GROWING UP IN A sleepy hamlet of Sharjah in the 1980s, my siblings and I had the run of vast tracts of uninhabited desert scrub between our apartment block on Al Khan Road and a patchwork of villas scattered a short drive away—towards the Ajman coast. In our teenage years, when we moved closer to Ajman beach, Sharjah’s terrain grew sandier, with paved roads running out of asphalt at the mouths of surrounding compounds. Games of gully cricket with our Somali, Pakistani, and Emirati neighbours played out amid desert shrub and storeyshigh sand dunes. So pastoral was Sharjah then, that it was not uncommon for our neighbours to keep goats and chickens in their backyards, or for camels to come wandering onto our road. I once tried to ‘rescue’ one of these camels by cutting some rope binding its hind legs.
In the span of a generation,
