Inside there's all manner of sports facilities, auditoriums, restaurants and even a library. The club is described on its website as "a beehive of activities all year round" for its 6500 members.
Yet on January 19, 2003, before the Cricket World Cup in South Africa, it was a murder scene. The insidious underworld of match-fixing flashed to the surface in one of the sport's ugliest moments.
Ed Hawkins describes the incident in his award-winning book Bookie, Gambler, Fixer, Spy, a fan's manual for how the Asian cricket betting underworld operates.
"The merrymakers didn't hear the gunshots," he wrote. "Twenty were fired, drowning the kisses of cue ball on colour in the snooker hall of the Indian Club ... Blood pumped from the skull of Sharad Shetty, darkening the green baize of the table to a dirty auburn. He had been shot from point-blank range by two men ... The killing had been ordered by Mumbai underworld boss Chhota Rajan. It was the culmination of an eight-year mafia war with his rival Dawood Ibrahim's infamous D-Company gang, of which Shetty was a deputy. In reprisals that could have been straight out of the Godfather trilogy, the adversaries had traded body bags: racketeers, goons, lieutenants."
As Hawkins explains it, Rajan was out to get revenge on Ibrahim while also ensuring he could make a play for an illegal Indian betting market estimated at $1 billion ahead of the World Cup, in which Shetty had the dominant market share. It was like Underbelly, UAE-style.
With another World Cup next year, vigilance will be required on Australasian shores if those sorts of sums, and the extras which inflation adds over 12 years, are being traded.
Another inescapable conclusion from the killing is that the match-fixing industry can make its participants vulnerable to such ruthless brutality. If you've got a faulty moral compass, you could be signing your death warrant, depending on how far you're up the match-fixing ladder. Cricketers tend to be on the lower rungs but they can be leaned on.
Call it a morbid fascination but the desire to see a place which required its pool tables to be drycleaned is on the bucket list.
However, the Herald on Sunday's pleas to enter the club prove fruitless. The foyer attendant obeys strict protocols, unsurprisingly enacted in the wake of the murder.
He's not swayed by a technically truthful pitch about 'hearing a lot about the place' and being 'recommended to come here'. He's thinking, 'why would an Anglo-Saxon looking bloke in a suit be sniffing out this part of town? He should be giving his wallet a workout at the Dubai Mall or living it up at the Jumeirah Beach Resort. There's something fishy going on. Is he packing some heat?'
Out comes the red flag ... but in a polished, clipped tone.
"I'm sorry, sir, you simply can't go in without a member."
As a last resort, the pathetic "but I've come all the way from New Zealand" is delivered and also dispatched. It's time to slump the shoulders and slink off like the Channel Nine duck.
Still, better to walk out alive.
Andrew Alderson travelled to the UAE courtesy of Emirates.
