February 28, my husband and I were in the backyard with the dog, throwing a ball in the late afternoon light, doing the ordinary domestic thing that you do without thinking about it, when the sky made a sound neither of us had a word for. One boom, somewhere distant and close at the same time, and then the three of us, human and animal, just stood there looking at each other in the particular silence that follows something you can’t immediately categorise. That was the beginning of the longest month any of us in the Middle East have ever lived through.
In the early days, every interception was a small dissociation. You’d hear it and feel time do something strange, feel your hands continue their task, chopping something, finishing a sentence, while your brain floated somewhere above you running calculations: how far, which direction, is this escalating, should I move away from the windows. *A psychotherapist based in Dubai described it to reporters as a state where people lose their sense of control over their own lives, and that is exactly what it felt like at the start, that the sky had become a variable you had no relationship with and no tools for. *By the third week, the body made its own decision. The booms became background. The nervous system, presented with too many threats to process individually, simply renegotiated its threshold.
Now I hear one and move on with my day, most of the time, and I am aware that this is either resilience or a kind of quiet damage and I have not yet figured out which it is. This morning, though, one was loud enough to shake the windows and pull me out of sleep, which is why I am sitting at my dining table at 4am writing this instead of lying in the dark waiting for the next one.
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We have had thunderstorms, rain, lightning, missiles, and drones this past month, and somewhere in the third week the categories started to blur in a way that is genuinely disorienting. One evening I stood on the balcony listening to something overhead and could not tell, with any confidence, whether it was an interception or a thunderclap, and then the rain came and it felt like relief in a way I hadn’t expected, familiar and soft and completely indifferent to geopolitics, which is the only kind of relief available right now.
The phrase that keeps appearing in every news report, from every correspondent trying to describe life here, is “functioning but tense.” That is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go very far. What functioning but tense actually costs is sleep, and the quality of your attention, and the ability to make a plan that extends more than two or three days without an internal caveat attaching itself to every item on the list.
This conflict arrived in the middle of Ramadan, and even from the outside of that month, the collision was visible in a way that stayed with me. The city has a specific quality during Ramadan, a deliberateness, a warmth that is hard to articulate to someone who hasn’t felt it, and this year that quality was still present underneath everything, people still gathering, still showing up for each other, still observing the month with the same intention, but carrying it alongside something that made the whole thing feel heavier than it should have been. I walked past restaurants that were strung with lights and half empty, and there was something about that particular image, the table set for a celebration that the city was too tired to fully inhabit, that said more about this month than most of the coverage did.
The surge in anxiety has cut across almost every cross-section of life here, with parents trying to manage their own fear while keeping the home environment steady, and expat professionals holding two fears at once: what is happening here, and the family back home watching coverage that is often more alarming than the reality on the ground. Every Indian I know in this city has been fielding the same calls, from parents, from aunties with news alerts, from cousins who send voice notes at odd hours, and the calls carry a specific kind of pressure that is hard to explain to someone who didn’t grow up inside it. It is not just concern. It is the entire weight of the original decision to leave, resurfacing. You left India to build something, and that choice was celebrated when things were going well and you were visiting for Diwali and posting pictures of the skyline. The moment the skyline has smoke in it, the implicit bargain is called in. Come back. You proved your point. And you are on the phone saying I’m fine, my whole life is here, while trying to hold that sentence steady against everything that is currently testing it.
There is one more texture worth naming, the specific experience of reaching for something ordinary and finding it slightly off. The banking app that showed an error for two days after the AWS outages. The delivery that arrived two hours late with no explanation. The small things that had always worked so seamlessly you’d forgotten they were systems at all, suddenly requiring your attention, reminding you they were fragile in ways you’d never needed to consider before. None of it catastrophic. All of it accumulating, taking up space in your head that used to be available for something else.
The economy is taking the kind of hit that hasn’t fully surfaced in the headlines yet but is already visible in every restaurant that has slashed its prices, every luxury hotel running promotions it would never have needed before, every beach club that is suddenly, unusually, easy to get into. Tourism represents nearly 13% of the UAE’s GDP and supports approximately 925,000 jobs, most of which are filled by expats, and all of that is under pressure now in ways that are uneven and hard to map cleanly. Salary cuts of up to 30% are being implemented at companies that are not failing but are simply trying to stay intact until the other side of this. A young perfume seller in one of the malls put it plainly to a reporter: missiles and drones don’t scare him, but the prospect of no longer being able to afford to stay in Dubai, that is what frightens him. That line is doing a lot of work. It is the sentence underneath all of this, for most of us.
For years, Dubai had been built on an unspoken promise: that whatever was happening elsewhere in the Middle East, this city would remain different, that the conflicts which destabilised the region would somehow stop at its borders. Since February 28, that promise has been tested in a way it has never been tested before. The city has held, the systems have held, the government response has been composed and effective, and I want to say all of that clearly because it is true and it matters. But underneath the composure is a city that has spent a month absorbing something it was not supposed to have to absorb, and the weight of that is in the faces of people you pass in the supermarket, in the way conversations trail off when someone asks how you are doing, in the particular flatness of the answer.
Earlier this year I was planning to launch my business, a gut health supplement brand I have been building for a long time, and when I got the corporate job I framed it to myself as financial runway, a way to fund the next phase of the build while drawing a salary. That was the January calculation, and it was a reasonable one.
The March calculation is something else entirely. The job now feels like shelter, not strategy, and I notice the difference between those two things even though I am not entirely sure what to do with the distinction yet. The question I keep returning to about the business is not the regulatory question or the formulation question or the unit economics question. The question is whether people have the bandwidth right now for a wellness product, whether gut health registers as a priority when the economy is bruised and jobs are uncertain and the sky overhead has become something you listen to differently than you used to. I do not have a clean answer, and I suspect nobody does. What I do know is that this is the question every founder in this region is sitting with at some version of 4am, in whatever room they ended up in when sleep stopped being reliable.
There is a version of the resilience narrative that I understand the appeal of, the one that says the city is standing, the systems worked, people are still going out to dinner, life continues, and all of that is true. The government stayed visible and composed in the early days, which gave the population something to anchor to, a visible signal that the people responsible for the city’s safety were not rattled. The interceptions have been extraordinary by any measure. And people stayed. Overwhelmingly, people chose to stay. The life they had built here was real, and they were not willing to treat it as provisional simply because the month had become hard.
What the resilience narrative tends to skip over is the texture of what a month like this actually costs at the level of daily life. Something shifts inside you when you experience firsthand what once felt distant, when the conflict you used to read about in other people’s cities turns up in yours and you have to learn to read it through a completely personal lens. The survival backpack by the door. The water stored in the bathroom. The extra cash because you learned not to assume that infrastructure you relied on every single day will always be exactly where you left it. These are small adaptations individually, and collectively they represent a renegotiation of the basic assumptions you live by, the ones you didn’t even know were assumptions until they stopped being certain.
We are not traumatised in the dramatic sense, most of us. We are intact and accounted for and the buildings are standing and the coffee shops are open. But we have spent a month compressing our nervous systems into a shape that allows normal life to continue, and compression of that kind has a cost that does not invoice you immediately, that tends to arrive later, all at once, in the form of exhaustion you cannot fully explain to anyone who wasn’t here.
I have been living in this city long enough to know that it will come back, that Dubai has a relationship with adversity that is different from most places, that the ambition and the money and the speed and the noise will return because the whole project of this city requires them to. The city has always understood itself as a place that outlasts its own instabilities, and that understanding is probably right. But the people who lived through every previous chapter had to get through the month first, before the recovery narrative was available to them, and that is exactly where we are now. Still inside it. Still listening. Still making coffee at 4am and sitting with the question of what comes next, the honest answer being that nobody has it yet, and so the city does what cities do in the absence of certainty, which is continue, imperfectly and stubbornly, until a better answer arrives.
The dog is asleep at my feet. The dining table is cold. Somewhere outside, the sky is quiet for now.
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