At a pedestrian crossing in Abu Dhabi city, a Filipino-looking man riding a BMX fidgets impatiently with the brakes on his bike waiting for the red lights to stop the cars. Before the pedestrian signal shows that it’s safe to walk, the man has already crossed the street. The Filipino bike man marks the beginning of a period of crossing. As soon as he reaches the other side of the three-laned road, swarms of pedestrians start crossing from either side. The people here are multiple, Arabs, Indians, Pakistanis and East Asians. There must be at least 20 on each side, walking on the unevenly-spread zebra crossing. No person sticks to just one side— there are those to my left and to my right walking in the opposite direction to me. Initially, I am in the middle, but after a while I zigzag between a couple and I am now on the right. In once-colonial India and Pakistan, cars stick to the left. Here in Abu Dhabi they stick to the right. As a result, the people should also stick to the right. Theoretically — there is no fixed place on the streets for the people, no side to stick to. They negotiate their place and position, their pace, the goals of their walk as they walk. Towards the end of the crossing season, a couple of men, not wanting to wait until the next cycle, run across the street, rejecting the explicit red of the signal.

Where there aren’t any signals but only zebra crossings, or sometimes just a long white strip of paint to indicate the place of crossing, cars often refuse to yield way to pedestrians. Once in a while, a kind soul will stop and signal with her hands for me to cross. I wave back and briskly walk across. Once, at a particular pedestrian crossing next to the World Trade Center, a friend and I waited at least 10 minutes for the signal to turn green — but it never did. We soon extrapolated that the signal must be broken. But it took us 10 minutes to do that. We ran across the street and towards the World Trade Center. In the absence of working signals, surely Abu Dhabi will plunge into chaos.

On one rather cool evening in the spring, this very friend and I decided to walk back from Al Wahda Mall to NYU Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat campus. It took us a total of three hours, give or take. When we returned, we were exhausted and hungry. We ended up cooking some ramen noodles. Back in Nepal, I used to walk hours at a time, from home to away, from away to home. This was the first time in Abu Dhabi that I had walked back home, to campus. On the highway, cars and trucks and buses blasted past us at high speeds. A strip of the highway, fenced off from the rest of it by a flat white line, was our walkway. I believe it was when the Sheikh Zayed bridge started that I led my friend onto a grassy area next to the bridge. Little did I know that that grass led us under the bridge rather than parallel to it. We had to walk back and onto the highway again. At that point in time, perhaps we were the only two people walking on the highways of Abu Dhabi. But it was just the highway — nothing more, nothing less. The highway compelled a negotiated state of being, between here and there, between the city and home, between urban and domestic life. The lack of any indication of life on either side of the highway, juxtaposed with the unstopping and unending life of the vehicles running through it was at that point in time a world that perhaps only Abu Dhabi can explain to us. Only three things convinced us to keep moving: the big shiny letters of Cranleigh School, the little green board that says Exit 11, and, in the distance, the sight of the NYUAD campus.

Abu Dhabi is made up entirely of signs, written in both English and Arabic. These signs are billboards, traffic lights, big LED signs denoting a construction site, the names of restaurants and shops and hotels and hospitals written alongside their logos. Some of these signs are often repeated from one street to another.

Repetition is key to understanding Abu Dhabi. On my way from Al Wahda to Electra Street, there were at least three ADNOC petroleum stations, each of which is accompanied by a grocery store called ADNOC Oasis. I buy moisturizing cream at these grocery stores sometimes, because walking in the heat causes my skin to redden and itch. This has happened almost everytime I have walked in the city — perhaps less over the spring. Every time I moisturize or empty the water bottle in my hand into my shirt I temporarily cool my skin down.

On my way from Al Wahda to Electra Street, the streets look almost the same, except that a Kalyan Silks turns into a Burjeel Hospital. A chicken tikka place is followed by a KFC, which is followed by a Hardee’s. The chicken tikka place is undoubtedly attempting to mimic KFC’s Colonel Sanders with their own Indian-looking chef, who, I recall, was wearing a chef’s hat and saying something about tikka that resembled Colonel Sander’s now-aphorism about his chicken. Another time, on our way from Sama Tower to Madinat Zayed, we found ourselves in front of Al Wahda. Without regard to direction, we walked away from Al Wahda, deciding to walk to wherever the roads took us. To our surprise, they took us back to Sama Tower.

Abu Dhabi’s signs are constantly in a relationship with the people who walk beneath them. Typically, the signs inform or direct. But for one who requires neither information nor direction, the signs occupy. Their repetition overwhelms the subconscious, and by virtue of their effect on the subconscious rather than the conscious, they liken themselves to a steady stream of thought, neither fragmented nor continuous, but both. Walking without purpose, these signs become a source of entertainment. Their presence guides us into a world of information that, here, does not serve to inform us at all. Hence they entertain in the most vulgar way possible — like a cheap film on a short flight, or a music video that plays on repeat on a public bus. Once in a while, the signs as stream of thought is disrupted: in front of a store whose name reads Yugoslavian Furniture, a group of men, possibly Indian, lounge. The sight amuses me: a state that is now long gone, continuing here by its furniture. Is it a tribute to the Communist state, paid by an anti-capitalist individual in the modern, quasi-capitalist Middle East? Does the irony matter as much as I think it does? The men who sit in front of the store — are they aware of the symbolism that I, or someone else in my stead, attribute to that name?

Writing about places can take one of two forms. It can either be didactic and instructional, as in a travel guide, or a certain kind of travel narrative or it can be poetic, as in a memoir. In the latter, the writing is ekphrastic, written for nothing but the sake of writing. The result of such an exercise is often sheer poetry. It has the capacity to become didactic but typically, even after interpretation, such poetry refrains from becoming didactic. Its meanings are multivalent and are manifested in the subjective self — both of the writer and the reader.

On Hamdan Street, there is a Nepali restaurant called Nepali Palace. The food there is not all that great, but it is not inedible — and anyway, it is Nepali food. A little further away from Nepali Palace is Kathmandu Salon, where I once got a haircut from one Mr. Sunny Thakur, who wanted desperately to give me a hard part despite my insistence otherwise. From Hamdan Street to the World Trade Center, one walks past a civilization that looks distant to the present: rows of old houses, their paint peeling, their concrete very different from the metallic looks of the skyscrapers elsewhere in Abu Dhabi. These buildings look unoccupied: who lives here? In the area there are watch-repair shops, small local Pakistani or Indian cafeterias and these places are also sometimes unoccupied. Sometimes an entire street goes by where it is only me,my friend and an occasional car, and all three of us are parts of ourselves. Where are the people who live in these houses? If they went away where did they go? Before they went away, who were they?

The people who had lived here were temporary. Their rootedness in Abu Dhabi had been dependent on a single stamp on their passports. Unlike my own student visa, nicely pasted on a page of my Nepali passport, I imagine the stamps on these people’s passports as ugly, blue ink running out from the page and onto all the other pages of their passports, staining their fingers as they stand in line hours on end at a government bureau. Or perhaps, they have visas like my own — earning good money, and living happily with their families, in air-conditioned homes in downtown Abu Dhabi. In my thoughts they worked in construction, either as labor or as management, but never as both. They had hopped from bus to airplane to bus and back again every day until there came such a time when a parent had died and they had had to return to mourn, only to never again return, caught in the spirals of funeral after funeral, grief, work, the multitude of practical concerns. Or they had flown business on Etihad and now they have moved away to new homes. These people are Nepali, Indian, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, Filipino — or they are not.