Lucky Ticket

by Joey Bui

  I had been counting on going home, and had made plans with Grace and my family. Instead, I watched at the end of the semester while everyone else got ready to leave Abu Dhabi. All the chatter in ICAD was about gifts for relatives and the food everyone was going to eat back home in Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, the Philippines or and Ethiopia. I could see the excitement among the students too. They passed the cafeteria on their way out to the main entrance, where taxis left for the airport. Dressed in track pants and hoodies and dragging large suitcases, they hugged and laughed and cried as they said goodbye to friends.

  I still did not really have a friend here. Abdul and I had grown apart. His preparations for home had continued for almost a month. He said he was sorry for me when I found out my passport was held up, but he forgot about it soon enough. Then he showed me an Arab perfume containing oud oil that he had bought to take home for his wife. He went on to talk about how he couldn’t wait to have sex with her again. Although we used to talk about sex often, I got angry and said he was perverted. After that he stayed out of my way.

  Abu Dhabi was especially empty in the summer because it was the season of Ramadan. Before Ramadan began, I caught the bus to the Corniche, the long artificial beach beside the city. I had heard that the white and yellow sand was imported from abroad, from places as far away as Australia. I took off my sneakers, but the sand was so hot that I had to sit down. White tourists lay on beach towels in bikinis. Emirati couples and families walked across the sand, the women in black burkas and hijabs and the men in long white kanduras and ghutra headscarves. Gleaming blue skyscrapers lined the pale-yellow length of the Corniche. Disoriented, I wandered around downtown Abu Dhabi, imagining Grace there with me, and the comments we would make about what we saw. But I wasn’t sure I was imagining her correctly.

  Although I had been working in Abu Dhabi for a year, I knew so little of the city. I felt as if I did not have permission to be there, to waste time there. It was nothing more than a workplace, and I was just waiting to get home to Zanzibar.

  That first day downtown, I went inside a juice shop. A welcome blast of air conditioning hit me as I pushed on the heavy glass door. Inside, there was just enough room for two tables. The owner took my order from behind a glass pane he had filled with oranges and lemons. I asked for a papaya- and-banana juice. The papaya was not nearly as sweet as the papaya at home, but it was still good. When three Emirati men came in, I left to give them my table.

  I stayed on the street for a while, finishing my juice. From across the street, I watched Emiratis take off their leather sandals before entering a small mosque opposite. The evening call to prayer is my favourite. Although the deep voice and the Arabic still made me feel like a stranger, it was undeniably calming. The skies were smeared with soft pink and orange and fathers were steering their children into the mosque by the shoulders. The soft fabric of the women’s burkas swayed as they followed.

  Even though my family, and everyone I know in Zanzibar, were Muslim, I had never prayed five times a day, or even daily. There was a men’s prayer room in ICAD. It was a small space, about two by two metres, a simple red rug on the stone floor, no windows. I had only glanced in there when I first arrived at ICAD. That summer I went in every day. It was always empty. I knelt, and didn’t know what else to do at first. I was tired of my own thoughts. But then I started to picture places in Zanzibar, as though testing myself to remember them properly. My parents’ house appeared vividly to me. I knew how many steps I took to walk from one end of each room to the other, and how far I could run my hand along the mantelpiece in our living room before reaching the edge, and how much dust was there, depending on the week of the month. And how low I had to duck to get under the curtain my sisters had put up to divide their shared bedroom.

  I could see the picture frames my mother liked so much: thick, gold-painted wood with rose designs, framing photos of our distant relatives from various branches of the family, not photos of our immediate family. The living-room walls were covered with my father’s tattered posters of Zanzibari and Tanzanian figures and events. There was a poster of Sheikh Abdullah Saleh Farsy, the Zanzibari poet and Islamic scholar, and a handful of promotional posters of the Zanzibar International Film Festival, even though my father had read none of the Sheikh’s writing and seen none of the films. Neema’s patterned cloths covered every flat surface, along with Sophy’s cut-outs of Nigerian movie stars, and Mary’s and Faith’s figurines. These items and decorations would have changed slightly while I was away. An old poster would have been replaced by a more recent film-festival poster. New baby photos would be squeezed into the edges of old frames.

  I went downtown two more times, once to have shawarma, thin slices of chicken shaved off a glistening spit and wrapped in pita with fries, onions, tomatoes and thoom, a light garlic paste. The second time I had dosa, a crispy Indian pancake filled with spiced potatoes. The Indian cook watched me from behind a perspex pane, from which an arch had been cut out for transactions. He was standing up straight, his head leaning back, as though to take in as much of the scene as possible.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  ‘Zanzibar,’ I said, and he nodded authoritatively. I thought it was unlikely he knew where it was. Most of the Indian guys at ICAD had not heard of Zanzibar before meeting me.

  ‘Where do you work?’ he continued after a while.

  I was trying to finish the dosa as quickly as possible, but the potatoes were too hot to scoff. I told him about the university, but he didn’t know where it was.

  ‘Construction?’ he asked.

  ‘No. Waiter.’

  ‘Your first time?’ he asked after another pause. I didn’t know what he meant. He pointed to my plate. ‘The dosa,’ he said.

  I nodded.

  ‘You like it?’

  ‘It’s good, very good.’

  He smiled contentedly and kept watching me.

  ‘Good, good. You will come back, huh?’

  I nodded as I chewed, then I scooped up the last of the chutney and got up to leave.

  ‘You are not tall like the other Africans.’ He chuckled. ‘Some of them are big and tall.’ He stretched out his arms to demonstrate. ‘A lot of Africans in the NBA.’

  I laughed half-heartedly.

  ‘You will come back, yes? Bring your friends. The ones who work at the new university.’

  ‘I will,’ I said.

  I was about to leave, but went to the counter instead. ‘Where are you from in India? One of my friends here is from Mumbai.’

  ‘Me too, I am from Mumbai.’

  ‘You too?’

  ‘There are a lot of people from Mumbai, beta,’ he laughed.

  ‘Twenty million of us.’

  ‘There are a lot of foreign workers in Abu Dhabi.’

  ‘Yes. We are the city. Everything works here because of us,’ he said loudly, and slapped a dough-dusted palm on the counter. ‘Don’t you know, eighty per cent of Abu Dhabi is foreign workers.’

  He told me that his name was Arjun. He was thirty-six. He had been working in Abu Dhabi for six years and had four children back home in Mumbai. His favourite was his son Aditya, thirteen years old and incredibly smart. Arjun hoped Aditya could go to school in America or the UK. Every year Arjun saved enough money to buy Abu Dhabi gold for his wife, who claimed it was the best gold in the world.

  I smiled and laughed as he spoke, making sure he felt at ease. It wasn’t how I used to behave at home. In Abu Dhabi, I felt older, different. I thought of myself standing there in a downtown dosa shop speaking to an Indian cook. I could have been anyone. It was like the feeling I had on the tarmac when I first landed in Abu Dhabi, as if I could start walking in any direction and no one would know I was gone, but this time I was okay. I told Arjun that I would come back with Abdul after the summer.

  Once Ramadan began, all the shops were closed during the day. A few food places remained open behind blackout blinds, but you could only buy takeaway. It was too ho
t to be downtown anyway, sometimes forty-one or forty-two degrees. I took the bus down once, but it was so miserable I waited for the next bus back. With even fewer people on the street, Abu Dhabi looked like a city inside a snowdome, encased in a bubble of heat. The searing light reflected from the surface of the skyscrapers bounced inside the globe.

  I began to spend hours at a time lying in bed, the fan pointed towards me, unhappy, drowsy, not speaking to anyone, sometimes for days. I was sweating all the time. I went to the prayer room just for somewhere to go. As I knelt, thick beads of sweat dripped down my chest. I closed my eyes and pictured the Zanzibar beaches, the cool water, the veiny lines of sunlight dancing on the surface, the rustling of the beaded bracelets sold by old men and women to tourists on the beach, and the drenching rain we would get after a whole week of sun. It had not rained once in Abu Dhabi since I had been there. The heat was so much drier than hot days in Zanzibar. I began to lose weight because I didn’t feel like eating. With my food stipend from RECO, I got myself bread, ham, oranges and biscuits from the grocery store in Mussafah, but I hardly touched any of it.

  One afternoon an ICAD manager told me to go to a meeting at Workers Affairs. I was so thankful to have to be somewhere again. Perhaps my passport had finally returned? There were still almost two months left of summer and enough time to arrange to go home. But my hopes were dashed: Ashley told me that RECO needed more waiters on one of their other projects, a three-day international conference at a hotel. I immediately accepted.

  Two days later, I caught an early bus with twelve other ICAD workers. The hotel was even bigger than the university campus. Thick, blue marble lettering greeted us at the entrance, before we followed a winding path, lined with topiaried shrubs, which led to a cluster of ornate, cream-and-blue private villas facing the beach, some with their own tennis court. The bus continued, via an underground carpark, to the workers’ entrance. We collected our uniforms and I was assigned to the kitchen. One of the hotel restaurants served as an all-day buffet. They needed me at the roast-beef station.

  The hotel was like a palace. My restaurant was round and cavernous, with white walls and high ceilings, and looked onto dense foliage—through the fronds you could see blue-green seawater, a sparkling pool, tiles tessellating in brilliant dark and light blues, and lounges made of cream canvas. The air conditioning maintained the room at a perfect temperature. The conference attendees were poised and well-dressed, the men in light-coloured suits and the women sporting colourful silk scarves. Everyone wore a lanyard displaying the conference logo—a blue-and-green globe circled by bare arms. As soon as I stepped out of the kitchen, I could smell the scent of the hotel, a fragrance that added to the dreamlike feeling of the place. It was subtle, neither floral nor fruity, neither musk nor oud. It was like a nut, both faint and sharp, as though you were standing in the field on which the nut was grown and caught the aroma of baking sugar, carried by the breeze. The other workers told me that the scent was pumped through the air conditioning, throughout the hotel.

  It was easy work, and, even though the skin of my hands was scorched under the heat lamp all day as I carved beef (there was no sign of Ramadan inside the hotel), I couldn’t drink in enough of the atmosphere of beauty and sophistication. There was also a dessert buffet, where the chefs varied the heights of the different desserts: entire iced cakes on platforms, towers of bite-sized tarts, shot glasses of mousses, and skewers of multicoloured fruit. I liked listening to the clinks of cups, forks, and spoons, and the gentle cadences of the academics’ voices. I spoke brightly to all the guests. Some asked me about Zanzibar and I told them about the beautiful beaches and the mshikaki, the skewers of grilled mutton and goat sold on the street late at night. They said they would have to visit.

  I was looking inside extreme Abu Dhabi luxury, only the surfaces of which I had glimpsed: the blue, glass skyscrapers, the sprawling five-star resorts, and the Emirates Palace, sitting at the other end of the Corniche, overlooking a field of fountains that glittered at night. I felt as if I was veering back and forth between two equally dreamlike places: from the hot, depressing stupor of my bed in ICAD at night, to the immaculately cool, glossy paradise of the hotel in the day.

  When I returned my blue uniform at the end of the third day and took the bus back to ICAD from the hotel for the last time, I felt oppressed with fear, desperate not to live through the next seven or so hours until I could sleep. I was more desperate now than when I first found out that my passport had been withheld and I couldn’t go home.

  The next seven weeks passed in a blur of misery. I woke up late, weak from thirst, often snapping out of nightmares about the sickly, thick heat and the sweat that soaked through my shirt and sheets. I napped throughout the day, drifting in and out of sleep. I was sick of being awake, my thoughts spinning. I felt inexplicably estranged from Grace, Neema and my parents. I was so lonely that I had begun to message people who were not even close to me back home, and cousins I barely spoke to. But once we had got through some preliminary greetings, I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone how I was struggling. Relief came only when it was dark enough outside—it took too long in summer—and I could go to sleep again.

  After weeks like this, there came a day when I simply could not get out of bed. I lay there, petrified and sweating. When I finally managed to stand up, after five hours, it was as though the volume in my body switched on and I could hear my heart beating, booming between my ears. I ran to the bathroom to splash water on my face, and looked in the mirror, afraid there was something wrong with me. I headed to the prayer room, where I wished for the health and happiness of each member of my family, trying to calm myself by picturing their faces and voices. Then I went outside the ICAD compound, pacing as I waited for the cool of the evening, before forcing myself to do push-ups and stretches, trying to feel stronger. Before the summer ended, I experienced two similar episodes.

  When Abdul and the other workers returned and asked how my summer had been, I told them, as though it was a fun story, about the absurd beauty and luxury of the hotel. It was all I could offer to match their stories of their homes, wives, girlfriends and families. I was so thankful for their chatter that I treated them more warmly than before and spoke to them for as long as I could. When I was stationed back at the sandwich bar, I asked students about their summer travels and, if they asked, I told them about Zanzibar.

  One afternoon, when I was making a grilled vegetable wrap for a tall student from Canada, I asked him why he seemed worried. He told me about assignments that were due soon, how his applications for internships had been rejected, and that he was late turning in a budget for the student body. His breathlessness reminded me of my mother, who became anxious and flustered whenever there was a problem with finances at the beef business. I remembered the calm, smiling manner with which Neema comforted our mother.

  ‘Pole pole,’ I said to him.

  ‘Pole—what is that?’

  ‘It’s Swahili. It means slowly, gently,’ I tried to smile the way Neema did—with patience, kindness—and I thought I could see his expression relax. ‘Take it slowly.’

  I became popular with the students, so Adnan gave me more shifts on the sandwich bar. That’s how I became friends with Ricky, a Filipino guy who had been on the main sandwich bar before I arrived. Ricky treated me like an old friend. He told me gossip about the workers—about their salaries, their romances, and we compared our favourite students and professors. Ricky opened up a social world in ICAD and on campus that made my life seem more real. The Filipinos treated Abu Dhabi like their home. I came to like their loud and cheerful manner, which had annoyed me earlier. I began to act in the same way.

  The second year in Abu Dhabi passed more easily. My passport was returned to Workers Affairs. Farah explained that the long wait was not routine, that there had been a problem with RECO’s processing. She said that Workers Affairs would now hold my passport for me, because of the kafala law in the Gulf that required employers to hold
migrant workers’ passports, but it would be accessible to me whenever I needed it. Because of my case, and others like mine, Workers Affairs would transition into directly handling the passport processing for new full-time workers of the university, rather than leaving it to contractors like RECO. Farah asked me to sign a form saying that I understood and agreed to everything about my passport. I thought she might have been taking precautions because of the rumours about migrant workers trapped by employers, like the maids in Oman whose passports were withheld. But I trusted Farah and the other women in Workers Affairs. I signed, and there were no further problems with my passport.

  Abdul told me that the rumours were true—in the UAE there were a lot of workers whose passports were confiscated, who tried to leave their employer because of horrible working conditions and accommodation, but who could not. He knew Indians and Bangladeshi construction workers who lived in apartments with ten or even fifteen men to a small bedroom, in places so old and dirty there were rats and you could get sick just from sleeping there. They were forced to work overtime in the sun even during the summer—‘The newspapers in Mumbai are full of these stories, full of them!’ said Abdul. He told me that the police had once arrested workers at their accommodation, beaten them and deported them because they had gone on strike, which was illegal in the UAE.