Today's the day I get my drivers license. In
Saudi Arabia.
Our predicament lies in the latter sentence.
I arrive in the waiting room 10 minutes late for
the practical driving test. As expected, the room was packed. The
instructor in the room points a finger at me and blares: "Aotomatic wala
manual?" "Automatic" I reply. He hands me my folder and physically
ushers me to a line of approximately 40 men, all sitting on hardened stools. A
lot of people drive automatic, I think to myself, and I was 10 minutes late so
I probably deserve this.
The line on my right was much shorter.
I presumed it was the line of people who were
going to do their tests on a manual car. Lucky them. It was the pinnacle of
summer heat outside this shack-looking excuse of a waiting room. Dreading the
hours to come, I whipped out my headphones; placed my bottom on the flat
surface of concrete; and hit the play button on my phone.
With the undertone of Quranic verses in my ear
and the rhythmic dribble of sweat from my forehead, I started seeing things.
Not mirages. Things that were already there, but only now making sense. Like an
uncharacteristic puzzle that you ignore at first but then can't resist the urge
to solve.
Our line wasn't progressing at all, despite
batches of people being moved forward, out of the waiting room and into the
driving grounds. Then I noticed that the line on my right only consisted of
Saudi's who were also giving tests on automatic vehicles. The difference, you
ask? They get to go first. Is it a rule? Or an agreement?
No. And that's what makes it worse.
There lies a tacit consensus amongst the
people that the Saudi man goes first. And it irritated me, knowing that a Saudi
who would arrive 30 minutes late will still get to go before the first man in
my line. But would that man say anything? No. Because the mood had been set in
that waiting room, and to cause a disturbance to that mood would lead to the
disorder of layers of unspoken rules. The resilience of the ecosystem would be
tested and, oh how I assure you, it would crush that man. Burry him into
blankets of mud, grass, sand, roots, and leaves. Silence him. And so, my dear
readers, that is why the man remained silent instead of being silenced.
As a foreign inhabitant of this country, I can
testify to the notion that this attitude not only exists in that waiting room,
but in the entire country - on so many different levels. But you see,
this story doesn't have a great ending. And protagonists rarely focus on
endings.
Expats make up almost 1/3 of this country's
population and contribute to around 70% of the work force. Those statistics, by
themselves, might allure you towards a daunting predicament. They need us much
more than we need them, but they still seem to have created an arbitrary social
leverage because of the color of their passport. It is such a fragile cycle, a
volatile grip. If broken, then every aspect of this country's sociopolitcal
development will be challenged. The government has already realised this and
put policies such as Saudization in place. An attempt to
tighten the grip, lesser the circumference.
My thought process comes to a halt as the following verse plays in my earphones:
***
As I sat in the waiting room that day watching
the men in thobe's butcher their driving but still
coming back with passed slips, a smile played its way to my
lips.
The only clock in the room ticked.
And I waited.
