As I was procrastinating from brainstorming ideas for this week’s blog, I came across a podcast hosted by Sheen Gurrib called Dream, Girl. And her guest on the podcast was a lady of Indian origin, Akanksha Arora, who was stepping up to be elected as the UN Secretary General. She spoke about how she grew up in Saudi and that was an ‘Aha’ moment for me. So this week, I’ll be talking about my story of growing up in the Middle East, specifically, Saudi.
Let’s start with how Dad moved from a small town in India called Aligarh to Saudi Arabia! Dad got a job offer from a company based in Doha in the early 1980s. He was then transferred to the company’s branch in Saudi Arabia in the late 80s. In Saudi Arabia, he moved to a town called Tabuk. And shortly after that, he was asked to lead a team to build a power plant in the hill station of Saudi Arabia, Abha.
After a year of my birth in Mumbai, I was flown to Abha. I’ve spent most of my childhood years there. Since Dad was working for the Saudi Electric Company, he was provided company accommodation in the SCECO area, which is where I made my first friends. We had Indian neighbours mostly and they were from different parts of India and we were close friends. I used to borrow my friend’s bicycle quite often to take some quick rounds around the SCECO area. Here’s a picture Mom had taken from the good old days of me giggling while sitting atop a bonnet of a neighbour’s car.
I was based in Abha until I was 7 and that’s when Dad decided to send my brother and I to Mumbai for education. Since there weren’t any good secondary schools that provided education with English as the primary language, my parents decided to send us to Mumbai to pursue our education. So, we moved to Mumbai in 1999 and the transition wasn’t easy as an 8 year old. It was nice to be living with my maternal grandmother, but I was very attached to my Dad and leaving him wasn’t an easy task. It involved a lot of tears and several calls from him talking about how this distance was key for a better future. As I slowly inched into my teens, it became a lot easier to deal with the distance. It almost became second nature to stay away from my parents.
Mumbai was primarily the education base, which meant that I spent my school vacations with my parents in Abha. In India, we have two vacations in a year, one is in summer, from late April to early June and the other is a Diwali break, usually for a period of 20 to 25 days in either October or November. I enjoyed flying back and forth. It really got me hooked to travelling. Yes, it didn’t involve a change in destination, yet, the change was welcome. It brought a healthy balance in my life.
Abha looks absolutely beautiful in the month of Ramadan. The trees along the streets were always decorated with beautiful fairy lights and houses decorated with traditional lamps. The work hours were shorter, which meant that Dad would be home early from work and right after Iftar we would head out for a long drive on the outskirts of the city, which looked stunning in the night.
I loved our road trips. Dad’s work involved managing projects on power plants around the western coast of Saudi. Getting to these power plants involved moving to the cities at the start of the weekday and getting back to Abha during the weekends. One summer, he was asked to work on a project based in a small city named Sharourah. Sharourah is mostly a sand-dune paradise. And it involved 7 to 8 hour-long drives from Abha to Sharourah. So we would leave Abha at 6 or 7 in the evening, make a stop in Najran, which is 4 hours away and then move for Sharourah the next day for another 4 hours. Since Abha is in the mountains, it meant we would drive down a mountain road, which is always picturesque. Yes, most of the mountains are barren, yet, it’s absolutely gorgeous.
We would then descend and start to feel the heat in the car. It’s also a beautiful shift in the landscape. From barren mountains to palm trees and short green bushes and later just heaps and heaps of golden sand. And as we move to Sharourah, the sand dunes start growing. And some of them are as tall as mountains.
The Saudi coasts are stunning as well. I managed to see the Red Sea for the first time in my life and dished out my shaky phone camera to capture it. I really wish I had a decent camera to do justice to what my eyes could see. Another interesting aspect of travelling by the mountainside are sighting baboons. Yes, they’re always waiting in groups on the edges of the mountain fences. We would encounter them each time we were out on our road trips and Dad made sure we carried a few extra bananas to share. Here’s a photo of one helping me take moody and abstract shots! 🙂
Now that Dad has retired and returned to India, we can’t visit Saudi until it’s for the purpose of pilgrimage. But I do hope to return soon and relive some of my childhood memories from SCECO, do a couple of road trips around Saudi and maybe, just maybe high-five the baboons!