One Saturday in Dubai several years ago I was reading the morning newspaper when I came across a rather unusual item hidden on the back page. You’ll appreciate, I am sure, that most articles one reads in Dubai’s papers are thinly veiled PR campaigns and the headlines tend to be about money, Cartier press releases, “Terrorism doesn’t exist here” fluff pieces, more money, Louis Vuitton store openings, and/or still more money. Anything actually newsworthy is either not reported (“You spoke to a migrant worker in Dubai? Who? WHO I ASK YOU?!”) or quietly nestled in the back page behind ads for dog grooming salons (“Breaking news: poodle hair conditioners now available!”), ensuring you won’t read it anyway.
The headline was something like “Gruesome Chinese Murders”. I thought it was going to be about some poor little Chinese girl who thought she was coming to work in a restaurant but was actually kept as a living doll in a mad sheikh’s house. But the report was way stranger. It told the story of a place called Dragonmart, a massive single-story shopping mall outside Dubai where immigrant Chinese shopkeepers sell cancerously cheap plastic things for very low prices. It’s quite a hit with the desis who dig discounts and I’d been there a few times myself. Over the course of a few months, people began noticing that a string of watchmen charged with protecting the building at night had gone missing. One by one the mostly desi guards would go off to work and never return. After a few disappearances, the police thought that something sinister was afoot and so launched an investigation. What they found was so disturbing I haven’t forgotten it all these years later. Apparently the reason the guards kept vanishing was that a group of Chinese people had formed a bi-monthly fine dining club for cannibals, i.e. they had served the guards up for dinner.
Dubai had no clue how to deal with a story so bizarre that they by-and-large pretended that it didn’t happen (though few were surprised the Chinese were behind it, a racist generalization based on the wide variety of things the Chinese manage to deep-fry without judgment). Every time I have come across ‘cannibalism’ in popular culture since then – and you’d be surprised how often that is – I can’t help but think of the Demonic Dubai Dining Date I had read about, mainly because the idea that it was a large group of people and not just one nut job was a seriously terrifying concept.
[quote]I'm really wondering what recipe the cannibals chose to do the cooking, which is, upon reflection, a tasteless question[/quote]
Cut to this week: two men, brothers no less, were arrested in rural Punjab right here in the Land of the Pure for having engaged in cannibalism. I’m not kidding. Apparently they sourced out their local ingredients at a nearby graveyard, which is a special kind of depravity. That’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that this is the second time they’ve been arrested for the same thing in as many years. Apparently the siblings were convicted two years ago and then sent to jail, but because Pakistan like most countries in the world doesn’t have specific laws regarding cannibalism, they got a much-diminished charge and got out quickly. I’m really wondering what recipe they chose to do the cooking, which is, upon reflection, a tasteless question.
Trivia: the two men spent most of their two-year sentence not in jail but at the King Edward Medical College, where they were being studied for being so very crazy.
But, as a pre-op transsexual psychic/life coach once told me in Texas, crazy is as crazy does. Most of the comments left by citizens online about the cannibal incident expressed relief that at least some evil in our country is plain old-fashioned, you-know-it-when-you-see-it evil.
You know the nation has major issues when people’s first reaction on reading about two repeat-offender cannibals is: “Huh. Well, at least they don’t lie about it.” I suppose I can understand that. In a country that charged a nine-month old baby with murder (and gave another away on a game show last year!) it is technically and demonstrably worse to send a “blasphemous text” than it is to dig up corpses and make them into a curry.
I was in Islamabad the other day when the most recent bombing at the Sabzi Mandi occurred. Even now stupid people are still weaving a narrative of how the oppressed are fighting for their rights (by bombing vegetable markets); how, if “we” stopped attacking “them”, the Sabzi Mandi bombing and others like it would cease.
We are officially negotiating with terrorists, which any action movie will tell you is a Bad Idea. In the last few months, we have ceded space, power, prisoners, and leverage to the Taliban with nothing to show for it. “The bombing was a setback to talks,” said the government the day after the Islamabad attacks. No duh. From the way they’d described it, you’d think it was a minor weather incident rather than delayed talks, rather than a bomb that eviscerated families shopping for veggies on a Wednesday morning.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com and follow @fkantawala on twitter
The headline was something like “Gruesome Chinese Murders”. I thought it was going to be about some poor little Chinese girl who thought she was coming to work in a restaurant but was actually kept as a living doll in a mad sheikh’s house. But the report was way stranger. It told the story of a place called Dragonmart, a massive single-story shopping mall outside Dubai where immigrant Chinese shopkeepers sell cancerously cheap plastic things for very low prices. It’s quite a hit with the desis who dig discounts and I’d been there a few times myself. Over the course of a few months, people began noticing that a string of watchmen charged with protecting the building at night had gone missing. One by one the mostly desi guards would go off to work and never return. After a few disappearances, the police thought that something sinister was afoot and so launched an investigation. What they found was so disturbing I haven’t forgotten it all these years later. Apparently the reason the guards kept vanishing was that a group of Chinese people had formed a bi-monthly fine dining club for cannibals, i.e. they had served the guards up for dinner.
Dubai had no clue how to deal with a story so bizarre that they by-and-large pretended that it didn’t happen (though few were surprised the Chinese were behind it, a racist generalization based on the wide variety of things the Chinese manage to deep-fry without judgment). Every time I have come across ‘cannibalism’ in popular culture since then – and you’d be surprised how often that is – I can’t help but think of the Demonic Dubai Dining Date I had read about, mainly because the idea that it was a large group of people and not just one nut job was a seriously terrifying concept.
[quote]I'm really wondering what recipe the cannibals chose to do the cooking, which is, upon reflection, a tasteless question[/quote]
Cut to this week: two men, brothers no less, were arrested in rural Punjab right here in the Land of the Pure for having engaged in cannibalism. I’m not kidding. Apparently they sourced out their local ingredients at a nearby graveyard, which is a special kind of depravity. That’s not even the worst part. The worst part is that this is the second time they’ve been arrested for the same thing in as many years. Apparently the siblings were convicted two years ago and then sent to jail, but because Pakistan like most countries in the world doesn’t have specific laws regarding cannibalism, they got a much-diminished charge and got out quickly. I’m really wondering what recipe they chose to do the cooking, which is, upon reflection, a tasteless question.
Trivia: the two men spent most of their two-year sentence not in jail but at the King Edward Medical College, where they were being studied for being so very crazy.
But, as a pre-op transsexual psychic/life coach once told me in Texas, crazy is as crazy does. Most of the comments left by citizens online about the cannibal incident expressed relief that at least some evil in our country is plain old-fashioned, you-know-it-when-you-see-it evil.
You know the nation has major issues when people’s first reaction on reading about two repeat-offender cannibals is: “Huh. Well, at least they don’t lie about it.” I suppose I can understand that. In a country that charged a nine-month old baby with murder (and gave another away on a game show last year!) it is technically and demonstrably worse to send a “blasphemous text” than it is to dig up corpses and make them into a curry.
I was in Islamabad the other day when the most recent bombing at the Sabzi Mandi occurred. Even now stupid people are still weaving a narrative of how the oppressed are fighting for their rights (by bombing vegetable markets); how, if “we” stopped attacking “them”, the Sabzi Mandi bombing and others like it would cease.
We are officially negotiating with terrorists, which any action movie will tell you is a Bad Idea. In the last few months, we have ceded space, power, prisoners, and leverage to the Taliban with nothing to show for it. “The bombing was a setback to talks,” said the government the day after the Islamabad attacks. No duh. From the way they’d described it, you’d think it was a minor weather incident rather than delayed talks, rather than a bomb that eviscerated families shopping for veggies on a Wednesday morning.
Write to thekantawala@gmail.com and follow @fkantawala on twitter