There is a joke that children who grew up overseas have a university degree before they get a driver's licence. At the age of 23, I had fallen into this category. The time had come to get my licence. It was not by choice; taxi fares had doubled. I reluctantly prepared to bid farewell to passionate haggling, political discussion and heartfelt translations of Bollywood love ballads. No more would I ride in Ras al Khaimah taxis. I would learn to drive.
After an interesting afternoon at the traffic police - involving a blood test, eye test, many cups of sugary tea and a discussion regarding the merits of one wife or four, I got my learner's permit. The police told me to attend the Corniche driving school, "the best school in RAK", they assured me. I hadn't driven since the age of 14, when my friends and I would drive laps around the RAK prayer ground. This is where most teenage boys in the city learn to drive.
However, I had only driven around the prayer ground twice. Our instructor, Majid - a friend three years our senior - had banned me from driving after I confused the brake with the accelerator. "You know, Anna, maybe, yanni, maybe, this is not a good idea in my car," he said gently. This time, I thought, would be different. I imagined myself driving my friends for shawarma sandwiches before morning prayer call, cruising down the Corniche after a UAE football victory with my friends sitting on the roof waving UAE flags, and driving to abandoned fishing villages on the southern Omani coast. The possibilities seemed endless.
Hopes were high as I walked through the door of the ladies' driving school. The ladies' driving school was a walled car park, where there was room for one driver to practice reverse parking and one driver to practice parallel parking. There was a pink, mildewed couch where women sat and waited their turn. An elderly Pakistani woman in an abaya explained that I needed to do 10 hours of practice and then I could go for a parking test. Afterwards, I could begin "outside lessons" on the city roads.
The school, she explained, didn't make appointments. I just had to show up, sit on the pink couch, and hope for the best. I arrived the next day and sat expectantly on the pink couch. After an hour of watching women park cars, it was my turn. I got in the driver's seat, adjusted my headrest and mirrors and reached for my seat belt. "No," ordered my instructor, angrily tapping my seat belt. "Inside, no seat belt. No problem!" Hearing her limited English, I explained in Arabic that even if a seat belt wasn't necessary for parking practice I wanted to wear it. We haggled over the issue and eventually I prevailed.
This was the beginning of a doomed relationship. Each lesson began with her tirade against seat belts. At the beginning, she sat beside me in the car and told me when and how many times to turn the wheel. Often, she would yell at me in English to steer left while pulling the wheel right. She refused to speak Arabic. Parallel parking was taught by formula. There were certain metal poles placed at intervals in the car park. Students were taught to turn the wheel a certain number of times when the poles were visible at certain parts of the car. The problem was, this only taught students to parallel park that particular car at that particular location.
One day, she sat watching me from a plastic chair for an hour, only to inform me after my lesson finished that I had done it completely wrong. In the late 1990s, it was common to see instructors in Ras al Khaimah clap a student on the back of his head if he drove onto a kerb or over a speed bump too quickly. Driving instructors are no longer allowed the privilege of such painful punishments and I suspect my instructor deeply regretted this.
Eventually, I gave up and gave in to my dad's requests to learn to drive in Canada. However, the hours spent waiting on the pink couch were not in vain. Due to the fact that the school did not make appointments, many women would gather, often with children or grandmothers, and sit on the couch with me for an hour or two, to wait for a 20-minute lesson. Ten years ago in RAK, most young Emirati women couldn't drive. Today, ladies driving schools are filled with young, educated women determined to learn. One 17-year-old girl attended lessons daily. She had done over twenty hours of parking. Her father didn't want her to drive until she completed her university degree, another four or five years in the future. But she insisted on her right to take lessons.
My driving instruction in RAK may not have taught me to parallel park successfully, but she did teach me to be grateful for the opportunity to learn and the independence that comes with driving. And that was a lesson worth learning. azacharias@thenational.ae
