Over here in the other emirate, Sharjah, there is a sad state of affairs. Today, one of my best friends announced that she might go to live in India because living costs here are getting too much to bear. Her house is too small and her family quite big, so when her husband suggested that they might go to his home town of Hyderbad, much cheaper than going to her family home in Jordan, she said, “No problem.” She just wants to keep everyone together. It’s a shame. Even worst, these kinds of stories are as common as sand in the desert. Finding affordable houses in this land of extremes where some pay millions and others can barely afford hundreds can be grueling and depressing if you are one the low end of the income spectrum. Real Estate agents are rip-offs, newspapers are often dead-ends. So, what to do?

If you have grown tired of looking through the want advertisements, just take a stroll down Al Wahda Street and check out the walls, the public telephones, and don't forget the underpasses. Oh, and next time you are going mad for some Malabari chai check out their walls too. For sure you will see them: THE BEDSPACE ADS.

Bedspaces for Filipina/os, for Indians of various sorts, for non-mentioned parties, and my personal favorite, for Executives, but the saddest of them all are bedspaces for families. This is when an entire family will suffer the indignities of living up close and personal on someone else's turf and that means that they will always be on their toes, waiting to use the bathroom, waiting to eat, waiting to shower, all because someone will be playing house Babu. Also, if you are a pious Muslim, your stay will be beyond hardship. For a woman, it will mean that you cook, clean, eat, and perhaps if you don’t have locks on the doors, sleep in your ‘abaya and hijab.

The UAE is a lovely place to live, but landlords ought to be tarred and feathered for putting this place in the dumps. Like my friend, I mentioned before her apartment went from 16,000 dirhams ($4,355) to 30,000 dirhams ($8,167) in less than two years and the toilet has never flushed and the paint job is the original from back in the 1980s. My building, the malaika building, (cause it has 70,000 angels back-to-back holding the place together) is a little better; they fix the toilets over here. It’s my theory, that if the malaikas weren’t there, this building would surely fall like a glass on the shaky edge of a table, crash. Yet, with a little glue and paint, and the annual mop job, the rents have doubled. Al hamduilllah, praise be to Allah, that it's double for only the new people-us old tenants, get to hang on a little longer with a nominal rise in rent.

Sometimes, I look at my lovely Al Wahda Street (once Main Street for shopping delights), I see its empty streets and look at the bored, tired sales people, or even more depressing the energetic hopeful ones, in shops with no customers. Then, I feel, we are just going down hill. With every new high rise, comes the more people who are just bedspacers living with fancy surroundings. A friend’s niece criticized her by saying, “Why do you live alone, what a waste? You could fill this living room with seven beds and be rich.” Imagine the bathroom queue up in there! If something isn’t done soon, Sharjah will be looking like a gentrified ghetto that has seen better days. One thing is for sure, putting too many people in one flat and/or building is the easiest way to destroy it. Add to that unjustified rents and next you’ll be thinking that this is must be Shai town (home to many a gansta rapper) and not Sharjah (the cultural capital of the Arab world). The sad thing is that nothing great will come out of it. There will be no hip hop, new type of lingo, funky art trends, or quick-witted literature. There are not enough roots or commonalities or senses of community. There are only bedspaces that will be filled and vacated by people rolling in out of the United Arab Emirates.

____________________

MARYAM ISMAIL is a writer currently based in the United Arab Emirates. She has a master's degree in sociology from the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research and is working on a textbook entitled, From Alaska to Mongolia: Portraits, Possibilities and Musings from the Muslim World.