After about a 10-minute wait tonight, an open cab pulled over. The passenger-side window went down, and the driver leaned over and semi-shouted at me, so I could hear him over the noise of the street.

“You know where you are going? I am new!”

I said, “Yes, I know,” and climbed in. New cabbies are not unsual, and they depend on their passengers to give them directions.

I told him to keep driving down the street we already were on.

“I have been here 10 days,” the driver said in India-inflected English.

He said he was from Kerala, the southwestern state that is home to many of the UAE’s 2 million-plus India expats. His version of religion in Kerala? Half Christian, 25 percent Hindu, 25 percent Muslim. (The wiki entry suggests Kerala is majority Hindu, and Christianity is No. 3, with 19 percent.)

He previously had been in Saudi Arabia. For several years.

He did not like it, he said.

“Many people feel that way,” I said. Which is true. Saudi is the most difficult of the Gulf countries, for non-Muslims.

A moment later, he opened the storage compartment next to his right arm, and reached in. He pulled out a black book with a soft, leather-like cover with a single word in round-ish script. It may have been Malayalam script.

He said: “Do you know what this is?” And I was thinking “Bible” but I waited for him to tell me.

“The Bible!”

In five years in the UAE, I have never had someone produce a Bible and show it to me. Not out in public.

Generally, it calls for someone to be very confident the other person is a Christian (perhaps wearing a cross), or come from a mostly Christian country — like Western Europe or America, like I do. So he had that right, anyway. Things became vaguely conspiratorial after that.

I said, “No churches in Saudi Arabia. We have churches here, though.”

He said, “Saint Joseph’s!”

He was referring to the popular Roman Catholic church in the “church district” of Abu Dhabi Island — three almost next to each other: the Catholic church, the Anglican church, the Baptist church.

He said it was good to have a real church to attend. And not just something inside a compound, behind closed doors. Which is Christian worship in Saudi.

I asked him if he had many Bibles … because the UAE generally does not like people bringing in several Bibles — as if to hand out. Now that I think of it, he didn’t really answer.

Christian proseltyzing is a delicate subject here. Non-Muslims are allowed to proselytize among each other, but it is a capital crime for Muslims to convert away from Islam.

It is not much talked about, but it’s one of seven crimes that can carry the death penalty in the UAE. No one has been executed for it in my five years here, though a woman nearly was in Sudan recently.

I reminded my driver of this. The “capital crime” thing.

He did not seem concerned. Either he plans to be careful (and after Saudi, he must be used to being careful), or he is so fired up about his religion that he is willing to wave around his Bible.

Don’t see many like that.