Nine years ago, I moved from New York to Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates. I stayed for two years, working at an English-language newspaper. On visits back to America, this often meant explaining to family or friends that I was living “near Dubai.” If people knew anything about the U.A.E., a nation less than forty years old at the time, it was likely something about Dubai. They’d caught shiny glimpses of the city on TV, or maybe in Newsweek. They knew the city (and, by extension, the entire surrounding country) as an avatar of wealth—quick-blooming skyscrapers, opulent hotels, a mall with an indoor ski slope—and of exploitation, particularly of the noncitizen “guest workers” shipped in from across the globe to build the skyscrapers, clean the hotel sheets, and serve mall-goers their après-ski hot chocolates.

These conversations often left me uncomfortable in ways I struggled to explain. Yes, there really was a ski slope in a Dubai mall. And, yes, the country’s work force was made up largely of noncitizens, too many of them working in precarious, exploitative situations far from their home countries. But I had a feeling that Western chatter about the U.A.E. was somehow reproducing, however unconsciously, the same dehumanization that it appeared to criticize. There was money-drunk decadence at the top, raw immiseration at the bottom, and little else: no middle ground—or middle class, for that matter—no mixed bags, no flawed and compromised agency. No real life.

Back in Abu Dhabi, I walked around the city’s middle- and working-class neighborhoods at night after work, surrounded by fellow-foreigners—mostly single men but also families with children. I felt myself surrounded by a library’s worth of stories: all the villages and cities people had left behind, the journeys they’d made, the communities they’d found themselves inhabiting far from home. I searched for these stories in bookstores but found little, at least in the way of literature. When people publish stories about the U.A.E., the country is almost always represented entirely by Dubai, which itself is almost always reduced to a glitzy, two-dimensional backdrop: a suitably strange, foreign Elsewhere, chock-full of easy signifiers of the “very old” (dark-skinned men in robes, desert sand) and the “futuristic” (Lamborghinis, postmodern architecture). It appears most commonly in mysteries and thrillers—the perfect dash of exotic spice to liven up a visitor’s investigation into some globe-spanning conspiracy.

Recently, the writer Deepak Unnikrishnan told me that my evening walks through Abu Dhabi likely took me right past the building where he grew up, in the eighties and nineties, and where his parents still live today. We were at a coffee shop in Chicago’s Lincoln Park neighborhood, where we had met to talk about his book “Temporary People,” a kaleidoscopic collection of loosely linked short stories set mostly in Abu Dhabi and focussed on residents of the city who are, like Unnikrishnan, citizens of India. It’s exactly the book I was looking for. For its characters, the U.A.E. is not a backdrop or a metaphor; it’s where they live. It’s the young country they build with their labor. Day by day, they become a part of it, and vice versa—whether they like it or not, and despite the fact that, legally, they can never attain citizenship, or anything like it. The moment you are without a work visa, your days in the country are officially numbered.

In his book, Unnikrishnan refuses to occupy a single style or register, as if to inoculate the reader against settling on any one idea of what the U.A.E. is, or of what it means. A few stories are in a familiar mode of straightforward realism. Others are surreal fables brimming with bizarre imagery: a man who swallows a passport so that he will be transformed into a passport; a woman who uses duct tape, glue, needles, and horsehair to repair the bodies of construction workers who have fallen from incomplete buildings; a pay phone that lets its users temporarily teleport back to India. There’s a tale of Indian workers who are grown from magical seeds in the U.A.E. desert; a story that takes a multilingual Abu Dhabi cockroach as its protagonist; and a few plotless prose poems, one of which consists entirely of an incantatory list of jobs that guest workers might find themselves performing in the Gulf.

Unnikrishnan was born in the Indian state of Kerala, but he spent only a month there before heading with his parents to Abu Dhabi, where his father was already working as an engineer. In 2001, he moved to Teaneck, New Jersey, to enroll at Fairleigh Dickinson University, and he quickly realized that India—a country he has only ever visited—was not “home” for him as it had been for his parents. They missed Kerala; he missed Abu Dhabi. When he wanted to soothe his homesickness, he went searching not for South Asian curries but for shawarma sandwiches like those he and his childhood friends used to wolf down after games of parking-lot soccer and cricket. “I missed hearing Arabic,” he said. “Which was a shock, because I can’t really speak it.” Growing up, he’d never spoken once to an Emirati.

“My friends and I had no vocabulary for talking about this—about Abu Dhabi and the U.A.E. as a home, as place that made us—because we were constantly told it wasn’t our country,” he said. One of the stories in the book is fewer than fifty words long, and it seems to show the author trying to claim the Emirates as—whatever else it may be—the site of everyday pleasures and defeats. It’s called “Cunninlingus” (the misspelling is intentional, one of many instances where Unnikrishnan revels in the U.A.E.’s promiscuous collisions of language and dialect): “First time, in a Datsun by the beach somewhere in Dubai. It was Ramadan; mid-afternoon. No shurtha in sight, few people around. Didn’t bite. Licked carefully, quickly. The AC was on, I remember. Unwittingly swallowed pubic hair. Refused feedback. Confident I had failed.”

In a book primarily about the U.A.E.’s foreign labor force—a group of people who, even in sympathetic journalistic exposés, too often come across as one undifferentiated mass of victims—this tiny vignette works wonders, jolting the readerly brain away from abstraction and directing it toward the fine grain of life. Unnikrishnan isn’t papering over the frequent harshness of noncitizen life, or denying how degrading it can be. But he is insisting that there is more to the story—that the people in the place have rich interior lives shot through with memories, desires, and confusions.

After college, Unnikrishnan moved to New York, then to Chicago, where he earned an M.F.A. at the Art Institute of Chicago and wrote “Temporary People.” Working on the book, he wasn’t sure whether he would ever return to Abu Dhabi. His father was approaching retirement, which would mean losing his work visa and heading back to India. As his parents’ departure date approached, they said out loud what Unnikrishnan had long suspected: were it allowed, they would prefer to stay. While they were away, India had become another country, and Abu Dhabi was what they knew, the place where they’d made their life. For now, their wish has been granted: their daughter, Unnikrishnan’s younger sister, got a job and a work visa of her own, allowing her to sponsor her parents as they’d once sponsored her.

To his surprise, after finishing the book, Unnikrishnan was offered a job teaching at New York University’s Abu Dhabi campus, which opened to students in 2010, long after he’d left for the U.S. This year, he’s been living in the city where he grew up. The city has changed drastically since his childhood, flooded with oil money and increasingly dotted with businesses and institutions catering to the international expatriate class—“guest workers” of a very different sort. This is the class in which Unnikrishnan now finds himself, however uneasily. As far as he knows, he is the only person from Abu Dhabi who teaches at the school. When his fellow-teachers, new to the city, ask him for tips about what to do with their kids on the weekend, he looks up answers on Google. “I’m afraid to tell them the truth, which is that I have no idea,” he said. “Growing up, it wasn’t like I had any money to spend. We were broke. Anyway, everything’s changed. That’s why I’m glad I wrote the book. It’s a way of saying, ‘Here’s what was here. Here’s who I was.’ ”