If you want to detox," remarked an associate, "come to Doha." But it was work rather than abstinence that took me to Qatar during the holy month of Ramadan, when to even ruminate about a sundowner is considered sacrilegious. It wasn't just alcohol, or its lack, that was bothersome, there was the propriety about avoiding daytime snacking. Touching down at Hamad International Airport, the flight crew had suggested that dining or drinking anything, including water, in a public place could be insensitive to local culture. Not that there was much chance of ordering a sandwich and cafe latte to go, all neighbourhood coffee shops and restaurants being shut for the duration.
Till sundown, that is, when you could join the local citizenry breaking the imposed fast with a feast fit, quite literally, for a sheikh. That's when Doha came to life. The malls, shut for the course of the day, would open at night till the wee hours of the morning. Hotels laid out special Ramadan buffets, offering the equivalent of breakfast, lunch and dinner through the night with menus that included everything from sushi to pasta. Business meetings were organised after breakfast at dusk, or over midnight lunch, and I went museum hopping at about the time I would have been tucked into bed at home. It was fun in an odd sort of way, if a tad disorienting.
What do you do in Doha when you aren't working? Friends in Delhi were forthcoming with outrageous ideas. One suggested a camel ride; another that I might want to buy the beast. If there was a lack of camels on offer, it was more than made up by the fleet of enviable cars on the road with Ramadan discounts if you were partial to a Lamborghini or Maserati to drive into the desert. Or you could buy a yacht and park it at a private jetty provided you had thought to acquire an accompanying apartment to qualify for a membership of the marina. Others suggested togging up in a dish-dash to pose for a memorable photograph, and though everyone in Doha seemed to wear one, the stores seemed to specialise strictly in retailing the equivalent of Just Cavalli and Salvatore Ferragamo. With little else to do, the women entertained themselves at shops in the malls, weighed down by shopping bags replete with shoes, dresses and makeup.
Breakfast by night ruined you for breakfast in the morning - or was that dinner at dawn? If night was the new normal for the day, then sleep became a casualty. Nocturnal shopping was no excuse for skipping diurnal conferences. While the natives practised austerities, my host was able to sneak us meals where no one was looking. "You'll come back with a glowing skin," my wife pronounced, fancying the enforced fasting as good for both soul as well as system. The puffy face that stared back at me from the mirror I blamed on lack of sleep, though the truth was probably an excess of consumption. At a souk, we dined on the Arab counterpart of haleem and biryani, at the hotel at night the specialty was whole sheep cooked and served on a bed of rice, at the office we sampled the equivalent of home cooking, desserts were compulsory for tasting the local cheeses sweetened with syrup and latticed with fine vermicelli. I daresay it's unfair I've been put on a diet by my wife only for the sin of observing local custom.
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