Dubai, UAE: On that Saturday evening the sky over Dubai began to flash with streaks of orange light and distant booms, like fireworks set off somewhere close. My 16-year-old daughter and her school friend were in the community pool, celebrating the end of their GCSE mocks. Floating on a Fatboy raft, they watched the sky the way teenagers watch fireworks anywhere—curious, mildly amused, not particularly alarmed.
Then something older than thought kicked in. My body reacted before my mind could fully catch up. I ran out of the house barefoot and down the path towards the pool, shouting for them to come inside. Halfway there I stopped. The sky had turned strangely mesmerizing. Streaks of light shot upwards and bloomed into bursts that dissolved into puffs of smoke. One after another they appeared, six in all. At that moment I didn’t know what they were—drone, missile, something else entirely. I only knew I had never seen anything like it: flashes briefly illuminating the indigo sky before dissolving into soft clouds that hung above the city.
Just hours later, a little past midnight, an alarm began blaring on every phone in the house. The message was brief: missile alert. Stay indoors. Seek shelter. Avoid windows and open roads.
As jets roared overhead in long mechanical arcs, my daughters stumbled into our bedroom without saying much and scooched in between their parents. I pulled a spare mattress from the guest room and leaned it between the glass window and the thick curtains, a makeshift barrier that made no particular sense but felt instinctively necessary.
For that night the four of us slept in the same bed, folded into each other as much as under the blanket. By the next evening, our routine evolved. A dressing area, the most interior part of the house with no windows, became the place our children drifted to whenever another alert sounded — their small bunker, assembled out of habit rather than panic. Sprawled there, my teens would watch childhood favourites—’Ben & Holly’, ‘My Little Pony’—safety rituals for their nervous systems.
In Dubai, adaptation tends to happen this way: quietly, almost matter-of-factly. Families adjust their routines, WhatsApp groups hum with speculation, and by morning the city resumes its rhythm of café lines, work meetings and online schooling, as if nothing extraordinary had happened.
Over the next several days the alerts would repeat. Fighter jets would scramble overhead. WhatsApp groups filled with rumours and reassurances.
Some rumours were elaborate. Videos circulated claiming Dubai airport had been hit. Others warned that densely populated residential towers were the real targets. In several neighbourhood groups, residents discussed ordering mattresses in bulk to place against their windows. In a city of floor-to-ceiling glass, this briefly seemed sensible.
Alongside the videos—posted three minutes ago, eight seconds ago—people began making plans: drive to Oman, cross the border, catch a flight out of Muscat. Anywhere that felt farther from the sky.
In our own neighbourhood, the instinct toward normalcy began to take deliberate shape. A wildlife enthusiast continued spending her mornings photographing birds, bees, stray cats and reflections on the water, posting them to the group each morning — small punctures in the anxiety bubbles of the night. The community organized a floral arrangement workshop for residents—a small attempt, the organizers said, to give people a sense of calm and joy during an unsettled week.
Beneath a sky riddled with jets, many showed up. For two hours, we stood around long tables, threading stems through butter paper and ribbon, arranging wildflowers and roses into careful shapes, pretending briefly the world outside did not exist. Conversations drifted deliberately away from school closures, flight cancellations or the latest rumours circulating online.
It was, on the surface, an ordinary morning. Yet, the act of standing there with flowers while fighter jets occasionally passed overhead felt strangely defiant. When the workshop ended, everyone carried their arrangements home like small trophies of normalcy.
Within 24 hours, the government had also opened a dedicated mental health helpline. The reasoning seemed straightforward enough. Many residents here live far from their families. A missile alert in the middle of the night, in a city where most people are expatriates, can carry a particular kind of anxiety.
In some communities, residents also organized their own forms of support. One well-known rapid transformational therapist offered free sessions to help people manage the anxiety of repeated alerts.
The speed of response was notable. In the middle of an unfolding security situation, the authorities had also turned their attention to the emotional state of the people experiencing it.
For some long-time expatriates, the response highlighted something else: a sense of equal protection that they had rarely experienced elsewhere. One resident who had previously lived in Singapore during the covid-19 pandemic told me the contrast was striking.
“In Singapore, the divide between citizens and expatriates became very clear during covid,” she said. “Locals received vaccines first, financial support and guaranteed re-entry if they travelled. Expats on employment passes could not even leave the country without risking being locked out.”
In the UAE, she said, the experience felt fundamentally different. “What stood out was that the government didn’t treat Emiratis differently from expatriates—from billionaires to delivery drivers. Everyone heard the same message: you are our family and we will protect you.”
At a book club meeting that week, no one cancelled. An Iranian woman who has lived in Dubai for years spoke quietly about the strange duality of the moment. She said she felt completely safe here, but was deeply anxious about her family back home. Internet restrictions in Iran meant she could only occasionally hear from them—only when they managed to call from a landline.
The contrast was stark: a city functioning almost normally while somewhere else the connections that tether families together had gone silent. For many people here, distance from family is a permanent fact of life rather than a temporary disruption. In cities built by migrants, belonging is assembled slowly—through neighbours, routines and the intangible infrastructures of mutual care.
Tourists stranded by flight disruptions were told their hotel bills would be covered. The message repeated across official channels: remain calm, stay indoors if alerts sounded, and rely on verified updates.
In the middle of the noise, the effect was clarifying.
On the WhatsApp groups, the tone of conversation shifted quickly.
Don’t forward rumours. Don’t believe every video. Wait for official information.
And then something else began to emerge alongside the anxiety: conversations not just about leaving Dubai, but about returning to it.
Friends stuck abroad were trying to get back. Families debated cutting short trips and flying home. In a moment when the region felt uncertain, many people seemed oddly certain about one thing—that Dubai was still the place they wanted to be.
Cities built by migrants often develop a different relationship with uncertainty. Most of the people who live in them have already crossed borders once—sometimes more than once—in search of opportunity or stability. They have learned that home can be constructed rather than inherited. When uncertainty arrives, the instinct is not always to abandon that construction but to hold on to it.
Actor Vivek Oberoi, who had been in India when the war began, returned to the UAE and described the feeling simply. “For all of us—from almost 200 nationalities who live here—the UAE is home,” he said. He spoke of the “steady leadership and unwavering calm” that made people feel safe returning. His sentiment was echoed by many others.
Sarina, an Australian expat and mother of four, who has lived in multiple countries, told me after the first shock and uncertainty, the challenge was to find real information “in a world gone mad with misinformation.” But the government response brought reassurance. “I suddenly felt this strange sense of civic pride about the place we live, this convergence of all of us Emiratis and expatriates into this new cultural identity where we were all in it together. Belonging isn’t only about where you are from, but where you choose to build your life—this is my home and I am not leaving.”
In the days that followed, life in the city acquired a strange dual rhythm. Missiles and drones continued. Fighter jets continued to scramble. We kept our gaze fixed on every unfamiliar sound in the sky. Debris occasionally struck buildings and set apartments on fire. Yet the clarity and constancy of information had a steadying effect.
Even though alerts arrived in the middle of the night, the routines of the city kept asserting themselves.
Children stayed home. Parents worked remotely. But cafés were full and every machine at the gym was occupied. Parents still dropped children off at tennis practice. In a place where most residents have chosen to build their lives far from home, routine itself seemed to function as a kind of collective steadiness.
Amid the barrage of apocalyptic analysis that the internet quickly becomes, I began to notice the distance between the global narrative and the lived experience of that week.
All this was unfolding during Ramadan. Many of the men and women responsible for maintaining air corridors and security operations were fasting through the long daylight hours.
We walked our dogs. We went to the gym. We watched reruns of our favourite shows. My husband went to the office. I took the children to the mall to see their cousins. We went out for brunch. In the evenings friends gathered for tea by the pool and watched India lift the World Cup again.
Dubai is a city where almost everyone arrived from somewhere else. Home here is not inherited; it is chosen.
As I spoke to people coming from the US, Australia, the UK, Ukraine, Russia, Singapore and Hong Kong, I began to realize that the assuredness many people felt was not denial of risk but recognition of belonging. Many told me that decision felt sealed during this conflict—a promise not only of welcome but of protection extended to them in the place they now call home.
Perhaps that is why routine becomes powerful in moments of uncertainty. The gym opens. Cafés fill and dogs sit quietly at their owners’ feet. Children go to tennis practice. Choosing to live an ordinary day becomes a quiet act of resilience and resistance.
Life continues not because people are unaware of danger, but because they have already chosen where they want their lives to unfold.
As I write this, I see my daughters at the pool again. Fighter jets are roaring overhead. In the corridor they create, commercial airplanes move steadily through the airspace, carrying loved ones in both directions.
In the setting sun outside, the pool lights have come on.