The Empty Quarter / Rubu’al Khali: Dreamwork of Golden Grains

It first rained on Rann of Kutch, the drought-stricken salt desert, on the day Fathima entered the village. Everyone still remembered that day and the girl who had brought rainclouds along into that Monsoon-forgotten hamlet. I recall the images I conjured up while reading The Love Across the Salt Desert by Keki N Daruwalla. No one dared to do the impossible by crossing the desert except those few who did so for “reasons of their own”. Nawab Hussain, for instance, made the journey for “the daughter of the spice seller; she who smelled of cloves and cinnamon”. Ever since reading that story I have romanticized the desert.

Here I am now in a distant relative of the Rann of Kutch: Rubu’al Khali, commonly known as the Empty Quarter, a territory shared by Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Oman, and Yemen.

        

The silence, the clarity, the mystery, the remoteness, the vastness, the serenity, the eternity and the capricious nature of a wild, other-worldly desert! Rubu’al Khali, 650,000 square kilometers of contiguous golden sand, 1000 kilometers in length and 500 kilometers in width. I had always dreamed of visiting it one day. That day finally came a few months back while I was accompanying a friend of mine on his way to a remote hospital.

I don’t really remember where and when I first heard the name Rubu’al Khali. But I do know I heard about the Empty Quarter long ago. I guess I first came across it in ‘Laurence of Arabia’.

Desert ecology has always been somewhat of a puzzle for scientists and desert inhabitants (called Bedouins) alike. Large swaths of sand stretch beyond one’s ken to the horizon. The sands are golden with a fine grain. I collected some in a bottle I found lying around to bring home just for a kind of fetishist attachment I felt after spending a mere couple of hours there. I hadn’t done anything remotely similar even during my visits to the holiest places earlier. But this time something in me tempted me to. I just yielded to rid myself of the compulsive urge to act whimsically.

The shifting sand dunes, and the curvaceous peaks forming a serpentine line following a mysterious symmetry, are all really alluring. It can win the heart of the worst Philistine. I will show you beauty in a handful of sand grains, hastening back to Earth through my fingers as smoothly as in an hourglass.

Stopping by a lonely car bay, we engaged in some stargazing. Never had I seen such a mesmerizing, starlit sky, ebullient illumination at its best. That brought me to the realization that there was much more to see in the sky than back home, on Mother Earth, than I had previously thought. The car made its way homeward in total silence, through that mesmerizing no man’s land.

Raised Guards:Your Crops Were Under Our Eyes

"Now, I may look like an eyesore to many youngsters. But not so long ago, I stood tall, keeping an eye on the crop that sustained your grandparents. My presence marked the existence of a seemingly sleepy hamlet in every valley in the vast stretch of apparently barren land. I was all alone all the time, keeping guard. Kasaba, that was the name they called the cylindrical tower made of mud, wood and rock flakes that was me.

"Kasabas were built in the same fashion as any adobe building where the people went once their guard was down.  A tubular structure that withstood the perils of the seasons, even though it was simply made of wooden logs, twigs, mud, and rock flakes. I have puzzled over how I survived the sandstorms, rainstorms and even hailstorms that were common before you all were born over here.

"People used to mount the kasaba to stay watchful of the crops they were raising. By every growing field, every tribe used to have one or two, depending on the topography. The same must have been used to scare away animals and birds that might spoil the crops."

Recently, as I was browsing through the stacks of books at Jarir bookstore,  one book really caught my eye: Back to Earth: Adobe Building in Saudi Arabia. I spent a while thumbing through it, marveling at the curious pictures in color. I looked in amazement at those pages. Quite instinctively, I even ran my fingers over the photos to feel if what was being depicted was dirt and rock pieces structurally engineered with logs of wood. The book tells how a kasaba was built back then, and the materials used. It includes a few pictures from Abha where I am currently living. Hopefully, these structures will never be razed to the ground, but live to tell their fascinating tale to future generations.