The shops that are not here to say so

Walk the old lanes of the souq in Manama and ask a shopkeeper about hard times, and you will often hear the same calm confidence. This street has been through everything. Every slump, every new mall, every change in how people buy. It always comes back.

It is a reassuring story, and it rests on the wrong evidence. The man telling it is standing in a shop that made it. The shops that did not make it are not there to disagree. Their shutters were painted over, or another trader took the lease, and nobody counts them when they say the street always recovers.

Once you notice this, it is everywhere. The seller whose stock has cleared every summer for a decade assumes this summer will clear too. Every story of resilience is told by whoever remained, and so every story sounds like proof.

It is not proof. It is a list of the lucky, plus some of the good. The ones that were good and unlucky vanished alongside the ones that were simply bad, and from the outside they look identical: absent.

None of this means the street will fall. It may well thrive for another fifty years. It means the record is a weak promise, because the record we can see was edited before we arrived.

The sensible response is not fear. It is preparation that does not depend on history repeating itself: some money put aside, a second way to reach customers, a habit of asking what would happen if this time went differently.

Because the ones it went differently for are exactly the ones nobody hears from.