Where you are from?” asks the friendly cabbie as he drives me from the airport. “India,” I reply. “Ah, al Hind!” he beams. “I like Hindis very much.” I smile at his English (sparsely spoken in Syria) and stare out the window, determined not to miss my first sight of the famous Domes of Damascus. Some 20 minutes later and I still see nothing more exotic than middle class housing blocks. “Execute me please,” demands the cabbie. “What?” I ask startled. He repeats slowly, “Exa-cuse me please but you are not looking like Hindi. I see many DVD of Hindi songs and dancing. You know Shah Rukh Khan?” I discover later, that Shah Rukh comes second only to Richard Gere as a national heartthrob with Syrian teens. But now I’m getting somewhat impatient as I read again from my copy of Mark Twain’s Innocents Abroad. Where is the Thousand and One Arabian Nights of my/his imagination?

‘Though another claims the name, old Damascus is by right the Eternal City…. She measures time not by days, months or years but by the empires she has seen rise and crumble to ruins.’ Twain was thinking perhaps of the no less than 33 successive civilisations that make Damascus the world’s oldest continuously-inhabited city. Having boned up on its dazzling antiquity – it enters recorded history 15 centuries before Christ and includes every major civilisation from the Assyrians, Phoenicians, Greeks, Byzantines and Romans to the Turks, Mameluks and French – I was expecting a living museum. What I’d found so far was neo-Socialist architecture, hardly any hi-tech high rises with the only antiquity being some old mosques and the amazing collection of Pontiacs, Buicks, Chevys and 50s relics clogging the roads. The cabbie explains these cranked up carcasses are the result of punitive import taxes that make modern cars an exclusive privilege. Even renting one for a month is the equivalent of a year’s salary for most.