You will find him scrubbed and presentable at the other end of Bat, sitting in his hole-in-the-wall shop under layers of razorblades, AA batteries, Tibet Snow face cream, lighters, coconut oil, baby powder, locks, toothbrushes, cola, chocolates, pineapple juice, frozen meat and everything else you need to be comfortable in Bat. He took over this shop in 2004 as part of legislation towards Omanisation, renting it from the owner and working hard to keep it successful. Price fluctuations have to be dealt with, and credit from his suppliers needs to be worked on. It is only now, after building up a level of trust over four years, that some suppliers have begun to give him up to a month's worth of credit. Others want cash up front. Luckily for him there isn't much competition in Bat: there are just two other 'Foodstuff and Luxuries' shops to beat — or live with.

Suleiman makes enough money through his shop to support his family of wife and three young children, but he's aiming a lot higher. His day job at the restoration site fetches him a handful of rials for every hour he moves stones into place, though there is talk of formalising the contract into a monthly salary. Given a chance, he'd skip the groceries and work with stones because, as he says, he learns a lot more in the field, and can apply these skills to other work he might involve himself with.

Multitasking comes easily to this 30-year-old. After finishing school in 1996, he started working in a travel company in Ibri, the largest town in the vicinity. He sold tickets there for a couple of months, until he left the company to join a typing and translation firm. Later, he joined an oilfield company, and spent three years being sent out to the rigs around Marmul for 21 days at a time, interspersed with five-day holidays.

Such dynamism seems startling, popping out between the graves, palms and crumbling sarooj ruins of the old town in Bat, the fields abandoned for lunch, the half-hearted string of barbed wire around the tombs. We are sitting in his farmhouse, eating khalas dates sprinkled with simsim, or sesame seeds, while Suleiman tells me of his life. This is the house that he built with his brother and father in 1985 — large, airy and spotlessly clean with a majlis done in blue.

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