Diary of February 8, 2012
On this day I arrived in India, finally, after months of anticipation and (excessive) fantasy. My uncle and aunt dropped me off at Sharjah International Airport late at night. It wasn’t sad to say goodbye because I would see them again in 15 days. I checked in, hung out, ordered a drink, read from my Kindle, and boarded the flight.
An Indian woman, probably in her late 30s, was sitting in my assigned seat, next to the window. She was dressed in robes that Muslim women in India typically wear, I think, which are modest but don’t cover the head like a burqa. She seemed poor, lower-caste. The air hostess asked her to move over a seat but she didn’t understand. Then the air hostess yelled at her and she moved, and I sat down next to her. I played M83 on my iPod and read Ham on Rye by Charles Bukowski. I had never read anything by Bukowski before, but it occurred to me that the way I write someone might think I was trying to imitate him. Just in the sentence structure, at least. I’ll have to read more Bukowski to know for sure.
Whenever the music in my headphones got soft, or moved to the next track, I could hear the lady next to me sobbing into her phone. She was saying something about losing stuff but I couldn’t really understand. We made eye contact and she smiled and I smiled back, even though she kept crying. I guessed that she was either a migrant worker or domestic servant. I became uncomfortably aware of my privileges, of my iPod and my Kindle and my navy blue blazer folded neatly across my lap.
Then the flight took off.
From the air, the UAE at night is strings of lights crisscrossing over vast plains of darkness, like necklaces suspended in nothingness. The void is probably the desert but might as well have been the sea. Sometimes it is both. “Where the Boats Go” was playing at that exact moment and it was incredible. There were no clouds that night and I could see the floating necklaces for a very long time.
Soon the flight attendants came around handing us arrival cards, which we were required to fill out and hand in to passport control. Even though India is a country is a country of like 23 official languages and many hundreds more local iterations, the cards were written entirely in English. I asked the woman next to me, who was still crying softly, if she needed help filling hers out. We nominally spoke the same language, but she couldn’t really understand my Telugu and I couldn’t really understand hers. What got the point across was the word “help,” in English. She nodded and handed me her card.
I asked for her passport, which she retrieved from an old plastic shopping bag that was otherwise stuffed with some faded clothes. Her Dubai visa had ‘SERVANT’ written in bright red letters, just below her picture. When I finished filling out her arrival card I was handed another, and then another, and another until I filled out six cards this way. I didn’t mind. All of these women were domestic servants in the Middle East, who couldn’t read or write any English. Since I couldn’t communicate with them I had to look through their passports to figure out where they lived and where they had been and what they did for a living (‘SERVANTS’).
Many servants in Middle Eastern households come from poorer countries like India and Pakistan, and are often abused and treated like shit. The law essentially guarantees this. Say what you will about #occupy and systemic malfunctions in the American legal framework, but Gulf countries reach spectacular new heights of discrimination against Poor Brown Souls. Foreign servants have no recourse so their employers can do whatever they want.
In Dubai, even locals on the government dole are given P.B.S. servants. Fuck this country.
There were no more forms left to fill. I went back to Ham on Rye and listened to Real Estate. I was looking forward to doing this for the rest of the flight but then the crying woman tapped my shoulder. She told me the saddest story I ever heard anybody personally relate.
“I worked for my family for sixteen years, and I cared for them,” she said. She wasn’t crying now. ”‘They told me to pack a change of clothes because I was going with them to their vacation home. Everything I saved, all my belongings, a hundred thousand rupees worth of jewelry, I locked in my room, and they took the key.”
“But they didn’t take me to their vacation home. They drove me straight to the airport and told me to go back to India. I didn’t understand! I said, what wrong did I do? They just gave me my ticket and my passport and told me to leave.”
“I said, what about my things? They said they would mail them to me in India, but they never asked for my address. I said, what about my husband? They said it wasn’t their problem.”
Her husband lived in Al-ain, which was about 30 miles away, but she hadn’t seen him in six years, she said.
“They said he wasn’t their concern. They didn’t pay me. I wasn’t even allowed to eat today.”
She was speaking in that mix of Telugu and Arabic and English that I had difficulty with, but I understood. Her family she worked for sent her home, without warning. They lied to her. She wasn’t even allowed to pack. They stole her possessions. They kept her from her husband.
“I was clutching their feet and begging for forgiveness, but I did nothing wrong.” She put her hand on mine, and began to sob. “I raised their kids and did everything for them, I did all the cooking, I did all the cleaning, I never stole, I never lied, I never tried to run away, even though I thought about it and I could have. But I never did it because I wondered what the family would do without me.”
She said they had her feed strangers who came to the house asking for food, even as she went hungry herself. She said her madamji, who she helped to raise, accused her of stealing from the family, and added contacts to her phone to accuse her of making international calls.
I asked if she had tried seeking help at the airport. American naiveté. Airport security threatened to send her to jail if she didn’t board the flight.
I believed what I was hearing, but I couldn’t believe it was happened in the seat next to mine. I didn’t know what to say. She was a woman without rights. As I held my iPod in one hand and Kindle in another, I told her what had happened was terrible and unfair. Did she think I was a liar? Because I felt like one.
Then I did something I hadn’t done in years: I stopped being an atheist, sort of. I told her god would look after her and would punish the family because cosmically, or whatever, there was simply no justice in what had happened. I didn’t really believe the god part but I did believe something good had to happen to her soon and maybe hoped for a second that there was a god who could help her. It’s easier to be an atheist when you don’t have masters to completely fuck you over, I guess.
This woman was living an illusion, where she had thought her family needed her, and cared for her, like she needed them. How can a human being be so disposable, you might ask? Something that has to do, probably, with one of the most efficient systems of systematic discrimination against the poor to ever exist. The cycle starts in South Asia and extends to any country that’s rich off oil. This woman is another input.
I just wish I remembered her name.
Now she was worried about coming home to her family, and her children, with nothing but a plastic shopping bag stuffed with old clothes. “What kind of things will everybody think I was doing over there?” I told her that her family would understand if she explained her story to them, but once again I didn’t really believe myself.
“But I still have a visa, right? So I can go back if I want to.” She gave me her passport and asked me to check. Her visa had a big red ‘CANCELED’ stamp, dated January 09, 2012. Her family, who legally controlled both her passport and visa, had been quietly planning to send her away. In the UAE, you are allowed to stay in the country legally for up to one month. She was surprised at the airport exactly one month after her visa was cancelled. That’s why airport security had threatened her.
Earlier that day, I listened to the Vande Mataram and cried. Now I cried for the second time. We were silent after that. Eventually I put my headphones on again and went back to reading. India’s first lights – from boats in the waters near Mumbai – appeared in the window.
My iPod was playing “Chicago” as we landed. Hello, Hyderabad.
