by Suketu Mehta
When they get home, they rent an expensive car for two weeks. The first morning home, the people of the family, of the village, gather around the migrant to hear stories of the new land. The migrant, with his fancy clothes, new shoes, and big car, tells them what a big man he’s become in Rotterdam, in Paris, in Berlin. “I am selling a story,” Jean-Gratien says. “I elaborate, I make up things.” His mother cannot refuse small loans while he’s there, because after all, he’s a big man in America. Then the migrants go back to the cold countries, and the only time they’re in a car is when they’re making deliveries.
These stories recruit new migrants. They’re not the whole truth, and they’re not all lies. “Did you hear about the two boys from Niger who stowed away in the bottom of an airplane?” asks Jean-Gratien. “They were dead when the plane landed. They found a letter they’d written, about their idea of life in Europe.” The two boys had been killed by the story—the story of success in the rich countries.
A friend tells me about going to the roof of a building in Dubai and being surprised to see a miniature mosque, a replica of the Kabaa. The construction company will hire only Muslim laborers. They work on top of a tall building, but they need to pray five times a day. There’s no time for them to come down to the ground and prostrate themselves, or to go to a proper mosque. So the company had set up this portable one. Every Muslim has to ritually wash before prayer, so another worker takes a water hose and hoses down the workers five times a day.
The workers live a brutal existence. They make $150 a month; but they are required to spend $80 a month at the “company store,” which cheats them as they buy essentials. So why do they keep coming? Part of it is economic, but part of it is also the strength of the story—often fraudulent—that each immigrant takes back to his village when he comes with a suitcase full of tchotchkes: electronic toys, a stereo, cheap jewelry. These knickknacks embellish the story: that life is better elsewhere, that the migrant is making progress.
A man I met once in Delhi told me about his cousins in Kentucky. Every summer in his childhood, the cousins would visit his family in Delhi, and the family would drop everything to host their American relatives, taking them here and there, preparing costly feasts, sleeping in the living room so that the visitors could rest undisturbed in the bedrooms. What the cousins regularly sent over were photos of themselves in front of their “bungalow,” which means “villa” in the Indian context, not a one-floor cottage as it does in America. Photos of themselves with their arms around their large new television, or lying on the hood of their large new car. I knew what the man from Delhi was talking about, because my family sent exactly these same kinds of photos to our relatives in India, partly to reassure them that we were doing well in the new world, and partly to stoke their envy.
When the man from Delhi grew up, he got a chance to visit his cousins in Kentucky for the first time. He expected them to be living like millionaires. When he finally got to their fabled home, he started screaming obscenities at his cousins. He saw their “bungalow,” the shabbiest on the block, and their ordinary car, and saw that they lived at a much lower standard than did his own family in Delhi, who had been made to feel impoverished every time his cousins visited. All his childhood he had felt deprived, because of this lie. He howled out his abuse at the Kentucky liars.
* * *
I give a ride to Colette and Geralde, two Cameroonian women I’d met at an African immigrants group, at 167th Street and Grand Concourse in the Bronx. It looks like a rough neighborhood—this was in 2008—but when they show up, they say it’s safe because “there are a lot of Africans here. Everybody’s African.” Neither one of them is in the country legally.
As I walk with the two young women to my car, a black man yells out to them, “Can I be your bodyguard?”
Colette is a plump, jolly, exuberant woman with a large gash on her breastbone. “My brother scratched me when I was a kid,” she explains. And then she had a couple of injections to prevent infection, which widened the scar, as injections in developing countries often do. “I don’t want to hide it.” It is prominent, like a large burn mark.
Geralde, wearing a red polka-dot top, a jean jacket, and tight white shorts, is twenty-eight and shyer. She is four months younger than Colette; they see each other every day and talk for at least an hour. When Colette’s cell phone battery dies, Geralde says it’s because of all the time she spends talking to her friend. She calls her variously “my twin” and “my sister.” In my car, they both sit in the back, hoping I won’t mind, “because she’s my sister and I have to sit with her.”
Colette works on the weekend as a home health care aide. “I take care of an old lady.” Her husband drives a yellow cab. They would like to move elsewhere—the Poconos or upstate. Where the schools are good, where there are no gangs. “Our children are our future. We want to do it for them.”
Will they move where there are other Africans?
“There are Africans everywhere.”
“What keeps you in New York?” I ask.
“Even if you don’t have documentation,” Colette explains, “you can find a small job in New York.” The city is the last refuge of the paperless.
Geralde is beginning her nursing degree at Hostos Community College; she pays for her credits in cash, $140 a credit. She has just taken a biology final, which she found easy because she had already studied the subject in her high school in Cameroon, where the educational standards are higher than in the United States. Her mother owns a school there. She has a boyfriend here, a Nigerian, who is doing a Ph.D. in computer science at the CUNY graduate center. He is a citizen, but he hasn’t forgotten his traditions. “He knows about voodoo.” She’s now working as a nanny for a white family on the Upper East Side.
Geralde has a six-year-old daughter in Cameroon. She left her when she was eight months old, with her mother, and came to America.
It must have been hard to part with her daughter at eight months, I remark.
No, she responds. “I would just give my daughter to my mother every day. My mother told me to go to America. I miss my mother more than my daughter.” She came here because there are no jobs in Cameroon, and with the father dead, Geralde’s daughter needs her mother’s money more than she needs her mother.
I ask about their jobs. They say that they’ve encountered prejudice, but it’s indirect, or innocent. Geralde was asked by her employer to do the children’s laundry, in which she found her employer’s underwear. “In Africa, we are taught to hide our underwear. You can do bad voodoo to someone if you get their underwear. I had to wash her underwear.”
“And fold it,” Colette adds.
But still, when Geralde first started working as a nanny, she got so attached to the little white girl she took care of that she would sometimes call her by her daughter’s name before she caught herself. “I still have a picture of her on my wall. I send her flowers, gifts.” I’ve found this with many of the immigrant nannies: they spend their lives caring for somebody else’s child while their own are strangers to them. And little by little, the child they are paid to take care of starts occupying a bigger place in their hearts than the ones that came out of their bodies.
“How often do you speak to your daughter?” I ask.
“Every day.”
“How long for?”
“Ten dollars.” That’s how much the calling card lasts—about an hour.
Geralde lives with her brother in a one-bedroom apartment. “The Muslim Africans live six people in a room. They sleep on the floor. We could never do that. We need beds.” She pays $900 a month in rent, and makes $1,500 a month from her nanny job. She sends money every month to her daughter, whom she hasn’t seen for five years. When she calls her, her daughter gives her the rundown of every single thing that has happened in the day; if she misses her call by a few days, the little girl will begin with the first day and go on till she’s recounted every day.
Then Colette tells me that, contrary to
her feigned indifference earlier, Geralde really misses her daughter. “She cries every day. I tell her, ‘You will see her. God has a plan.’” But her daughter doesn’t know quite who she is on the phone. “She’s Auntie Geralde to her,” Colette says.
“What does she call you? Does she call you ‘maman’?”
“She calls everybody ‘maman.’ I’m Geralde Maman. When she was asked who’s her mother, she named my sister-in-law.”
She lifts her eyes. They are full of water. She lifts a finger to them just before it can spill over.
When I drop off Geralde, I tell her I have two children too.
“Where are they? Are they with you?”
I tell her I’m divorced and they spend half the time with me. Later I realize that she wasn’t asking if they live with their mother or me; she hadn’t the remotest idea that I was divorced. She was asking if they were in India or America. It is a natural question for Geralde to ask of other immigrants.
* * *
Every immigrant has left a love behind. Every immigrant has abandoned a lover or a child or a best friend and has made false promises of return. Back home, the grandparents prepare extravagant meals, lay out the table in the garden, light the lamps in the evening for the children who will never come back. Back home, the children wait for their mothers to call every Sunday.
I knew an Indian babysitter without a green card in New York who hadn’t seen her children for a decade. They had been left in the care of her in-laws while she and her husband struggled in New York, to send money back, in the hope of becoming legal someday and bringing the children here. Every Sunday she spoke to them. One day somebody was showing her some pictures of a wedding in her town in India. “Who’s that?” she asked, pointing to a teenage girl. The person showing the pictures looked at her in surprise. “That’s your daughter.” The babysitter burst into tears.
* * *
I saw the possible and dismal future of the world when I spent a semester teaching at New York University Abu Dhabi in spring 2017. I teach at the most internationalized institution of higher education on the planet. NYU has three full-fledged campuses, and also some twenty-seven study abroad portals, which can be found on every continent. It’s become like Starbucks, or the East India Company. My NYU Abu Dhabi students were from all over the planet, wandering around a campus built for three times their number, a land without students for students without a land.
Outside my window in Arabia, I could see sand, palm trees, and not a single Arab. It is a nation of resident foreigners, who have built the Emirates with their labor. Abu Dhabi is easily the most multicultural city I have ever lived in. And it taught me that white people have no monopoly on racism. It was a country of pearl divers until the 1960s, when the oil money started gushing in. With the money, the Emiratis started importing labor; 88 percent of the people are from elsewhere, the highest percentage of migrants in the world. The 12 percent lucky enough to be Emirati occupy themselves with flippancies: falconry, horse racing, bidding for license plates with the lowest numbers (the royal family has the single-digit ones). In the Emirates, all races and colors and nationalities are welcome, as long as you don’t get political. Make money and send it home. You don’t live in Dubai or Abu Dhabi, you commute there to a job. Ten or eleven months working every day, then a month or two back in Lagos or Dhaka, laden with presents for your wife and children and parents. You will be pampered with the choicest foods, as a provider. They will recognize your ordinary heroism.
Dubai, the Emirate next door, has thirty thousand prostitutes. The hotel lounges are depressing places where expat businessmen meet migrant whores. At one of them, a Chinese girl from Guangzhou, five months in country, stands by us and smiles, waiting to be asked. What is she doing here? As with many of the Latina women traveling north, she is offering the only commodity she has after her long journey: her body.
In the gold souk mall in downtown Abu Dhabi, I feel happy because I could be in a midsize town in Kerala. All around me are Malayalis buying electronic appliances for their loved ones back home. Then eating in the food court: a Kerala thali served on banana leaves for eight dirhams, about two and a half dollars. On the NYU campus, everyone speaks Hindi but the sahibs. I am one of the sahibs, but I am also brown. An African man, probably a professor, asks me if I work at the car rental desk. An Australian man who runs the scientific lab asks me if he can help me, assuming I might be wanting to break into the lab, then turns to joking about mad scientists when he realizes I am of his rank.
* * *
The taxi driver who picks me up on the NYU Abu Dhabi campus shortly after 7 a.m. is African. As soon as the cab gets to an empty road, he pulls over to the side and beseeches me, “Pee-pee. I’ll be just a second.” And he runs out, squats in the bushes by the road, and is back in ten seconds, relieved.
His name is Robert Kwasi, and he’s from Ghana. He’s been here for less than a year. Last year, a recruiter for the taxi company came to Ghana and picked up 150 Ghanaians. “The government there is bad, so we can’t get jobs,” he says.
Robert works eighteen hours a day, seven days a week. He’ll be on his way to his camp after dropping me off. “I will sleep, and wash my body,” he tells me. But often, he tries to sneak in a nap in his cab. He was doing that three days ago when one of the taxi company’s management vehicles took a picture of him sleeping; that cost him a 500 dirham ($136) fine. The same day, a police car caught him sleeping; that was another 500 dirhams.
It is against the company’s rules for him to park and get something to eat, so he rushes into a cheap restaurant when he can, but more often subsists on biscuits and tea. “It is bad for my body.” Even in the cab he has to eat furtively; it is against the rules to eat in the taxi. He points to a camera just above the rearview mirror, recording both of us.
The Ghanaians were promised a basic salary of 800 dirhams ($218) a month, but when they got to Abu Dhabi, they found out that they were working on commission only. So they can’t afford to get sick and miss a day of work. Accommodation is free, in a barracks forty-five minutes out in the desert, where Robert is in a room with nine others in a system of bunk beds. He is not allowed to cook, because the company wants them to pay for food at the canteen. The company comes into their rooms sometimes and destroys their cooking equipment.
If his taxi is scratched when he returns it at the end of his shift, he is fined 300, 400, or 500 dirhams—more than the cost of repairing the scratch. Robert is secondary to the taxi he drives. His body is of less value than the body of the car; if he’s sick, the company won’t take care of him, but if the car suffers a scratch, the company will spring into action and demand that he fix it.
I ask him how his Arab customers are. They are fine, he says. “They just pay and they go.” Some Arabs will not take a cab driven by a black driver; others will not take cabs driven by Indians, Pakistanis, or Nepalese, because they believe blacks are cleaner and speak English better.
He is working to send money back to Ghana. “In my country, I am a man of position,” he says. He didn’t go to university, “but my oldest is studying to be a doctor.”
“It’s great that he’s studying to be a doctor,” I say.
“Daughter,” he corrects me. “All three of my children are girls.” Then, for the first time, his face softens at the memory of his girls, and with a gentle laugh, he says, “I am close to them.”
Robert Kwasi is a hero. He is in a country not his own, living a life as an adjunct to a machine, forgoing all pleasure—listening to music, eating his native food—to work for his three daughters. Every human need—sleeping, shitting, fucking, eating—is against the rules of the company. He can’t even talk on his cell phone with his fellow drivers, as the ones in New York do.
Afterward, I go back to my lavish NYU campus and sit that evening by the sea at the Hyatt, paying more for drinks in one day than Robert earns in a week. Because I am American. In the age of globalization, your dignity is determined by your passport. If
you’re American or European, you will get your Emirati visa in the VIP section, and other nationalities will wait on you. In other countries, borders will fall magically at your advent, and visas will be provided on arrival at the airport. If you’re Indian or Filipino, you will wait endlessly in line and be treated with casual rudeness, along with all the other Unimportant Persons. In the twenty-first century, your humanity is defined by your nationality. And those who have no nationality—the Palestinians, the Rohingya—are fucked. They will wander the earth, powerless.
This is the future of citizenship: a hierarchical model as in the Gulf nations, in which 88 percent of the population works for the other 12 percent and has no rights whatsoever. All men are not created equal. Just like the undocumented Salvadorans slaving away in the kitchens and on the farms of America, or the “guest workers” in Europe who’re expected to leave after their host nations stop needing them. I’ve always found the term “guest worker” puzzling. If you invite a guest into your home, you give him food and drink; you don’t ask him to wash the dishes and clean the toilet. If he does do it, he is no longer a guest; he is your roommate.
A pedestrians’ revolt in Doha gladdens me. I am waiting to cross the road with a crowd of around a hundred other pedestrians at an interminable traffic signal by the Corniche. The expensive mastodons of the Qataris zoom by: Land Rovers, Lexuses. The light doesn’t change; it’s been ten minutes. Then there’s a momentary gap in the traffic, and a couple of the pedestrians, almost all migrant workers, step forward, followed by ten more, followed by twenty, and finally the whole mob rushes forward into the twelve lanes of the boulevard, whooping and dancing and laughing as the big cars screech to a halt and furiously honk and flash their lights. But there’s nothing they can do short of run us over as we move forward, the ragged army, reclaiming land.
