A personal, historical vignette

By Cainnech Ó Sullibhain

This story begins of all places in what was then known as the Trucial Coast of Arabia, bordering on the Sultanate of Oman and Muscat in the Persian Gulf on one side and Saudi Arabia on the other.

While I was serving in the merchant navy, I had the opportunity to touch the Trucial Coast, which of course got its name because the British had signed a treaty (truce) with the local sheikhs in the seven sheikhdoms, which were later to become known as the United Arab Emirates.

It was here in the Trucial Coast that my ship dropped anchor in the early 1950s to unload some cargo. Finding the time I hopped ashore in a small boat to a creek where there were Arab dhows moored along a pier. Upon reaching the shore, I thought that I would take a look around and see what this place was all about. At that time, the average person here was not very well off, and the houses were not the palaces one sees in the UAE today. The local people existed on fish, vegetables and rice or beans. I ventured into the local open-air market and was watching the people haggling over the prices, which is the norm in most of these places in the Persian Gulf. I wandered on a bit, and saw a little boy and his father at a stall selling tomatoes and a few other vegetables. As I neared them, I was eager to find out about these people, so I started talking to the little boy of about 10 years of age. He was quite interested to meet someone from the outside world, because it was a rarity in these parts.

I had no idea that this encounter would play a very important part in my life then. I got to meet the boy’s father and family. Now, this boy was looking for someone that would be his mentor, and he clung on to every word I spoke. A day later we set sail and I was no more to hear from this boy. In 1961, I met this boy again and we exchanged pleasantries and had a good talk. The boy had become a man, and had gone on to the London School of Economics to study finance. During the years that had passed, the place where this boy hailed from became what is known today as Dubai, a very important hub of finance in the Persian Gulf, and it grew by leaps and bounds as oil was discovered. So what was a sleepy fishing village then now had become a metropolis. That same place where I met this boy now had more hotels, cars, buildings and palaces than any other place that I knew of.

The boy, I discovered, was from the original royal family of Bahrain, that were deposed by the British in the 19th century, and they called themselves Bushing Iranis and at that time Bahrain was under their rule.

One day in October 1983, this boy, now a man, called me on the phone and told me that he was coming to San Francisco for a conference on finance and that he would hop on a plane and arrive in Montreal, Quebec on the 28th. He arrived in Montreal and was at my house at noon on the same day. The very next day, he invited me and my family to the Holiday Inn, Pointe Claire, Quebec to have lunch with him. During lunch there was a show, and my friend discovered that most of the people in the show spoke Arabic. He then called them after the show to meet me and my family. He told them of how we had become friends and that he had waited 25 years to meet me again. All the people were really impressed and told me that this was a miracle. While sitting with this billionaire my wife asked him how rich he was, and he told her that he had a lot of money. The next thing I knew was my wife asking me to ask my friend for money. I told her that was one thing I could never do, because it would sour our friendship. But, my wife spoke to my friend and said, “You are a billionaire and my husband is a pauper.” My friend turned around and said to my wife, “You don’t realize it, but your husband is a richer man than me, only you do not realize it!”

A day later my Arab friend left, and at Dorval Airport, Montreal, said to my wife: “Take care of this man your husband, because he is my older brother.” My wife still couldn’t understand what this man was trying to tell her, because in her culture such friendships did not exist.

In 1990, my friend knew that my marriage was on rocky ground and invited me to stay for two weeks in Dubai, and he would cover the cost of everything. When I arrived at the Dubai International Airport, there was my friend and his bothers waiting for me to arrive, but he had gone to the UAE immigration minister and cleared me before I had arrived. When the plane landed, four officers of the UAE immigration department came on board the British Airways plane and asked the hostess where I was sitting. They came to my seat and escorted me off the plane as they would a dignitary.

On that flight, I got to talking with a lady who was a vice president of an electronics company from Silicon Valley, California, named Terry Rosedale, and she asked me what field of business I was in. I told her that I was a pauper without any money or connections, but I had a friend in Dubai who had invited me over. I also told her that I had a lot of dreams that I hoped would one day come true. She sat with me for three hours, and we talked about a lot of things, and when she was returning to her seat, she told me, “I know one day, I am going to see you on television, I know that!” I’ll bet that she must have thought that I was some dignitary traveling incognito, when I was being escorted off the plane by the UAE immigration officers and there she was waiting in line to be cleared by the UAE immigration authorities.

In 1992 my fried asked me if I would like to go on a trip to India with him. I accepted his offer and I got to Bombay on December 26, 1992. He had arrived a few days earlier and he was waiting for me at Sahar Airport, Bombay. He had had his SUV, a patrol wagon, shipped over from Dubai and he put my luggage into it. When he left the airport he never told me what hotel we were registered in. Imagine my surprise to find that he had registered me in the Taj Mahal Hotel, Bombay, one of India’s renowned hotels. He of course had a penthouse suite for himself with room service. Imagine me meeting Indian actress Moon Moon Sen and her husband, a director, and having tea with them in their home. He later took me to the home of Amrish Puri, who acted as a high priest in the movie “Indiana Jones Temple of Doom.” A few days later I met Afzal Khan, the Indian movie director, and he invited us to have tea with him. I got a bit of a jolt out of this, because here was I, a pauper rubbing shoulders with millionaires from Indian society, and I seemed to fit in. But the shock was still to come.

From Bombay, we traveled to Mysore State, where I slept in a room at the Lalitha Palace Hotel, which was the former Maharaja of Mysore’s home. This was the only time that I ever had the opportunity to sleep in a palace.

A few days later, we had registered at an Air India Hotel in Santa Cruz, Bombay and we had gone out to meet some of his friends. We arrived at back at the hotel, and a guard dressed in livery saluted me as the sahib and opened the door for me, leaving my friend outside as part of my entourage. What the guard didn’t know was that my friend was the millionaire and I was the pauper his guest. It really got my sheikh friend annoyed at the guard. Perhaps sometimes people judge us by the way we hold ourselves and not necessarily how much money we possess. That experience gave me an insight into attitudes of people. Here was I a pauper and this sheikh was treated as a servant by the guard at the hotel door.

I left Bombay on January 8, 1993 and got to Dubai, UAE, to catch my flight back to Toronto, Ontario in Canada. But I had a bit of trouble in Dubai, getting a plane to London, because all flights were fully booked. When I got to London, I had to wait till the morning to see if I could get a seat on a plane. That night I sat at Heathrow Airport, I bought every English language newspaper in sight and read all through the night. I was really very tired, but I had to get my seat on any airline for my return to Toronto. I finally managed to get a seat on an Air India plane to Lester Pearson Airport, Toronto. On the flight, there was an Afrikaner boy, who was badly treated in London by the British immigration authorities and was coming to Canada. He was sitting in the middle row, and the Indian passengers were giving him a hard time. So as there was a seat beside me at the window, I told him that it was quite alright for him to sit there. We spoke for about 10 minutes and he fell fast asleep. When we arrived at Pearson Airport, the immigration authorities came aboard and I got cleared immediately, so I walked off the plane cleared customs and got a cab to Mississauga, Ontario and home.

That brings me to the end of this story. A few days ago, I got a special Christmas card; it had a picture of my friend Sheikh Salim Olama’s father’s palace. Apparently his father had passed away some years ago, and it was really meant to be a memento, because I had never seen this palace when I was in Dubai, UAE.

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Related: Arab/Muslim World, India, Society, History

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