Driving Licence

Licence to Chill

7.45 and it’s over 40 celsius and the sand-laden sky from yesterday is replaced by an azure blue painting in which a yellow-hot sun now beats down on the minibus. Ashraf, the jovial, can-do, short-bearded Pakistani driver, grins in the rear-mirror as he weaves us in and out of the Formula 1 racetrack called Riyadh. I sit in the cool air-conditioned rear watching the madness pass by as we fly over fly-overs, and smile back. He is a gem.
20 minutes later and we near our destination; snaky-streams of cars and vans are parked higgelty-piggelty (a forbidden word ‘piggelty’ in this part of the globe) around the Ministry driving school and licence-centre for Riyadh. Ashraf deftly finds a vacant space with centimeters only to spare and we glide expertly into the sand. A whole city of providers surrounds the Ministry compound walls: a souk of typing pools to type documents, whole football teams of translators to translate foreign licences into Arabic, a miniature shop for huge cardboard files and staplers to provide the necessary file to stow all the bits of paper needed, tea shops, water carriers, gofers to take the unaccompanied licence-hunter (not me, I had Ashraf) to the 14 or so different crisis-rooms needed to be visited in the licence quest, and an electronic bank-teller robot to take the required monies when all the signature business was done. It’s a festival of colour, a Glastonbury of chaotic order that actually works and an industry of human endeavor to boot, all conveniently and tidily bent around the process for the acquisition of the Saudi driving licence.
10 riyals of my mountain of banknotes sees a pink cardboard folder handed over to Ashraf; two sheets of plain paper are neatly and efficiently stapled by the staple-boy into the file and we proceed to the next hut. My Youkay licence is examined and copied (20 riyals); as is my passport and Residence Permit, still crispy new. I am taken in the intense heat through the sand to another door, past a shifting dune, and to another hut – it’s called Hut Number 2, which is both logical and handy.  A battalion of turbaned men wave documents in the air as if to cool themselves, while actually they are only trying to gain the attention of the sleepy Egyptian official who is multi-tasking: smoking, using his mobile phone to order shawarmas, sipping mint tea and, in between, checking and verifying documents before placing two purple stamps on each completed chore (30 riyals). For some reason, I get priority (!) and am quickly stamped: my EU licence, passport etc. are deemed correct and I can proceed. The stamp-fellow sort of smiles at me but I am not sure.
I look at my documents and am drawn to the photograph on the main piece of important document. With horror I find that the dye from one of the many stamps from one of the many sweaty fingers engaged in stamping has run and, bang in the middle of my face, is a big purple orb. Could this be an issue, I wonder? Might I have to start all over again?
Meanwhile, the sky has got bluer. The sun has got fiercer. And the sand has got sandier. It seems like I am taking a cake out of the oven it is so hot now and the fierce sun’s air burns into my face. I gratefully duck into a cold room where two young Syrian males smoke and chat. They salaam me. My pink file is handed over; they staple in a new sheet. The guy sitting in a dirty-while coat sticks a needle into my thumb for my blood test – the pain is surprisingly and excruciatingly terrible and I want to scream. Instead I sweat and tears swell in my eyes. The Damascus Two take my 50 riyals and I take the pink file. Two more doors; wrong ones so, Ashraf undaunted, we go to find two more.
We storm inside the compound and go to Door 1 (written in Arabic: wahad). I stand in a conveyor belt, a fast-moving queue of bandaged heads: and find that it is an eye-test queue. Never mind. I get to the end of the queue – a Baluchistan fellow smells like a gorilla’s armpit as he passes me and I nearly pass out. The pong, the pain from my damaged thumb and the sick-red of the cotton wool bandage that I am now holding to stem the flow of blood from my savaged thumb (I am worrying that it will bleed all over the pink file and that this, too, added to the purple orb, will prevent me from acquiring my licence) meld as in a dangerous cocktail and I wonder if I am going to die. An ancient, fully bearded – pure white beard – Saudi fellow sits behind a tin-grey desk on which strange, sinister-looking metallic eye-testing goggles are arranged. He does not use them – he merely looks into my eyes and stamps another piece of paper. My eyes have passed muster. Both of them. Irish eyes are smiling and so are those of Ashraf the Unflappable. We move on.
The Call to Prayer echoes in the heat and sand. We are assured that there is only One God but Allah and that Mohammed is His Prophet. It is always advantageous to be reminded.
Another room, another queue. A short queue, though and a speedy signature soon sees me in yet another queue and, although I am not sure what this queue is actually for, I get another signature in my pink file. Ashraf is beamingly happy and therefore so am I.
Another trip across the sands and another room. This is a much larger room and truly looks the business.  The room is filled with rows and rows of men, eyes straight ahead, all steadily focused on a door that keeps opening and closing with people disappearing and reappearing from it and an accompanying wall of heat entering and exiting as they do so. I am ushered into a white plastic chair in Row 11 which squeaks, incidentally, like an unmentionable animal, as I sit. In fact, everyone is squeaking away and having a grand old time as we sit and wait in splendid contentment. There is great peace and harmony mixed with expectation. But, no sooner am I seated, than I am, somehow, and suddenly, summoned from this throng of human tide, whose malodorous and combined airs rise thankfully and largely up to the ceiling, and I am bowed though the door by a tall, extremely portly, Sudanese fellow with a button or three missing from his uniform top-coat. I pretend not to notice the missing buttons and am soon being manhandled into the driver’s seat of a 1950s hybrid car.
The passenger door is hanging off its hinges and is a different colour from any of the other three doors, and I am asked with a cross-cultural, paralinguistic nod, to close it. My smattering of Classical Arabic soon comes to bear fruit as I guess from the utterances of the passenger in the broken seat beside me – for I had not expected this – that this was to be a driving test. The police officer beside me, for he was the person in the broken seat, clad in a dodgy uniform and, through a smiling mouth devoid largely of teeth, indicated that I should commence. I started the engine and then surprised the Examiner (I probably nearly failed my driving test at this juncture) by adjusting the rear mirror; he had clearly never seen anything like this before. He was mystified. The side mirrors had no glass in them so I abandoned their usefulness. The rear-view mirror was kind of hanging there in the firmament roof of the jalopy; it was broken for the main part and was so layered in desert sands that it was a challenge to try to use it. Nevertheless, I adjusted it as best as I could, almost snapping it off in my endeavors, and I looked into its murky depths. It was no use – I could see nothing so, guessing there weren’t any cars or trucks coming, I pulled out onto the road (still inside the Ministry compound, I think I need to add). I whipped us into second gear and crawled around a roundabout at which point the Examiner called it a day and I guess that I must have passed; at least he scribbled something on my file. I think I left the bloodstained cotton-wool swab from my throbbing thumb in the car in all my excitement. It is probably still there.
Meanwhile, Ashraf, thinking I’d be busy driving for the next hour or so, had gone off for a crafty milky chai and, so, when I dismounted the ancient car, I had to find my own way around the different and myriad rooms. I was on my tod. He’d hoofed it.
So, a lone foreigner, I bravely entered yet another building; it was large and air-conditioned. I got a further stamp there. I next entered an adjoining building and got another stamp. Then I hit a wall – a metaphorical wall – when I found that, at the end of a particular queue, I was told it was the wrong queue. I think that’s what the chap said. Never mind. A friendly character with not an ounce of badness in him kindly pointed me towards ‘the Captain’, attired from head to foot in a starched uniform – with all buttons in place as far as I could tell - who was sitting at a large desk behind a glass wall. Quite friendly by nature, I am sure, he nevertheless quickly sent me on my way and back to the last fellow: clearly, I should not have been sent to him in the first place. Where was Ashraf? No problem. I was sent to another Captain, with full complement of buttons, starched uniform, in a mirror image of the previous Captain (it might well have been the same one) and he quickly and efficiently signed my papers with a flourish.
Then it was time to visit the electronic bank and to stick 250 Riyals into its interior. Alas, it was having none of that – the system was down.
Would you believe it: clock-work precision from the human chain had brought me so close to the award of the licence and then a man-made machine failed to do its job. Nearly there – but not quite. Inshallah. Bukaran. Marshallah. And I’d traded in my IBM for an i-Pad
Ashraf and I – for the trusty Ashraf, refreshed from his mid-morning tiffin, had returned – abandoned the quest for the day and beat a retreat. We headed for the hills.
It was even hotter on the drive back to the office. The sky was bluer, too.
Next day, I went back, paid my dues and, within 20 minutes, I had my licence. Simples.
A happy man, indeed a much better man from my cultural expedition, I switched on the engine (with a bit of a swagger) and, looking for old time’s sake in the rear-mirror, and sitting comfortably in my rented Hyundai Tuscon, I eased confidently off from the sidewalk and  into the mayhem of traffic, relishing in the luxuriant air-conditioning with the knowledge that, carefully tucked into shirt pocket, was my brand new licence to chill.