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.

I feel a sense of anticlimax as we approach our house in the diplomatic Raoda quarter where a peaceful anti-US demo is being staged before the ambassador’s residence nearby. The scream of sirens and lines of baton-wielding soldiers was to become the backdrop of our lives during the months of the Iraq war just like the towering Mount Qassioun, with its forest of homes and mosques, hanging like a living tapestry outside our balcony. Dominating the north of the city, Mount Qassioun has stunning views of the surrounding Anti-Lebanon mountains where the snow refuses to melt even when the mercury hits 33 degrees C at ground level in summer. As I watch the mountain twinkle with myriad lights and some electronic Arabic calligraphy that first night, I determine not to waste a single moment next morning before hitting the Old City.

Finally – it was all there: 4,000 years of civilisation, living and growing out of every souk and cranny so that the entire Old City is a World Heritage Site. Between the subterranean church of Saint Ananias (sunk beneath successive civilisations) and the soaring towers of Bab Sharqi, down which St Paul was lowered in a basket to escape death, there was so much myth, legend and medieval history, I could barely skim the surface despite a dozen visits. Where else in the world will one find a Roman bath peeping from the backrooms of a jeweller’s shop? A Corinthian capital carelessly used as a stepping stone or the entrance to King Herod’s amphitheatre as part of a secretary’s office? Be it Byzantine basilicas or gilded Mameluk mansions, vaulting Ottoman caravanserais or towering wooden door fortifications studded with nails, the congestion of culture, history and architecture overwhelms the senses.

But the Old City is much more than a relic of glories past – it is a throbbing commercial centre and has been so for centuries. Being at the crossroads of Europe and Asia, Damascus prospered for a thousand years as the last staging post for the Haj. Even today, it is the best place to buy hand made kilims from Iran and Central Asia as pilgrims weave them all year to exchange them for cash on this last stop before Mecca. Sadly, there are no tourists this year and even the diplomats have been evacuated before the war, so the price of kilims and other handicrafts has fallen to a quarter. Rebuilt by the Ottomans in the 18th century, Souk Hamidiye is a gargantuan tunnel flanked by shop houses spilling over with the famous Damascene linen and inlay boxes, perfume oils, hubble bubbles, kilims, curtains of iridescent glass beads, old silver and plenty of trashy tourist memorabilia. But I’m unprepared for the gaudy, seductive lingerie trimmed with faux fur and feathers around strategic cut outs at the nipples and crotch. I aim my camera at a pair of panties with a cell phone fixed in the crotch – there’s actually a veiled woman buying the stuff. Is this some sort of undercover rebellion?

“Four years ago, there were hardly any veiled women in Damascus,” says the fashionable wife of a transport magnate who is one of the very few with Indian business connections (in fact there are no more than 600 Indians in all of Syria, a record given our migratory compulsions). While women in central Syria have usually worn veils, those on the Mediterranean coast and the ancient metropolis of Aleppo dress like Westerners. For although Syria is 80 per cent Muslim, it remains the one country in the Middle East where Christians still feel safe as more tolerant strains of Islam – Sufis, Ismailis (the Aga Khan was born here), Alawaites (the ruling Assads) – ensure secular harmony. Even so, Christians and Muslims do not intermarry and rarely visit each others homes and while the Christians dress like Europeans, young Muslim girls may choose to wear a headscarf, if not the veil. “It’s really a matter of personal choice,” says Budoor Alatar, a college student. “We never wear veils in schools but colleges are co-ed, so some of us like to.”

Such shows of modesty can become a mockery when a girl with a headscarf wears trousers so tight (the fashion) she looks as if she’s been poured into them – giving a whole new lascivious dimension to the ad slogan ‘Nothing comes between me and my Calvin Kleins’. Still, the stunning beauty of Syrian women with their mixed Eurasian heritage, leaves me envious. True, they are a little heavy with the pancake and the craze for black lip liner gives some a Jezebel allure, but it can only be the closed regime which has kept them from winning all the international beauty pageants. I ask Budoor if she has a boyfriend. “They only go out with girls to drop them,” she says dismissively. “Most boys are useless.” It’s clear she’s set her sights on marrying one who is working in the Emirates or Kuwait like her father and brother. Government jobs in Syria don’t pay much – a joint secretary in the government or a university professor doesn’t earn more than US$200 a month – and what’s worse is the compulsory military service. Luckily for Budoor she had “only one brother so he doesn’t have to join the army.”

So what does one make of Syria? It’s a land of geographic and cultural contrasts. On the one hand there is sea, mountain and desert and on the other, 7000 years of antiquity waiting to join 21st century modernity. Syria’s years of protectionism may have impoverished the nation in some ways but it has also enriched it by preserving a traditional culture and way of life. Here there is no McDonald’s, Coke or Pizza Hut. Instead you feast on lip-smacking shawerma, humus, baklava, goat cheese and olives.

There are few Hollywood films and night clubs (Syrians barely drink) though plenty of hubble bubble cafés and belly dancers. But what I found most endearing was the uncomplicated, unsophisticated openness and friendliness of Syrians everywhere. They aren’t worried about ‘image’ and ‘status’ or what others may think of them.

One of my warmest memories is a long siesta lunch – the main meal can last three hours – in the little hill resort of Meshta el Helu. After a five course feast accompanied by aniseed-flavoured arrack, everyone was clapping and dancing to the catchy Beirut beat and I had to stop myself from gaping as middle aged women did spontaneous rock-belly dances with little concern at the wolf whistles and clapping that accompanied them. They knew it was not lewd, disparaging or inappropriate – everyone was simply having a good time as usual. “In Syria relationships are mazboot, not like America,” says the Internet café owner in Raqqa who has a picture of George Bush on his entrance mat.