Operation Desert Storm

When I first arrived at my flat and began to unpack my worldly wares I started to judge the person who lived in this flat before me. This is not an unusual thing to do, and I think we can all admit to deciding on a person’s entire life story judging by the state that they left the oven in when they vacated the premises.

The person who lived in this flat before me, judging solely on the few discoveries that I made, definitely had an affliction of some sort. Now you may be thinking to yourself ‘ok Nancy Drew give us your proof’.  And I will, in a minute. I need however, to add that I surmised that the previous tenant had one of two possible afflictions.

My first impulse was that the tenant was a British male (no woman would ever leave a kitchen in that state) and so would have been unused to the Arabian heat. As a result he broke into a heat rash that soon covered his body in flaky bits of skin. These flakes then drifted slowly onto the ground like a lazy snow storm. Soon his hair, his clothes and his bed were reminiscent of a volcanic ash cloud. This would also explain my rather terrifying suspicion that there are bed bugs in my bed. It was this miniscule white matter that I then spent half an hour cleaning from the drawers that were to house my underwear, something which I was not altogether over the moon about. And thus my first hypothesis was this – our British hero, in a near state of leprosy, abandoned his life in Arabia to seek cooler climates and thus vanished in a cloud of his own dust.     

My second suspicion was that the previous tenant had a fetish for talcum powder. Perhaps he was not a fan of bathing, or even worse, was phobic of water and so in an effort to keep smelling relatively fresh bathed himself in a cloud of powder every morning (this again would explain the bed bugs). Perhaps one day, while innocently loitering in the bathroom, he slipped and fell and grabbed hold of the first thing he could find. Here I need to explain a little device used in Muslim plumbing for those of you who have yet to visit me. All toilets have a little hosepipe thing with a nozzle at the end hanging next to the cistern. I gather it is used as a replacement for toilet paper. There are also drains in the floor for when one is ‘tidying up’ or whatever one does with the hose. I personally find it very handy for cleaning the floor. Anyway, back to my story. So our hero trips, grabs hold of the hose, unknowingly sets off the nozzle and sprays water all over himself. Streams of chalky white gunk begin to run freely off his body and years of sweat and dirt begin to cake the drain. This trauma is all too much for our hero, he can never trust himself to loiter in a bathroom again and so he packs his bag and sets off to a place where he knows he will be safe from water and where the sands of time will serve as his talcum powder, he disappears into the desert, never to be seen again.

I thought both these stories were highly plausible and I was proud of my sleuthing abilities, I left no stone unturned. And so I set about sweeping, mopping and cleaning in order to rid my flat of the dusty white memorabilia of its tragic previous tenant. I opened the windows, sang the song that Snow White sang when she cleaned the seven dwarves’ cottage and I like to think that goats, donkeys and camels surrounded my block of flats as I whistled while I worked. Oman is a little bit short of rabbits, squirrels and blue birds. After a long day of cleaning I dramatically mopped my brow and collapsed onto my couch, satisfied. I could feel the cool breeze of the desert blowing in through the open windows and I could hear the distant sound of a head on collision as yet another person added to the death as a result of an accident per capita quota. All was right in the world.

That night I slept well and I nestled further into my duvet when I heard the wind begin to pick up its momentum. When I woke up the next morning and stepped out of bed I felt a familiar and definitive crunch under my foot. I pretended to ignore it and by the time I reached the bathroom the soles of my feet could no longer feel the floor because they had amassed such a thick layer of kak. It was then that I forced myself to realise that I was not living in the former home of someone (who if treated properly) could become the world wide ambassador of Head and Shoulders. I was also not living in the home of an aqua-phobic. I was living in the desert. And I have quickly come to realise that the desert will come right into your home if you are not careful. It will hide in those crannies that are an absolute bitch to clean and it will layer your clothes like a soft sprinkling of icing sugar.

I still sleep with my windows open, one must relish a breeze while one can, but it is with reverence that I now look out of my window to the endless desert. I am only a visitor here, the desert has made that blatantly clear and though I may one day leave the desert will still be here sweeping bits of itself into this place, claiming its rightful ownership over the entire city.