This month Deepa Bhasthi goes looking for an El Dorado in the desert… the gold, the scent, the memories…
“Very seldom in life does a book like Goat Days come along and ruin you for other books. It becomes like that mythic true love you once felt for someone when you were still innocent — but now that you have lived through it, you no longer are that innocent person. You have read it and now other books just don’t compare. You may stop reading altogether, for a while, just to let memories of Goat Days flow through you unchecked.” Sheheryar Sheikh, in Dawn.
Sometimes, like in Benyamin’s Goat Days, language plays only a functional role. Sometimes, you need to strip language of its vocal abilities to tell a story as powerful as that of Najeeb’s. He is recently married; his wife Sainu is pregnant. He dives for a living; but things are unstable, as the business of sand mining might soon become regulated. Worried about the future, Najeeb jumps at an opportunity to go to the Gulf as a migrant worker. “Only long enough to settle a few debts. Add a room to the house. Just the usual cravings of most Malayalis.”
From Riyadh airport, Najeeb gets kidnapped. He is driven into a slavery-like situation for over three years, tending goats, unpaid, underfed, losing hope but retaining his faith in Allah. Eventually he escapes and braves the expanse of the desert. There is a happy ending, but not before your heart is wrenched by the cruelty, driven by necessity or otherwise, that humankind is capable of; not before you are almost overwhelmed by the tension and poignancy that precedes the triumph of the human spirit; not before you internalize the fact that Najeeb is real and this is a true story.
Stories like Najeeb’s are rarely heard, even if you discount the magnitude of it. It’s the perspective that you don’t often hear. You rarely, if ever, hear a “sob story” about the Gulf. The prevailing attitude is one that seems to ask: “what is the need to acknowledge the dust on the road to that El Dorado?”
You’re more likely to hear the story of someone like Shaji, among the first few batches of migrants from Kerala who went to Gulf, or to “Dubai” which has become the generic name for Dubai, Saudi Arabia, Oman, Riyadh, Qatar and the rest of the region. You would hear about how Shaji became a ‘manager in a shop’ there. In reality, he would probably have done something much more menial. You would see him coming back to visit and the air would seem different around him. He wouldn’t flaunt the gold wrist watch or place the new VCR too obviously in the front room, but he would bring with him the air of the Gulf, the air that would fill the lines on your forehead with specks of sand and smell rich. His friends, perhaps Najeeb among them, would hear from him the word khubus, “in the riverside bragging of many Gulf-returnees”, Shaji is in that tribe now.
In the drawing room of Shaji’s newly built house, there would be a showcase displaying things no one in his village had seen before. Those things, the new aura of well-to-do-ness that would surround his wife and his mother would become part of the Gulf lore.
Many years later, after the stories, overheard, imagined, have become legends and rosier dreams, other stories would be told; stories of people like Abbu, who would have gone to Dubai at the behest of his grandmother and aunts, after showing him their neighbour Shaji’s house in the distance and pushing him to help the family out,and to buy them some status. Abbu would learn to make wafer thin pappadams from a Pappada Chettiyar in the village, although this would have once been the domain of that one caste, economics would have a way of driving away such minor inconveniences. He and several other 19-year olds would trudge along to these places of learning, ribbing each other, laughing, the way 19-year olds do. They wouldn’t talk about it much, but Dubai dreams would cloud their every thought, every joke, every new crush.
Abbu would become part of the second wave that supported the lives of Shaji and others of his wave. Those pappadams would probably be sold at Lulu Hypermaket in various cities; the industrial size of consumerism at those cities would make Abbu feel lost and yet would strengthen the sense of awe that Gulf stories inspired in him when he first heard them. Two years later, when he visits his village, he would wear a slightly see-through shirt and sit in the front seat of the Ambassador car his family would hire to go pick him up from the airport.
People in this same village in Kerala would have a hearty laugh every time they would retell Ahmad Kutty’s misadventure. They would tell of how Ahmad Kutty fell for an agent’s deception and went on a dubious visa to Oman; how he was never able to leave the building where he worked and lived in for two whole years, never stepping out, never seeing the desert at night. They would tell of how, when Ahmad Kutty was ready to return, he had walked out and surrendered to the police, and had been sent to prison for not having the right papers; how he got his head shaved in prison, as was the rule. Ahmad Kutty would be deported, and would land in Mumbai and stay there a few weeks; not wanting to return to the village till his hair grew back a little. They would tell of how a distant relative (they never liked each other much) saw Ahmad Kutty in Mumbai and carried that tale of shame to the village.
But people who had also seen those faraway lands understood that there were things you did, in the lands, during those times, that you never spoke of. You did them because there was money at the end of it. People left behind also understood, but they still made fun, as laughter was the only mask they could afford to wear. In any case, none of this really mattered in the end; when Ahmad Kutty came back home, they all milled around his suitcases, as they would with any Gulf-returnee. He, like all the Gulf-returnees, would have gifts for everyone, however small: scented pens, scent bottles or seedless dates. The opening of the cases, petti thorakkal, would be accorded its due ritual.
Generations of Malayalis have grown up on these stories. Mostly the gold-plated ones. The Najeebs of the world aren’t talked about on the shores of the river Nila. Some stories are best left behind on those dry shores. For what you did isn’t the question.You smell of Dubai. That is enough.
Disclaimer: Except when referring to Najeeb as part of the book, all other names are fictional. The anecdotes, however, are all true, and were collected from friends from Kerala.
