DUBAI DIARY: MISSILE ALERTS AND MORNING COFFEE

In a city of floor-to-ceiling glass, ordinary routines become a defiant act of belonging

- Priyanka P. Narain [e-mail]

Emergency Alerts Public Safety Alerts

n that Saturday evening the sky over Dubai began to flash with streaks of orange light and distant booms, like fireworks set off somewhere close. My 16-year-old daughter and her school friend were in the community pool, celebrating the end of their GCSE mocks. Floating on a Fatboy raft, they watched the sky the way teenagers watch fireworks anywhere—curious, mildly amused, not particularly alarmed.

Then something older than thought kicked in. My body reacted before my mind could fully catch up. I ran out of the house barefoot and down the path towards the pool, shouting for them to come inside. Halfway there I stopped. The sky had turned strangely mesmerizing. Streaks of light shot upwards and bloomed into bursts that dissolved into puffs of smoke. One after another they appeared, six in all. At that moment I didn't know what they were—drone, missile, something else entirely. I only knew I had never seen anything like it: flashes briefly illuminating the indigo sky before dissolving into soft clouds that hung above the city.

Just hours later, a little past midnight, an alarm began blaring on every phone in the house. The message was brief: missile alert. Stay indoors. Seek shelter. Avoid windows and open roads.

As jets roared overhead in long mechanical arcs, my daughters stumbled into our bedroom without saying much and scooched in between their parents. I pulled a spare mattress from the guest room and leaned it between the glass window and the thick curtains, a makeshift barrier that made no particular sense but felt instinctively necessary.