Blowing In the Shamal

DESPITE ACCOMPANYING MY MOTHER to the bank to cash the monthly draft that my father sent from the Gulf in the early 1970s, and slurping up the creamy fruit salad from Reena Bakery on our way back home, I didn’t want to go to the Gulf.

Preening like a peacock in my teenage years in the 1980s, wearing a yellow round-neck, deep-blue denim and white trainers that my father and cousins brought home on their annual or biennial holidays from the Gulf, I didn’t want to go to the Gulf.

Despite the magical and salubrious fragrance of the Gulf permeating the room when they opened their box the morning after their late-night arrival, I didn’t want to go to the Gulf.

I never wanted to go to the Gulf.

But, I did end up in the Gulf, like the thousands of men from my hometown, Varkala, a seaside town on the Thiruvananthapuram-Kollam border, in spite of my efforts to escape the common destiny of hundreds of youngsters flying across the Arabian Sea every year like following an invisible pied piper, chasing El Dorado. Or, fleeing the uncertain future back home.

Having lived decades of a ‘bachelor’s life’, sharing bedrooms and bathrooms, even bed spaces, and bending their back under an acrimonious sun, some men don’t want their sons to follow the same destiny. But, strangely though, there are many others who want their sons to somehow leave the shores of Kerala and land in some jobs in the Arabian Gulf.

The Asian expatriate community in the Middle East, especially in the Ara­bian Gulf, is a unique one. While novelist Deepak Unnikrishnan has called them ‘temporary people’ in his experimental novel Temporary People, I have written about this ‘phenomenon’ in my second novel, Shamal Days (HarperCol­lins), which is set in the Middle East.

My father came back for good with two cartons of books he had collected over the years he lived in Abu Dhabi and Ras Al-Khaimah, and a malignant tumour tucked somewhere in his lungs. A few months after my sister’s marriage and burying Father in the qabristan of our village mosque, my mother and I looked at each other, and between us a question loomed. “What do I do for a living?”

Immediately after finishing my journalism course at the Press Club, I had sold my bike and gone to Delhi to become a journalist. I had wanted to write on cricket. Equipped with recommendation letters from senior journalists, I met a few editors and senior journalists from Kerala. One of them, who is now no more, asked a nervous me if my name was Sunil Gavaskar or Ravi Shastri, for that matter. I gulped my fears. I stood before him with my knees knocking against each other. The hard-nosed, veteran journalist then asked me if I had read the likes of Neville Cardus, Christopher Martin-Jenkins, John Arlott. I stared down at the floor. He tossed my résumé back and asked me to go back to Kerala and read up and come back. He may have meant well but in the process he had dented the confidence of a young man who wanted to become a sport writer. It was winter in Delhi. I was staying with a friend of mine who was a trainee reporter in an English news magazine. The room was too tiny for both of us. Before I drained all the money I had, I packed my bag and left Delhi. A couple of months later, I passed the written test and was called for an interview for the post of a trainee reporter in Lucknow for the same news magazine. I would be paid five grand, and I knew that would be barely enough for me to survive in the city of kebabs and biryanis. In the meantime, my brother-in-law, who had been in Abu Dhabi for a few years, managed to get me an employment visa as secretary to the finance manager of the large company he was working for. I was in a dilemma. In one hand I had the interview card, which could open a door to the world of journalism; and in the other, a visa for a job which could bring enough money to calm the nerves of a widowed mother.

My dream job or my filial duty? I tore up the interview card.

In one hand I had the interview card, which could open a door to the world of journalism; and in the other, a visa for a job which could bring enough money to calm the nerves of a widowed mother. My dream job or my filial duty?

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They heaved long, heavy sighs. They were warm yet unfamiliar, like siesta gusts or the shamal, whirling in from the desert, spraying tiny, shiny powder of sand. No matter how many years they lived in the country, slog­ging it out in the sun, killing themselves day by day, knowingly estrang­ing themselves from their own backyards and bedrooms back home, they would never become a part of the country—they would always remain expatriates, the second-class, dispensable residents. They could be asked to go back any time, deported unceremoniously, dumped without regret like leftover waste from the previous night’s feast.

As the tired men continued to watch, with sagely composure, the sea slapping on the breakwater boulders, they wondered if the waters had ever changed since the day they boarded the launch, were tossed up and dropped down viciously, and, after countless days of journeying under star-filled skies with seasickness, arrived on this coast, sapped of every ounce of their energy, parched and hungry, yet with a glimmer of hope somewhere within their heart.

Worse, after many summers, their sons follow their footsteps. Years later, shadows of the fathers and sons merge under an inescapable, scorching sun.

(Shamal Days)

WITH A BROKEN SPIRIT AND A bleeding heart, I drank every night in my small room in the sprawling compound of the company’s accommodation in the dusty industrial area, Mussaffah. Drunk and senseless, I wept to sleep, lamenting my fate. My heart throbbed to be in the world of letters while I was assisting a Lebanese-Aus­tralian finance manager in drafting letters to banks and employees. From 12 noon to 3PM, we had lunch break, and because of the heat, most of the office staff slept for a couple of hours before return­ing to office at 3. I couldn’t sleep. I walked around the industrial area in the sweltering heat, watching the people and their lives around me. My friends and cousins thought I was crazy to be out in the sun. I was looking for stories from the lives of the labourers around me. I wrote features about them and sent them to a local English newspaper. None of them were published.

Unperturbed, I watched the life around me in the dusty industrial area with grey dust-smeared shops of spare parts and scraps, and workshops lining the bumpy roads. I observed the men who worked in construction sites and lived in squalid shanties. I watched the dark, frail women who worked in garment factories. I wrote about them in my notebook.

The heat in the summer months was not just palpable but oppressive—like a beast—pressing heavily, squeezing out every ounce of fluid. Dates ripened golden, and, as the heat intensified, to deep bur­gundy. The faint hopes of the expatriate labourers on construction sites grew fainter as the day progressed. At sunset, a blood-red, sweating sun dribbled down a pallid horizon, silhouetting scaffolds and cranes into apparitions of fantasy. It was also time when a mélange of suppressed sighs escaped the workers’ lungs and eddied up into the thick air, like hesitant wood smoke.

Life was unbearably slow in the sum­mer heat, and strangely rueful.

In the evenings, they returned to their matchbox-like shanties, or Labour Camps, sapped of every ounce of energy. Their eyes burnt, emanating the heat of the noon sun, and their hearts ached from agony for which they had no names. Some called it suffering, some fate, and some others, hell. They sat in their pickup van with sweat-soaked towels draped around their face to ward off the hot breeze and dust, and thought about their families back home.

They remembered their faraway vil­lages and their folks. They remembered the now-distant moments with their wives, children and parents. They remembered the fleeting, lighter phase of life. Tears welled up in their flaming, dust-filled eyes; a lump clogged their throat. Once at the Camp, they washed and bathed after waiting long for their turn, and cooked din­ner and the next day’s lunch. By the time they washed the plates after dinner, it was well past midnight and they had to get up at five to be in the van by six for yet another day’s toil in the sun. Their wages were at the mercy of their employers, given once in a few months.

*****

In the country of expatriates, most Sri Lankan women were either house­maids or worked in garment factories in the dry, dusty industrial area. Their fuzzy, sunken eyes mirrored the shadows of the bloody war back home. In their memories of their homeland, and some­where in their conscience, was etched a pool of blood mixed with the salt of the sea, torrents of tropical rain, and the serenity of mountain dew, which they carried with them as they toiled in swanky kitch­ens with no history, or worked long hours slouching in front of sewing machines in factories or warehouses.

Every day, they were brought to work in minibuses with dysfunctional air conditioners and no fan. They had to keep the sliding glass windows of the vehicle half-open to let some breeze in, but the hot, dry desert breeze brought with it the fine dust of sand, which settled on the fringes of their hair and brows, and on the cracks on their dark, brown lips. Several of these buses picked them up from their shared hovels in another part of the city and dropped them at their work destinations unceremoniously, taking them back at sunset. Though, in the morning verve, they spoke about things back home, by the time they returned, they plunged into silence. On their way back, they kept staring at the shops lining the streets and the vehicles whooshing by. Every day, their eyes kept getting sucked further back into their sockets and their cheeks caved in deeper. What they realised in these quiet moments of daily travel was that hardship at home and hardship in a foreign land were the same man, manifesting his cruelty in two different ways.

(Shamal Days)

VAPPA LEFT ON A JUNE MORNING WHEN IT RAINED INCESSANTLY. Walking down the short flight of stairs, he turned back once or twice and looked to where Umma and I stood. Sister was in a cloth-cradle, sleeping, not aware of the emotional separation being played out in the portico.

He would get into Podiyan maman’s cumbersome, pale-green Ambassador along with my uncle, and the car would begin its two-hour-long journey— rolling past silver-grey backwaters, vast swathes of paddy fields and coconut groves—to the airport in Thiruvananthapuram, from where he would take a flight to Bombay, and then to Abu Dhabi, where it hardly rained.

Umma would be silent for the next few days—till the postman brought her Vappa’s telegram with two short, smudged words: “Arrived Safely”. It would take another 15 days for his first letter to arrive, in which he would describe in detail how difficult it was for him to leave her, me and Sister behind; how crowded the Bombay airport was, and how dry and hot Abu Dhabi was.

Without a phone, there was no way we could exchange any real-time information. When one of our neighbours had a telephone in their house, Vappa used to call at a scheduled time, and Umma, sister and I would take our turns to speak to him

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It would be nearly impossible for today’s children or wives to imagine the life of a Gulf expatriate’s family back in Kerala during the late 1960s and early 1970s when there was no smartphone with Facebook or WhatsApp, with seamless and live connections. Vappa quit his teaching job at a college in Trichy to go to the Gulf in the early years of the ‘oil boom’ when every John, Gopi and Mohammed left Kerala for the Arabian deserts dreaming of El Dorado.

For the most part of my teenage years, my father was nothing but an annual warmth—who came every year for 30 numbered days with lots of love, gifts and stories of camels, deserts and a city of expatriates, and left creating a huge vacuum of paternal love and care. For the rest of the year, we were completely in the dark about his life—he existed in the black-and-red dates on the cal­endar nailed on the bedroom wall. Vappa used to write lengthy letters quite regularly to Umma, his love-turned-wife, detailing the ‘Gulf life’. A man of letters and a teacher of English, he was disillusioned with his life in the Gulf in an era when telecommu­nication was yet to revolutionise everyday life and build bridges and tunnels into personal life, redefining intimacy.

Not all men could afford to take their families with them to the Gulf. A typi­cal ‘Gulf pocket’, our seaside town had a large number of ‘gulf widows’ who, knowingly or unknowingly, were victims of a life of separation, with all its psychological repercussions. Growing up under the shadow of a mother who was a graduate and yet a homemaker and a grass widow, I could never fully fathom the desperation, longing and frustrations of a young woman forced to live away from her husband. Umma was one among thousands in Kerala. Vappa, on the other hand, was living a ‘temporary’ life, away from all of us, but he wasn’t sure of how long he could survive in those harsh circumstances. He always had a ‘sad box’ tucked under his bed in the room he shared with another.

I remember Umma pulling out the monthly cheque tucked between the sheaves of onion-thin, sky-blue letterheads. Vappa was good in the art of epis­tolary—in his neat, near-perfect writing, he would give graphic descriptions of life in Abu Dhabi, his colleagues in an insurance firm, how sick he was of a life away from his family, and the usual worries over finances and the need to build a house. Occasionally, he enclosed a few photographs of his, taken in a studio with a backdrop of a huge crescent rising over sand dunes and camels decked up for Eid. Sometimes, he sent pictures of himself sitting by a row of red and yellow flowers in a park in Abu Dhabi. Behind him, we could spot expatriate workers in green dungarees watering or pruning plants.

Umma would reciprocate with her share of detailed writing—every bit of mine and Sister’s growing up, what she did with the money, how lonely she was (I guess!), and would remind him of the number of days left for his next vacation. Once I forgot to post a let­ter Umma had written to him, which was discov­ered by Vappa during his next vacation from my biology textbook!

Going to the bank to cash the cheque was a monthly ritual, which I eagerly looked forward to. I could barely see what was behind the counter at the Indian Overseas Bank on Temple Road, Varkala. Once the teller called out the number, and Umma counted the bundle of banknotes, we would walk to Reena Bakery for fruit salad. On our way back, she would buy me a Poompatta and a few copies of Mandrake and Phantom. For me, Vappa’s physical presence was substituted by the monthly supply of comics and a mouth-watering cup of fruit salad with a lavish helping of red, shiny cherries.

When I began to learn the letters of the English alphabet, he drew them with corresponding animals in his letters to me, written in big, round letters. Good at drawing, he sent me pictures of boys and girls in action to describe what a verb was.

Without a phone, there was no way we could exchange any real-time infor­mation. When one of our neighbours had a telephone in their house, Vappa used to call at a scheduled time, and Umma, Sister and I would take our turns to speak to him. We would walk home, reliving the moments of our brief con­versation. Umma would smile ear-to-ear. Sister would sing aloud, and I would hum a tune. When we had a telephone at home, he used to call every Friday, and when there was any urgency. He called me up when Rajiv Gandhi was blown to death in Tamil Nadu. I still remember the first time he complained of a numbing pain in his right hand.

Unnikrishnan has brilliantly captured the predicament of a newly married man who works in Dubai and phones his wife back in Kerala.

Johnny Kutty was married only a month before a distant relative found him a job as a car mechanic’s apprentice in Dubai. Johnny Kutty bought phone cards and called his wife once a week. He called his friend Peeter’s STD booth, and Peeter sent a helper to fetch Johnny Kutty’s wife and they talked frantically until the card ran out. When Johnny Kutty discovered the phone, he couldn’t wait; he made an appointment for the next available date.

Life in the UAE, over 15 years, opened a world of opportunities for a village boy like me. It gave me, a diehard cricket fan, the opportunity to meet, shake hands, and even to sit in a press box, with my childhood heroes as I reported on cricket from Sharjah

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On that fateful day, as Johnny Kutty hovered over his wife in his friend Peeter’s STD booth, he noticed Peeter sat there, smiling at her, and she at him. He offered her cold cola, which she sipped using a straw, blushing as she did so, blushing, Johnny Kutty couldn’t be sure, at Peeter’s attentiveness or because of what Johnny Kutty was telling her, of the things he wanted to do to her—dirty, dirty things—and she nodded and blushed, and blushed then nodded, smiling all the time, smil­ing until it drove the hovering Johnny Kutty crazy, until the phone card ran out. “Quickly, Johnny Kutty made the next available appointment for the fol­lowing year, but he continued to call his wife every week using a regular pay phone. It wasn’t enough any­more. He imagined all sorts of things: that she was drinking cola, that Peeter had bought bottles of cola only for her, that he put the straw in himself, that he sucked on that straw after Johnny Kutty’s wife left, that he licked the tip where her lips and spit had been.

When his young wife shared she was pregnant a few weeks later, John­ny Kutty knew then that his life was ruined. That night, he broke into the kadakaran’s kada and called Peeter. The phone rang and rang and rang, and Johnny Kutty was sure Peeter wasn’t managing the STD booth, which was also the front portion of his house. Peeter, Johnny Kutty knew, was busy with Johnny Kutty’s wife, and had no time to answer phone calls from his best friend, too busy cuckolding his best friend with his friend’s young wife, the bitch who loved cola. As he realized what his wife had done, Johnny Kutty started hating his once-happy life, de­stroyed now by his cheating wife and his once-best friend.

(Temporary People)

Vappa’s letters became less frequent once we had a phone at home, and soon they virtu­ally stopped once the pain in his hand gradu­ally made it impossible for him to sit down and write. When I was in college and Sister in high school, he came back for good to the house he had built on a hillock spending all the money he could make, living a life he never wanted to live. He came back home with two boxes of books, a VCR and cancer in his lungs.

As a parent, he never wanted me to go to the Gulf, given my inclination towards reading and writing. After we buried him un­der a cashew tree in the cemetery behind the mosque, where he had seldom been to, we walked back in the relief that he had, finally, been relieved of the excruciating pain from the cancerous growth.

WE, IN KERALA, ARE FAMILIAR with sons following their fathers’ footsteps in the desert however re­luctant they are. I, too, followed suit. But for me, life in the UAE, over 15 years, opened a world of opportunities for a village boy like me. It gave me, a diehard cricket fan, the opportunity to meet, shake hands, and even to sit in a press box, with my childhood heroes as I reported on cricket from Sharjah. Though the editor of the newspaper never published the features I had sent him from the industrial area, he once called me in my office and offered the post of a subeditor. A door opened to my dream world of journalism. I began to edit and report local matches. I began to meet stars.

Later, as an editor of sports magazines, I trav­elled to countries where I would not have other­wise. My life in the Gulf gave me the rare chances of meeting and asking questions of stars like Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Tiger Woods, et al, and interviewing George Foreman, Wasim Akram, Mike Gatting, Joel Garner, Tony Greig, et al, at a time when the mushrooming sports leagues had not made them accessible to the common man.

Now back in Kerala due to personal reasons, I reckon the UAE as my sec­ond home, where I met my life partner in a newsroom and married her at the Indian consulate in Dubai.

Even now when it rains incessantly during the monsoon, I remember the June morning when my father walked down the stairs of our family house in a backwater village, and how he turned back twice to where Umma and I stood.

Since the oil boom in the Gulf many fathers have left home with a heart broken and bleeding for their family left behind, many mothers have heaved sighs of loneliness, and many children have grown up dreaming of the annual warmth of paternal love.

Today, when we are pondering a post-Gulf life, Kerala cannot fail to ac­knowledge the silent and collective sacrifice of the millions of Gulf expa­triates, who are unique among any migrant community anywhere in the world for their sheer selfless, uncertain existence.

Thanks to the unbelievable innovations in telecommunication, the Gulf is no more a land of mystery. We all have become digitally naked and close.

According to latest reports, the migration from Kerala to the Gulf has gone down 90 per cent as the youngsters from the state are going to Europe and else­where. In a couple of months, Goat Days, the movie adaptation of Benyamin’s novel Aadujeevitham, will come out showcasing the nearly unbelievable misery of a man’s life in the desert. While the physical and mental torture and trauma Najeeb, the protagonist, undergoes is not common among the men in the Gulf, there are hundreds of others who live their lives in weirdly tragic ways—there are many who have not returned home for decades.

These men hardly realised then that, in many ways, it would turn out to be a one-way journey. With no social acceptance and access to not even basic human rights, they lived and endured hardship. They lived in a dust bowl that pulled their feet down every day into an abyss of uncertainties— a trap set by the insecure native upstarts, for whom freedom and civil rights were veritable threats to their new-found stroke of prosperity.

Over the years, back home, their wives, with no word from their men, grew impatient, frigid, indifferent, and, finally, distant. Their flesh lost hunger, blood its youthful gurgle, their dreams lay thwarted prematurely in the untimely sweeps of frustration and angst.

(Shamal Days)

About The Author

Sabin Iqbal

Sabin Iqbal is a journalist, novelist and literary curator. He curates Mathrubhumi International Festival of Letters. His third novel, Tales from Qabristan, will be published soon

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