There was a green and gold taxi parked in the shade right outside our apartment. I motioned to the driver to see if he was free, and he smiled broadly. Salaam alaikum, I said. Wa alaikum salaam, he replied with more amusement than usual. I was going to pick up John's wedding ring from the Gold Souq at Madinat Zayed shopping mall, and then on to Ace hardware store at Meena port to get linseed oil and paint thinner.

 When I speak Urdu with taxi drivers in Abu Dhabi, they are not surprised. Almost everyone here speaks at least three languages, and Urdu is usually the second or third, after Pashto but before Farsi and Arabic. Out of curiosity they ask where am I from, because I don't look South Asian, but perhaps there is a region in Pakistan or Kashmir… everyone's heard of green-eyed Kashmiris, and maybe I am one. Only when I say I am American do they register some slight shock, and approval, and relief at being able tocommunicate.

 I started talking to taxi driver in Urdu. His name is Bahadur Sahab. He wears a white lace cap, and has closely cropped white hair. He lives in the apartment building next to ours, but where ours is brand new and was just a sandy field eight months ago, his is slated for demolition in the next five months. He doesn't know where he'll live after this; he's been living in that building for 15 years.

 He said he came to the UAE in 1975 from Peshawar, Pakistan. I asked if he lives with his family, and he said no, his salary isn't sufficient to sponsor his wife and children, so they live in Pakistan and he sees them once a year. He has two children, one in elementary school and one in high school. His mother and father are still alive, and he has two brothers and one sister. One other sister died a couple years ago of cancer. Her children were grown by then. At this point in the conversation we had reached the gold souq, and I asked him to wait for me while I ran in to pick up the repaired ring.

 From Madinat Zayed we headed to Meena Port. His jovial countenance invited more questions, so I kept asking. Once a year Mr. Bahadur flies to Peshawar and takes a two hour bus ride to his village to reconnectwith his family and his Pakistani life. Every week he sends money to them. He sends less money now, as rent rises and inflation cut into his salary. (I don't think the meters have been updated to reflect the 11.5 percent inflation in the cost of living in Abu Dhabi over the past year.) I told him that I was looking for a woman to practice Urdu with, and that it seemed difficult to meet women here. He said he would look for me.

 I again asked him to wait while I spent ten minutes in Ace hardware. Otherwise it would have taken me at least ten or twenty minutes to find another cab. We then headed for home. I said it sounded like a difficult life -- working so many years to send money home to a family that you rarely see. I said it was an act self of sacrifice for your family and country. In America, I said, people usually immigrate to make a better life for themselves and their families (I guess this doesn't hold for illegal immigrants, who maybe live in greater sacrifice than Abu Dhabi workers, because of added risk, and less ability to visit home). He said: "It is difficult. The truth is that no one in Abu Dhabi is happy. No one. Making money is not enough to make your heart happy. It doesn't matter how much you make. You eat and bathe, and that is a life like an animal's. After 33 years I should be able to say this is my life, here, but it isn't. I have to leave when I retire. I cannot die here. What will I do in Peshawar in my old age? I have not lived there since I was a young man."

 It was June 11, and I'd been in Abu Dhabi for three weeks. It was like a desolate warning, but it doesn't quite apply to me. I have a family here, I am the family here ("I contain multitudes" right now), and that could be the difference between partial happiness and total sacrifice. And yet he still seemed so cheerful and positive, as generous in countenance as… as a guru, a deacon, a priest. As I walked up the stairs to our apartment, still unfurnished and empty, I reflected that sending remittances home, while not as old as international trade itself, may be almost as old as the invention of currency. But this city, with something like 80 percent of its inhabitants here solely for the purpose of working, not living; everyone sacrificing their lives here for someone or something else's existence far away -- that is new. It is a whole different invention. I don't know what it means, except that we all have to be delicate with each other, for starters.