Gaar Adams Extract from Guest Privileges

Gaar Adams

Extract from Guest Privileges

Before dusk could settle over the vacant lot, I climbed a pile of cinder blocks to watch two taxi drivers wrestle bare-chested in the sand. The shorter one, standing a full head beneath the furrowed brow of his challenger, punched his thighs in pre-match theatrics while plumes of dust sprouted from the makeshift ring like ill omens portending his swift defeat. But when the fighters locked arms to grapple, the scrawny man pulled loose, swinging a heel into the crook of his larger opponent’s knees, pitching him to the ground. As beads of sweat coursed down their torsos, the smaller wrestler grabbed the fallen man’s kaupina loincloth, using it for traction to climb atop his hulking frame, triumphant. In under a minute, the bout had finished. But this unexpected underdog victory felt like an aftershock to the initial surprise of the event itself: two South Asian cabbies, nearly naked, sparring in a barren sandlot along the edge of Dubai. In a place where simply donning shorts can run afoul of the city’s notoriously strict penal codes, I felt like I was witnessing not just a feat of athletics but a challenge to an entire sociopolitical order. It would take much longer to understand that the subversion I’d experienced that evening was also personal. I was not the only spectator that day. The victor bounded out of the ring and a stout, bearded man pulled him into a firm embrace, wiping away the sand that caked his brow. Clutching each other’s shoulders, the men grazed foreheads and grinned through a muted exchange before a throng of fans encircled them, hoisting the wrestler upon their shoulders. In the far corner of the ring, the next pair of wrestlers stripped out of their shalwar kameez, rubbing their biceps for warmth as they waited for the rabble to subside. Only a small

tract of reclaimed land separated the sandlot from the open water, and fresh January winds blew in steadily off the Gulf. I jotted a quick line in my notebook about making sure to mention this winter chill. It was one of those things I often heard people back home in Midwest America invariably getting wrong, spouting some variation of “Oh, but isn’t it always hot over there in the desert?” When I moved to the United Arab Emirates in 2010, I tried to dismiss questions like this as innocuous, but I was just beginning to recognise the outsized role they played in how I spoke about the region. I drove 150 kilometres from my home in Abu Dhabi to the sandlot earlier that afternoon for the same reason I often hopped into my car back then: to research an article. It was 2014, my fifth year living on the Arabian Peninsula, and I was filing arts and culture pieces for a variety of American magazines and international media outlets. The personal maelstrom of packing up my life and shipping it to the Middle East for the first time coincided almost to the hour with a larger seismic shift: President Barack Obama’s January 20, 2009 inaugural address, in which he took the remarkable step of singling out the Muslim world by name, calling for “a new way forward based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” Living in the Middle East in the early days of a new American presidential administration, the mood felt almost buoyant, as though the region had emerged from the Bush foreign policy era as one might from an extended hurricane: unfurling from a defensive crouch to open up the shutters, survey the damage, and let in the light. But over the ensuing half-decade, I watched as American rhetoric on the region failed to match the ideals that Obama’s speech entreated. The same year I began research for the wrestling article, Newsweek — at the time, one of the most storied magazines in US publishing — ran a cover photo on the Arab Spring that featured two bearded men, fists clenched, with the headline “Muslim Rage” in bold, capital letters. Eschewing any nuance as to how long-standing political grievances were morphing into a complex web of organised protests, the cover seemed to encapsulate the dual lens that the American media offered to view most of the Muslim world: violence and danger.

I first pitched my editor this article about pehlwani, a traditional form of South Asian wrestling, in the spirit of offering a critical response to this worldview. In addition to the heterogeneity of the sport’s origins — the 16th century Mughals who conquered northern India melded their Sufi-infused Persian koshti pahlavani wrestling with the region’s Hindu-inflected malla-yuddha form — pehlwani wrestling also enjoyed popularity across a wide swath of culturally varied Indian states, Pakistani provinces, and Bangladeshi districts. I imagined penning an article that illuminated how Dubai, the diverse capital of an Islamic country, uniquely brought together die-hard wrestling fans regardless of passport colour, socioeconomic status, or religion. My hope was that if I could illustrate this reality to even a few readers, I just might be able to provide a counterbalance to the onslaught of inflammatory headlines and cover stories around me. In the face of so many misconceptions, my initial impulse was to fortify this pehlwani article with a glut of historical research. So, I dove in, treading through minutia, including the physical mechanics of single-leg takedowns and the linguistic particularities of Urdu wrestling vocabulary. But, when it finally came time to sit and write the article, instead of striking the keys on my laptop, I found myself continually hitting ‘play’ on my audio recorder. Again and again, I would return to the interviews I’d conducted, pouring over hours of conversations with wrestlers and spectators, both banal and consequential, on topics ranging from laundry to love, jobs to heartbreak, lifelong dreams attained and those yet unfulfilled. It was a troubling pattern I noticed intensifying with each new story I pitched: an inability to begin writing, coupled with a looming sense that the glut of completely unrelated material stored on my recording device was somehow more salient to my articles than any of my other research. And so it was, that, in those days, I would sit and stare at a blinking cursor for hours, caught between a deadline, a word count, and a nagging dread that I could not at all capture the reality of such a misunderstood place without starting the story somewhere else entirely; a beginning rooted not in historical narrative, but buried somewhere in the depths of my recorder.