Persian Gulf. The land of dreams for any average young man
of his age. A lot of people he knew, his friends, had emigrated to the Gulf
countries for livelihood. He did not dream huge. If one were a social scientist
doing a study with the lower middle class in India, one need not have looked
any further beyond him for a sketch.
He had some loans, none big, but none insignificant like any
other across-the-street guy. He aspired to wriggle out from the confines of his
small rented house in a small town in the southern region of India, to a more
spacious if not luxurious, permanent abode. He wanted to live a peaceful life
with his very loving wife. Wanted to provide good quality education to both his
little kids, the older one a boy of three and the younger one a lovely little damsel
all of one year old.
And like a lot of his contemporaries at the time, he foresaw
the shores of Dubai as the place to fulfill his dreams. Work overseas in the
Gulf for four or five years, earn enough money to finish off the debts and buy
a small plot and construct a home, that was the idea in general. And the small family’s
joy was sky high when he managed to get a work visa, to work in a construction
company that was one of the many contracted to shape up the skyline of the emerging
metropolis of Dubai through one of his schoolmates, who emigrated to the Gulf a
few years earlier.
The ecstasy turned into tears as the day of departure approached.
As much as the unhappy thoughts of staying separated from his family bothered
him, none less was the fear of leaving his wife alone at home. How would she be
able to cope up with the stresses of the world, the hassles of running a
household, alone, that too with these two little kids? He knew she couldn’t
turn to any relative in case of need, they had been far banished from the minds
of the relatives of either sides.
As he sat on the flight westward, he reflected on the
circumstances which alienated either of them from their near and dear. He first
saw her in college. It was not love at first sight like they almost always show
in movies. Well, it simply happened over the course of time. What else could
explain her courage, and her devotion, her bravado of walking out of her house
when he called stood in front of her house, and called her to join his life?
Leaving behind a possible comfortable life, she being the only daughter of a
wealthy plantation owner. She knew, when she took his hand, walking from her
house towards the gate. She turned once, and that look in her eyes of her, the
mix of apprehension, sadness, anxiety and above all, the resolve, that made him
promise to himself that he would never bring a drop of tear to her lovely eyes.
If he did, he did not deserve her. And they walked, a little over two miles, all
the way to my home. Both of them were dead silent all the way till we reached his
home.
It was a surprise reaction that awaited them at his home. He
can’t be blamed if he expected his father, the local leader of a left-wing
party, to accept them. After all, what he did then would be interpreted in a
leftist ideological school as akin to a revolution, the difference being the
absence of the bourgeois masses. But his father refused to let him enter the
house. He still remembered the pleading look on his mother’s face, her eyes
telling him to come back, her mouth refusing to open in front of her dominant
husband, but he had made the decision. He knew there was no turning back. They
had decided to live together despite the odds, she had trusted him with her
life, and that was the bottom-line. That had to be the bottom-line. Period.
Embroiled this cornucopia of emotions, he was somewhere in
dreamland when his flight crossed the quiet Arabian Sea and touched down at the
dream land of his generation – Dubai.
Dubai, was quite in contrast to what he had expected her to
be. The lushes of the artificial greenery, sprawl of the upcoming sky scrapers
and the naturality of the sand dunes were the way it was visible to an outsider
or rather, the way it was projected. Beneath this extravagant visage, the world
flipped quite a lot among the real people who toiled to make it happen. There
were cases of this guy from Tamil Nadu, who had to leave back to Dubai from his
home four days after his marriage because his sponsor refused to grant him any
further leave, another Gujarati Mehta who was unable to go home when his mother
died. Most of the workers there had a similar story to tell. The foundation of
the dream city they were building, he realized, went much beyond bricks, mortar
and reinforced concrete. It was made of the sweat and blood that was squeezed out of the
hearts of ordinary South Asians.
When he got a better job, better living conditions came with
it. It was better than what he had expected. And he thanked the heavens, he
thought it was his wife’s prayers back home that helped him, that spurred him. His
initial thoughts remained unaltered, that he’ll work for four or five years,
earn enough to buy a small piece of land and construct a house there and
subsequently go back and live close to his family. It took him just over a year
to finish off his outstanding loans and he then started saving for his
objectives. He kept his spending in check, and that never hurt his cause of
incrementing his savings bank back home. He used to go home once every year on
an average, and those 2-3 weeks he spent at home with his wife and kids were
ones that he always cherished a lot.
It took him a little over five years before his dream was
realized – at last he was able to construct a small house in his hometown. He
always used to reminisce how the years after that went by. It was the
necessities in life that kept him in Dubai much beyond his original intention
of staying. As time passed by the expenditures invariably increased. His
children grew up, graduated from expensive convent schools into college. Time
passed by without him realizing it, which extended his stay overseas from five
all the way upto nineteen years.
His daughter was good with her studies. She was the apple of
his eyes. She studied well and hard, and finished her schooling with impressive
grades. But his son… God, where did he go wrong..? The boy got into wrong
company in high school. He got into drugs and pornography, when most of his
classmates were figuring out the streams for their plus two courses. In one of
her letters, she described how the boy almost got himself arrested. He
remembered reading and re-reading that letter from his wife sitting on the
waterfront. Shaking his head every time. And that is where he made the
decision, to go back home for good.
People were inquisitive when he returned back. They kept
asking him as to why he returned so suddenly quitting a good job in Dubai. What
could he tell them..? How could he tell them, that it was the activities of his
son which brought him back..? That it was in part, to protect his daughter from
the predatory eyes of his son, that he was forced to leave everything and be
back home?
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Standing in front of the Central Jail, he waited for her to come out. He
could not control the flow of tears from his eyes as his mind flashed back his
life, and his family’s. As if a celluloid. He remembered his wife standing in
front of the court, looking in the eyes of the judge and screaming, “I did it.
I killed him. I killed my son. I knifed him when it seemed he would tear my
daughter’s life apart, in that inebriated state. I saw it in his eyes when he
advanced to grab her pushing me aside. I saved my daughter. But I should be punished
for the look of guilt in his eyes, when he looked at me one last time with life
in those eyes. I did the right thing. I saved my daughter. But for that, I had
to kill my son….”
