Between Departures

Dubai is a city built for arriving and leaving. Almost no one is from here. Almost everyone has a reason to go.

This is a book about the people who stayed anyway.

When Oloi Shorua arrived in Dubai in October 2024, he came with two large bags, a resident visa, and the particular uncertainty of someone building something from the beginning. What followed was not the Dubai of photographs - not the towers and the spectacle and the curated glamour - but the Dubai that exists between all of that. A hotel suite in Barsha Heights. The same breakfast every morning for two years. A driver who waited outside driving school and came back when the money was difficult. A bar that felt like home until, on the first of April, it closed.

Between Departures moves through the operational geography of expatriate life - the back roads and the budget meals, the karaoke rooms and the Creek at night, the people who arrived from Burkina Faso and Angola and Goa and Ethiopia and found themselves, briefly, at the same table. It is a book about the friendships that form without being decided, the routines that hold a life together when nothing else is certain, and the particular kind of loyalty that only appears when you are vulnerable in a place that was never supposed to be permanent.

Then war came. The sky changed. Most people left.

Some stayed.

A literary memoir about belonging, impermanence, and the city that will not remember you - but that you will not forget.