The Air India Express flight touched down at Doha's Hamad International Airport with the precision of a Lionel Messi free-kick. The sprawling terminal is spacious enough to accommodate passengers from across the globe who will be travelling to Qatar for the month-long festival of football. Voted the 'Best Airport' in the world at the 2022 World Airport Awards, Hamad International Airport will be a beehive of activity in the coming days with hundreds of footballers from 32 participating nations and thousands of soccer enthusiasts starting to descend on Doha.
The first stadium I saw on my way to the hotel was Al Thumama Stadium. Al Rayyan, Al Khor, Al Ruwaiz… Over the next one month I will be coming across many places with the prefix 'Al', the definite article in Arabic and the equivalent of 'the' in English. As we drove to the hotel, Govind Chandrasekharan, a native of Changanassery who came to receive me at the airport, told me that there is a place in Qatar which is 'named after' a Malayali. As I was wondering who it could be, Govind tilted his right shoulder down and said, "Al Mohanlal" and narrated to me why the place was called so. There is a roundabout in Doha that local people, especially Malayalees, call the 'Mohanlal Roundabout'.
"Let's take a detour and go via the Mohanlal Roundout," Govind said. In fact, the intersection with a traffic signal is originally called the 'Slope Roundabout'. It is the local Malayalees who named it the Mohanlal Roundabout as there is a gentle slope in a seemingly flat area, which would have reminded them of Mohanlal’s style of walking with the trademark shoulder to one side. Govind searched the Internet and showed me the construction drawings of the road. Yes, he is right. Like Mohanlal, one side of the street has a slight incline!
I recalled the lines from Benyamin's famous novel Aadujeevitham. Najeeb, the main character of this novel, claims that he had met in masara, a goat farm in the middle of a Saudi desert where he spent three years, people who laughed like Jagathy Sreekumar, people who walked like Mohanlal and people who stammered like EMS Namboothiripad. Yes, Najeeb would have met them in the vast barrenness of the desert!
The 'Mohanlal Roundabout' testifies to the Malayali Diaspora's love for their second home. There are many other places in Doha that carry names in Malayalam. An intersection which looks like crossed scimitar swords, a symbol of Arab heritage, is locally known as the 'vaal' (sword in Malayalam) signal. Even the local Qataris have started to call it the 'vaal" signal! There is another traffic signal which confuses both drivers and pedestrians. People call it the 'crazy signal'. If you are not careful enough at this busy intersection, you may end up heading in the wrong direction!
However, as far as preparations for the FIFA World Cup are concerned, Qatar is heading in the right direction. Although some European countries are still keeping their red lights on, Qatar is going at a gallop as the kick-off of the sporting spectacle is just five days away. Remarkably, many Malayalees, who treat Qatar as their home ground, are striving hard to make the event a grand success.
