For months, I’d seen the kid in the newsroom. Maybe 26. One of our drivers, waiting for an assignment. He always wears a baseball cap. Backwards. Jauntily. With “Chicago” in script on the front of the hat — which puts it on the back of his head.

It is not a look we commonly associate with the UAE’s 1.5 million Pakistanis, who seem to prefer what might be called their “national dress”, the shalwar kameez — baggy, pajama-like pants with a long, loose-fitting tunic.

He also tends to be smiling, even laughing. At something. He seems upbeat. And I got 90 minutes with him in the company car as he drove us from Abu Dhabi to separate assignments in Dubai.

It is an interesting thing, sitting in a moving vehicle with someone you don’t know. A plane, for instance. A car. Odds are fairly good you will hear a lot about someone if you bother to listen.

And the biggest surprise from our Pakistani driver?

He dearly wants to live in America. But he would gladly take Canada, too. Or England.

The baseball cap and the “Chicago” in script are the tip-offs, of course.

He said he comes from a small town, maybe even a village, in a hilly area of northwestern Pakistan. The nearest big city, he said, is Peshawar, which is known in the West for maybe three things: 1) As a major stop on the U.S. overland military supply route into Afghanistan; 2) as the “home” of millions of Afghanistan refugees during the wars of the past 30 years (during which time the Afghans picked up cricket); and 3) as an area with a particularly conservative Islamic population.

He has been in the UAE for four years, but the last time he went home he found out that some former neighbors, who now live in the U.S., had visited. They live, yes, in Chicago, and they seem to like it very much.

This deeply impressed our guy, and the visitors apparently gave him the baseball cap with “Chicago” on it. (Where he got the idea of wearing it backwards, I don’t know.)

At this moment in history, a Pakistan passport is not at all a handy thing to have. It is difficult to move around and even harder to stay. That doesn’t stop a guy from flights of fancy of living in the West, but it sure crimps his plans.

Our would-be Pakistani-American also has issues with supporting his family. If he somehow got to the U.S., or Canada, or England, he would still be responsible for supporting his parents and three of his five sisters (two are married), back home. Which is tricky, because he makes only 2,000 dirhams (about $540) a month.

(I know this because he told me this. My experience with people from the subcontinent is that they will tell you all sorts of details from their lives without prompting, and may be quite blunt about asking you for your information, too.)

So, at the moment he feels a bit trapped by circumstances. He said his hometown is dirt-poor. No running water, no electricity. No jobs there. He said “people have nothing to eat.” He described his father as perpetually depressed and his sisters as unemployable.

Like many Pakistanis, he is proud of his country but also deeply unhappy with how things have gone in recent history. Corrupt leaders, no infrastructure, rampant poverty. A dangerous place, he said. He described the peril of showing even a small amount of money, because a person carrying cash could be robbed.

I asked him about his options. Could he leave his current job, with the transport company (which subcontracts with The National), return to Pakistan … and then come back in a higher-paying job? No, he said. If he went back he would never get back in and, anyway, the expense of a new visa would be crushing.

We talked about languages. His native tongue is Pashto, which normally is associated with Afghanistan. About 15 million of Pakistan’s 170 million people speak Pashto in their homes.

He also speaks Urdu and English, the official languages of Pakistan, and knowing Urdu means he can understand Hindi. He also has learned a fair chunk of Arabic because, he said, Emiratis are unhappy if their drivers don’t speak Arabic.

He asked me what I thought about his English, which he learned in school and then improved upon in the UAE, where it is the common lingua franca. I told him his vocabulary seemed good and that his accent was not strong. He seemed pleased by this.

He said he can read in some languages, but not others. Presumably he reads English or Arabic, because those are the languages on the road signs here. (Though he did stop three times to ask cabbies for directions, in Dubai.)

We talked a bit about politics and history. He seems to have given up on the Pakistan government. He described a sort of “every family for themselves” society with the lives of the common man getting no better. “In my town, no toilets, no electricity. This is how we live.”

When talking about how difficult it is for Pakistanis to move around, we got onto the topic of terrorism, and Osama bin Laden’s years hiding out in Pakistan. He rued the “blasts”, as he termed them, of suicide bombers, saying that the bombers often did it for financial gain, and suggested that most of those killed by the blasts were just other poor people.

We talked about 9/11. He wanted to know how it happened. I went over it with him. “Twenty guys, 19 of them Saudis, took flying lessons in Florida, got on four jets …” He wanted to know how they took control of the planes. I described the box cutters.

He wondered why the Americans have never shown pictures of the dead Osama bin Laden. (Who was living not all that far from Peshawar.) I suggested a U.S. concern over the treatment of a Muslim’s body. I also said that pictures probably eventually will leak into the public realm … and that people who don’t believe it was him, or that he is not dead, will just suggest the photos are faked.

Oh, and he was married. For 10 days. He has been home only once in four years, but a marriage was arranged for that visit. She was from a family with more money than his. After he returned to the UAE, she demanded that he come back to Pakistan and get a job. He said that would be impossible. She left. He doesn’t seem crushed by it; he seemed to relish telling the story. “Ten days!” Will he get married again? Maybe.

Oh, and he hates cricket. Hates it. Which is very rare among Pakistanis, who may love cricket even more than Indians. “Whenever cricket is on the TV, I must get away or my head will hurt.” He said he is interested “only in football” and conceded that Pakistan is horrible in football.

Ultimately, he likes it in the UAE. He said he lives in a labor camp, but things there work and no one is hungry, and he is able to send home enough money to stave off disaster for his immediate family.

He talked about how nice the roads in the UAE are, compared to those in Pakistan. How much safer they are. And modern.

But there is someplace he would rather be. He has heard that Chicago is very nice, and they have well-paying jobs there, as well as a fairly significant Pashto-Pakistani community. He knows the Pakistani community in England is extensive. He would like to find out.

I have decided that his wearing the baseball cap, backwards, with “Chicago” stitched into it, is his way of keeping the dream alive. Maybe he just likes the look.