the sidewalk outside my place. Taxi drivers call me Ma’am and when they realize I have been in the country longer than they have, their eyes widen. The ping of the sms telling me my salary came into my account at the end of the month still surprises me. I entered a bar without an ID check last Tuesday to watch another high school friend who also stayed and studied in Dubai, perform stand up to a laughing room. I made friends at work and ate lunch with colleagues who were twice my age. I was shocked when finding out some of my colleagues in their mid-thirties and forties had also grown up here. There were not one but two generations of Gulf Kids now in the workforce. Maybe more. We were not an anomaly anymore or attached to the UAE just because of our parents or childhood. We had more tethering us here.

I dated a man I fell for, who now left for the UK. After our last phone call, I attached the turtle keychain he gifted me to my copy of the apartment keys. I am not sure what to do at the spots in Dubai we once went on dates together when I pass by them. Dubai was more his home than mine. Anyways, I find my footing and back to work I go. I don’t have time to wait. I have not waited by the door in a long time. When my friends do come, it would be their phone calls or texts that would alert me, not me spotting them from a distance. I now smile at their stories instead of feeling left out. Once, a male friend from high school said I was a meeting point for our friend group because everyone came together when they came to see me. I am among the familiar parts of the Abu Dhabi they left, besides their own families. University friends would talk to me about missing the UAE when calling me on zoom. They ask me if they can stay with me if they visit.

If I could meet that teacher again, I would say I became a writer. I became the school friend that welcomed everyone home as well as the locally-based friend at university. I became my parent’s adult daughter. I became a woman in the same country I was born a child in. I became a marketing executive, a colleague, and an employee. I am still making myself because at some point, the waiting became a note in the background. I am still preparing to leave but unlike my parents generation, I am no longer constantly preparing. I have the luxury of stillness till the moment comes. Perhaps a new version of the Gulf Dream, one that is about staying, is coming to fruition. I am not sure if we are ready for it.

Sometimes there are moments I listen to “right where you left me” and I sing into my memories to reminisce. I am still at the restaurant but I am not frozen like I thought I was.