A metaphysical crisis at a supermarket veg counter

A trip to the supermarket underlines a feeling of home in Abu Dhabi for Deborah Williams

At Lulu Express, shoppers enjoy the connivence of the Baqala's but still prefer the selection available at bigger markets. Mona Al-Marzooqi / The National

The other day I went to Lulu in Khalidiyah Mall, which is not my usual grocery store, but I was in the neighbourhood and remembered that we were out of milk. Once I was there, of course, I remembered that we needed butter, bread and assorted lunch box snacks, given that my children’s school canteen would not be serving lunch during Ramadan.

I whipped into a parking place in the underground garage and remembered to take a photo of my parking spot before going inside. That’s why the smartphone was invented in the first place, isn’t it? To prevent us all from stumbling around car parks thinking “wait, were we on level B1 or B2…?” Threading my cart through Friday’s post-prayer shoppers stocking up for a weekend’s worth of iftars, I made my way to the vegetable section and then as a special treat found the little window in the back of the store where you can sometimes find someone to chop you chunks of fresh coconut.

As I walked by the mangoes from Pakistan, the apples from China, the potatoes from Lebanon, and cucumbers from Al Ain, it hit me: I was at home in a way that when I arrived in Abu Dhabi almost five years ago – mid-August, mid-Ramadan – I thought would never happen.

It had been in that very same Lulu, about two weeks after our arrival, that I had a bit of a nervous breakdown – OK, I burst into tears – because I hadn’t known to get my vegetables weighed before I went to the cashier. There was a long line (it was Friday afternoon), and when the cashier realised my mistake, she glared at me while the people behind me in line grumbled in a variety of languages. At that moment, I wanted to be magically transported back to Manhattan, where I was efficient, where I knew the rules – spoken and unspoken. Clutching my plastic bags of fruits and vegetables, I felt as if I would never again be that efficient self. Who knew that being confounded in a supermarket could precipitate a metaphysical crisis?

Before I moved to Abu Dhabi, I hadn’t thought about grocery stores as indicators of cultural comfort, a kind of adaptation index created by breakfast cereals and laundry detergents. I suppose it makes sense, though, given that that so many of us create our sense of “home” with food. We may not have Proust’s madeleine memories, but we probably have visceral reactions to this brand of biscuit, that type of bread, those sorts of apples: our childhoods nestle in the grocery store shelves. But those shelves also reflect the present. The shelves of Lulu hold the entire polyglot community of Abu Dhabi: fluffy rounds of Arabic bread, rows and rows of ghee, entire sections of Filipino specialities, tins of treacle and jars of Marmite.

Why so many varieties of ghee, I used to think, and what does a person do with labneh, and why is it so hard to find fragrance-free detergent? Now, however, I know one type of ghee from another; I have my preferred brand of labneh. (I remain perplexed, however, by the relative rarity of fragrance-free laundry soap.) I no longer get lost in the car park (thanks to my smartphone) and I know how to throw a gentle elbow into the scrum around the vegetable-weighing clerks, a job that must require a skin as thick as a dragon fruit’s.

Now, when I’m in New York grocery stores, I find myself looking around for the vegetable-weighing clerk. It’s a small thing, I guess, but definitely a marker of having a new sense of “normal”. I also know I’ve adapted because I know that when I tell people it’s regularly 45°C here in the summer, they’re going to respond by saying “but it’s a dry heat, right?” I tell them that no, it’s not a dry heat at all. Imagine the inside of a clothes dryer, I say, before it’s finished drying the clothes: it’s searingly hot and damp. That’s an Abu Dhabi summer. But don’t worry – I know where you can get chunks of fresh coconut that are a great way to beat the heat.

Deborah Lindsay Williams is a professor of literature at NYU Abu Dhabi