Nine Days on the Corniche
When historian Rila Mukherjee boarded her connecting flight from Shreveport to Doha in late February 2026, she expected to be home in Kolkata within 48 hours. Instead, a cascade of flight disruptions, followed by the outbreak of US-Israeli strikes on Iran on February 28, left her stranded at The Royal Riviera Hotel on Doha’s Corniche for nine days, watching drone interceptions light up the Gulf sky and reflecting on civilizations, food, and the quiet dignity of the workers who kept the hotel running. She reached home on March 12.
The Bangladeshis Who Held the Hotel Together
The Royal Riviera’s staff was drawn from across Asia and North Africa: Bangladeshis, Filipinos, Sri Lankans, Nepalis, Algerians, Moroccans, and West Asians. Qatar’s hospitality sector has long depended on this labor, and the crisis only made that dependence more visible. With hundreds of stranded transit passengers arriving at once, demanding information that nobody had, the staff absorbed the pressure without breaking. Mukherjee writes that they “deal gracefully with the diverse demands and complaints of the passengers,” a line that carries more weight than it might seem. In a hotel that had effectively become a temporary city, with children playing in corridors and travelers washing clothes overnight and drying them with hair dryers, the composure of the staff was the one constant.
Bangladesh sends hundreds of thousands of workers to Qatar every year, many of them in construction and hospitality. Their presence in Gulf hotels is so routine that it rarely gets remarked upon. Mukherjee’s diary, written from the vantage point of a scholar who notices what others overlook, gives them a moment of recognition in an otherwise chaotic scene.
Ramadan at the Buffet Table
Because it was Ramadan, the hotel’s buffet schedule ran on a different clock. Breakfast started at 3 AM to accommodate those fasting before dawn. Lunch opened at noon. Dinner was done by 7:30 PM. The cuisine was genuinely varied: Arabic, Turkish, Italian, Spanish, and South Asian dishes appeared side by side, though Mukherjee notes the South Asian offerings were “not good at all.” The spread included hummus in several forms, feta cheese, stuffed vine leaves, green and black olives, samosas, spring rolls, koftas, baba ghanoush, and the rich Yemeni-Egyptian dessert Umm Ali, a baked bread pudding that is often caramelized and served warm. Good cappuccinos and flaky croissants rounded out the mornings.
One small detail stands out: there was no fresh fruit for the first several days. Onions, too, were absent until Day 5, when a shipment arrived from India. In a hotel otherwise well-stocked by the Indian-origin Lulu supermarket chain, these gaps were a reminder of how quickly supply chains fray when a regional war closes a strait. The Hormuz closure had idled ports across the Gulf, and even a large transit hotel in central Doha felt the ripple.
A Maritime Historian Watching a Closed Sea
Mukherjee’s room faced the Corniche, and she could see the Persian Gulf from her window. For a scholar whose 2022 book, “My India in the Indian Ocean World,” traces two thousand years of maritime exchange across the Indian Ocean, the view was both professionally resonant and deeply unsettling. The Gulf she was looking at was empty. No cargo ships, no tankers, no cruise vessels. The Hormuz Strait, one of the world’s most critical maritime chokepoints, had been effectively shut by the conflict.
“After all, it has been a crossroads since recorded history,” she writes, and the contrast between that long history of movement and the sudden stillness outside her window gives the observation its full weight. The Persian Gulf has connected the Indian subcontinent, the Arabian Peninsula, East Africa, and the Mediterranean for millennia. Bangladesh itself has deep ties to this maritime world: its traders, sailors, and workers have moved through Gulf ports for generations, and today the Bangladeshi diaspora in Qatar numbers in the hundreds of thousands.
Persia, History, and the Weight of Civilization
With time on her hands and Al Jazeera on the television, Mukherjee turned to the longer view. Her reflections on Iran’s civilizational depth are among the most striking passages in the diary. She traces the arc from the Achaemenid Empire (c. 550 BCE) through the Seleucid, Parthian, and Sassanian periods to the Muslim conquest in 651 CE, and then forward to the Safavid dynasty (1501 to 1736), whose Shi’ite legacy shapes modern Iran’s political identity. Her point is straightforward but worth stating plainly: a country with 2,500 years of continuous civilizational memory does not simply disappear because a younger power decides to strike it.
This is the kind of historical perspective that gets lost in the noise of breaking news. Mukherjee, watching drone interceptions from her hotel window, brings it back. The attacks, she notes, sounded “more like Diwali patakas than the very loud explosions that one expects,” a comparison that is both darkly funny and humanizing.
Solidarity in a Temporary City
What emerges most clearly from the diary is the solidarity that formed among the stranded passengers. A South African couple checked on Mukherjee every morning. A Pakistani financial analyst from Toronto shared breakfast insights. A British couple advised her to carry her passport at all times and offered to buy her medicines. A young teacher from Geneva shared dinner tables until she was repatriated on a European relief flight. The Pakistani man was given two hours’ notice when his flight was arranged and called Mukherjee’s room at 1:15 AM to say goodbye.
These are small moments, but they accumulate into something. Mukherjee describes the hotel as having taken on the character of “a London bedsit,” with the noise of children in corridors providing “an oddly comforting sound among the explosions, security alerts and sirens.” It is a precise and human observation, the kind that only comes from someone who has actually lived through something rather than reported on it from a distance. The Bangladeshi staff who served the buffet, changed the sheets, and fielded complaints through nine days of war stayed behind when the passengers finally left. Their story, glimpsed briefly in a historian’s diary, deserves more than a footnote.