Pearl Of The Gulf

BETWEEN PEARL DIVING AND LAND ROVERS, OIL WELLS AND GRAND PRIX TRACKS, BURIAL MOUNDS AND INDOOR SKYDIVING, SUMEET KESWANI FINDS HIMSELF IN TWO BAHRAINS THAT COEXIST IN PERFECT HARMONY

 

- Sumeet Keswani

Zahra keeps fiddling with her hijab as she intersperses titbits about Bahrain with her own life stories. She’s a Muslim millennial born in a Gulf country. Naturally, she seems torn between the old and the new. Between modern feminism and timeless patriarchy. As if reading my mind, Zahra recounts the day she found a picture of her grandmother in her prime. “She was wearing a miniskirt in the 1960s!” Zahra exclaims in an exaggerated show of disbelief. “Today, she doesn’t even let me leave the house without an abaya or at least a hijab.”

Zahra al Muhammad is the 24-year-old guide who’s leading our tour through the kingdom of Bahrain. Outside our air-conditioned bus, the sun seems to be vaporizing everything in sight. Every time I step out, my camera lens is fogged by the humidity and my eyes melt into puddles. So when the waiter offers me a cool drink of saffron with chia seeds called zaffron at Ateeq Alsoof, an old restaurant in Manama—Bahrain’s capital and largest city—I gulp it down in a hurry only to realise that it is nauseatingly sweet. The locals here like their saffron, I’m told. ‘Ateeq Alsoof’ is part of a sentence that means, “We prefer the old over the new,” Zahra tells me. Over the next few days, I will come across this sentiment a lot while discussing the new generation of Bahraini youth, who are doing the exact opposite.

The kingdom of Bahrain is made up of 33 natural islands and 50 artificial ones. It is home to over 1.4 million people but half of them seem to be vacationing abroad since it’s summer here in July. In the National Museum, our first touristy stop, we get a taste of the kingdom’s history. Relics from the Stone Age and Dilmun civilisation tell intriguing stories from the pre-Islam eras.