She smiled back, but in the way you smile at someone you don’t know when crossing paths at night.
I looked back at Khalid. He was still in the car, the window down, watching me intently; he held his hands up as if to say, “Now what?” But my why was bigger than his what, and it always would be.
I quickly gathered the stones, put them in the basket, and walked to where the other ladies hauled their work. I caught the eye of their watcher. He was in the shadow of a building with a vacillating fan blowing over him. His sluggardly body found purpose, and he turned to Khalid and then to me. I was too far away to see his face; it was enough that he saw me and let me continue back to Ruka and help her with her labor. That day, we outworked everyone in the field. When I looked for Khalid again, he was gone; in his place was something I could not have imagined, Mohamed’s car. Why was he not in custody?
Needling
The sun left the sky, making it impossible to discern the chunks of earth the workers were here to clear. The man who had been sitting on the edge of the parcel, smoking as we worked, barked words into the sky and then rose. He took a wooden baton and beat a metal bell repeatedly until everyone shuffled into a ragged line and followed him to the street. Ruka mumbled something to me. Somewhere deep in my brain I knew what she was saying, like when she had toddled and babbled and my maternal translator knew the words she used. We were going “home” for the night—to rest, for food, for a shot. We might have walked a block; this part of town wasn’t delineated in the neat streets of the most developed sections.
Eventually a skinny light-blue door with three locks on it rose against the dilapidated sand-color stone of the building walls. The man who led us here had the key for each of the locks. I suspected they existed more to keep what was on the other side of the door in, rather than keep the nothingness outside from entering.
He opened the door and stepped out of the way to let us file in. As we got close, the ladies in front of us were engulfed by the darkness. We followed them and were greeted by a burned tang that filled my nostrils. The smell of boiling cleaning solution. Dim light came from a line of sconces on the wall; I could see the particulates in the air swirling above them. Everywhere was the sensation of close bodies on a packed bus. Radiant heat rose from sweaty bodies and gave the air a musty remainder of the tired permutations they had worked through until exhaustion. Ruka reached back, found my hand, and squeezed it. She was scared, and though I never would tell her, so was I.
The door closed behind us; the bodies bumped and shuffled, while muffled cries and serial weeping came from another room or floor. The rank smell grew stronger, and as we inched toward the back of the house, I saw fluorescent lights blasting a dirty food preparation area with soggy vegetables and dry falafel. The man who had led us was there now, banging through a small box until he pulled out a needle and held it to the light. A murky brown solution filled the vial, and he gave the plunger a jerky press, sparking an arc of liquid from the tip and sending it to the floor. A woman stood next to him with a plate of food. The girl at the front of the line sluggishly reached for the plate, but the woman holding it pulled it back and pointed to the syringe.
The man pushed up her sleeve and plunged the needle into her arm. Her tense neck muscles slackened and her face became flaccid. The meal was given to her, and the next woman approached. I didn’t want Ruka getting this shot, whatever it was. I pushed her out of the line and told her to stand in the darkness and wait for me. When I approached the man, he looked me up and down and shrugged before sending the needle into my arm. I wanted to tell him that he shouldn’t do this. That the girls would work for food alone. But my mouth grew heavy and thick, and the plate of food she placed in my hands felt as though I were carrying an entire cord of wood.
The next moment, my mind and body separated. I knew what I wanted to do, but I couldn’t will my body forward. I felt a hand push in the middle of my back. I picked up momentum and was able to advance into the blurry darkness. Ruka found me, her words peppering me in rapid succession.
I only processed. “Food … okay … .tired … tomorrow.” They all sounded like distant lands I’d never heard of.
I felt the food in my mouth, but it was tasteless, a vague substance that landed in my stomach with an adequate thud. Ruka brushed my hair and stayed close; I felt her breath on me. I drifted while she was constant. Her voice in my ear woke me. I strained to open my eyes, and when I finally did, Ruka was there. I had found her; the perilous dreams that bounced inside my head were only half true, and I was fully grateful.
“Mama, I’ve come up with a way to leave.”
Her eyes looked like mine felt: swollen, red, and irritated. She tapped her fingers on the wall next to where I lay. She helped me up to a sitting position and gave me sips of warm water. Floating bits that tasted like rust made it into my mouth. My body felt as though I’d been asleep for years.
“Do you see this?” Ruka took a rock from beside her and circled a point where three of the lines came together. “This is where the bus leaves from. I’ve heard if we pay, they’ll take us out of here.”
Minrada appeared in my mind, the look she had given me when the doors closed on the bus as I left without giving her payment.
“I know.” The words croaked from my throat. “I know because this is how I came home.”
“Then we can do it again.” She looked hopeful, the way children look when all the turmoil that surrounds their idea isn’t visible to them.
“It’s possible, maybe.” I was too lethargic to explain what I’d been through.
“They said a new bus goes in two months.”
“They?” Who were these people who had told her?
“One of the other ladies who works in the fields with me. She knows things the others don’t. Secrets about how it all works.”
“It?”
“Here. This place. Dubai.”
Two months seemed excessive. “Let’s go. Time to work,” a voice commanded us.
Ruka stood up and pulled my arm. When we stepped outside, the sunlight burned the remaining fog from my brain. “Have they paid you yet?”
“No. They said they would pay us at the end of the month.”
“And what about a passport?”
“The book they gave us when we came?” I noticed a twitch in the corner of her mouth, where she used to half smile. The injections.
“Yes.”
“I don’t remember. I don’t remember much.”
We followed the line, but it wasn’t going back to the place where we were yesterday.
About five people ahead of us in the line, a woman, darker than me, with a yellow dress and a headband holding back her wiry black hair, bolted. She lost her shoes a few steps into her escape. It didn’t slow her velocity as she slipped between condensing walls of stone. The man didn’t look back; if he had, I wasn’t convinced he would have made a chase of her. Physical force wasn’t what was holding anyone in this line.
We arrived at the ground level of a partially constructed tower. I couldn’t get perspective of the height other than the open top, where steel rods shot out of the concrete toward the sky and disappeared into clouds. The line moved into an open elevator with flimsy rope railings that delivered us onto a gusty platform. The views expanded over the city. A few of us tottered and pulled at our clothes to steady ourselves. From the platform, girders crisscrossed to form the base of a floor. The man handed us each a mop and pointed to the sand and bird droppings on the beams.
He took out his phone and immersed himself in it.
We all exchanged looks. I knew with the drugs still floating in my blood that I shouldn’t step out over open spaces; one misstep would mean death. Ruka put one of her bare feet in front of her. There were harnesses hanging on the wall next to the man who had brought us here. I whizzed past him and retrieved one; it was connected to a cable above. A gust of hot wind surged between the open spaces and pushed me back on my heels. Ruka was off the platform, her a
rms out, turning her into a human letter T to balance against the wind. I didn’t want to call her and have her turn around. In my brain, I was proud she was pushing forward through this terrible situation of dangerous and frightening events. My heart pumped gallons of anxiety throughout me, thinking of where this might lead her.
I stepped to the edge of the platform, which I didn’t dare leave; I still felt my body swaying.
“Ruka, honey, turn around slowly. I have something you should put on.”
She kept her balance and took a step toward me, I pulled some slack in the metal rope, which wove through the back of the vest and disappeared into a bank of reels on the other end of the rack of vests.
Ruka slipped one arm through and then the second. One of girls behind her reached for something that wasn’t there. The girl’s foot hovered in the air. I imagined, somewhere under layers of manufactured brain chemistry, her brain knew something wasn’t right. But when she retrieved the something, then fell out of sight, she did it with a show of contentment.
“What is it, Mama?” Ruka asked.
She turned toward the air, where the innocent girl, who could have been her, was, seconds before. Ruka, however, had missed that horror and was better for it.
One of the other women gave her a mop; a few followed her and put on the safety vests. They looked like a pack of impoverished marionettes.
With the long eye of the horizon and pieces of the building to hide behind, I eventually lost sight of Ruka.
A cloud of smoke surrounded me, and the man pushed my shoulder. “You. There.” He cast his hand lazily in the direction of a beam caked with bird feces.
“I’m not feeling balanced from my shot last night. I can’t go. I might fall, like …” I didn’t even know the girl’s name.
“Doesn’t matter. You fall, your fault. Go now or else.” His Sinhala was broken; he knew just enough to direct us.
Or else what? I wondered. He didn’t seem enthused enough to even smoke his cigarettes; I couldn’t imagine him having to deal with a defiant woman. As I suspected, he returned to his chair and didn’t bother me further.
Only a few minutes had passed, and then there was fearful yelling, resting on top of the constant noise of the wind. I stood up and looked out. Some of the girls were pointing; a few were moving in that direction, while the rest had a hypnotized glaze about them. When I saw the source of the commotion, my heart fell through the stories below. Ruka was hanging over an expanse facing down, her body straining against the orange vest that was tethering her to this life. She had frozen, the look on her face vacant. I’d seen her do this once when she unexpectedly had come face-to-face with a mother elephant while we were walking in the forest. She didn’t move, and she couldn’t move then, as I calmly had called for her to back away from the elephant. There was no backing away this time. I followed the rope up to the bank of pulleys and looked for a way to get to it. Maybe I could reel her in. The elevator, which had left the platform, looked as though it went higher than where I stood. I pressed the button in the metal box to call it and heard it churning its way to me. I kept looking at Ruka. Tears were coming from her eyes now, her face contorted. The elevator arrived. I was on it and ascending to the next level of beams. When I pressed the red button to stop the elevator, the adrenaline running through me had flushed away the fogginess, and I was at the spools of thick wires, trying to determine which one was attached to Ruka. Three wooden planks were laid out in front of them, and I felt myself lower as the wood bent under my soles. The wind turned Ruka into a pendulum. I followed the line up until I was looking at the reel. I pressed the button on the side of it, and it let her down. She screamed as she dropped to the next level. I pulled my finger away, then pushed the other button. The swing and the movement got her close enough to the platform so someone could grab her.
“Please, someone.” The other women looked at me, then turned back to cleaning. “Can someone get my daughter? Pull her to the platform?”
The man stood up and shushed me. He grabbed Ruka when she got close to him, then yanked her down to the platform. He went back to his seat and picked up his cigarette from the ground.
When I got to Ruka, I put my arms around her and kissed her head. Then I looked up; in the distance over the low-rise buildings, I saw the formation of the Palm Jumeriah, where Mohamed lived.
The man gestured for us to get back to work. Ruka looked up at me and I shook my head. “You’re not going back out there.” I pulled her to face me and unzipped her vest, and then we casually walked to the elevator. Ruka was still young enough that she thought I had more influence on the world than I actually did.
“You can’t.” The man’s tone was mellow, and he was half out of his chair as we passed out of sight.
“Where will we go?” Ruka asked.
“I know someone.” I was thinking of Minrada. What kind of groveling would I have to do to get her to help me again? She was a woman of connections and profit. So I would have to make it worth it for her to trust me again.
From up above, the walk looked doable, but as we trudged on, trying to stay in the shade of the buildings, I realized how far we might have to go. I had some Sri Lankan money with me, which I knew was worthless here, but I offered it to a vendor on the street who was selling screw-cap bubbly water for ten dinars. He looked at Ruka and me, took my money, and waved me on. I let Ruka have the first sip. “Don’t spill any. We won’t likely have someone so generous at the next stop.”
It was night before we reached the first bridge into the complex. I had Ousha’s passport which showed this as my residence. They stopped us at the entrance, looked for less than a second at it, then let us pass. I hoped Minrada would be under the bridge. And if I could be brave again to get her what she wanted, she might help us.
The Book of Mohamed
Ruka coughed as we walked along the red path in the center of the island. At first I thought it was the salty air from the water blowing through that was catching in her lungs. Light in Dubai was ever present; the glass buildings, water, and bulbs turned the city into a crater of mirrors. I missed the quiet darkness of my home, where I could look up and be peppered by the intensity of the starlight. I pulled Ruka closer to me and rubbed her arm.
She looked up at me. “I’m thirsty.”
On either side of us, restaurants were filled with well-dressed patrons enjoying meals, smoking hookahs, and laughing. Some of their jewels looked like lights themselves. My stomach cried out for the plates of succulent meats and sugary delights. I caught the eye of one man; his face was full of all that was good. He was handsome, scrubbed clean, and he was chewing. He held a light-green glass with olives bobbing in it. He watched us; at first I thought he might be able to help me, but then he scoffed and used his eyes to direct the woman sitting across from him. She turned and looked, made a face, then laid her hand on top of his.
Ruka didn’t see it; it was enough to be poor in a land of wealth, but to suffer the embarrassments of that poverty could tear a tender soul apart quicker than the pain of hunger.
There was a water fountain ahead, and Ruka ran to it and drank, filling her empty stomach. Water dribbled from her chin and made a butterfly shape on her dress. I rubbed circles on her back as she gulped.
“Where are we going? It’s so far.” She wiped her mouth.
“We’re very close.”
She let me have a few sips, then spent the next few minutes lapping up the water. The injection made me feel as though moisture wicked away from me; I tried to distance myself from how she might have felt.
Ruka held her belly the way a pregnant woman might, and we walked away. There was something about being full, even if it was only with water, that made the stares sting less. A grand hotel with a wall of lights and screens flashed the time as 10:13, and the coolness of the desert night had set in. For a moment, I wished to be back in Mohamed’s house in my cozy room. I pulled Ruka in closer. The water had lightened her mood; she’d skip and hum some of the
songs that were common in our village.
“Do you remember your brother’s favorite song? ‘Hinchi Pinchi Hawa’?”
She giggled, then hummed it, winding through the high notes, then faking sadness with the low notes. When she was done, she asked, “Do you think Mewan misses me as much as I miss him?”
“I’m sure of it.” I tapped her shoulder. “Look there.” The next street was only a hundred paces ahead of us. “That’s where we’re going. You must be very quiet and follow me. No complaints, okay?”
Nodding, Ruka picked up the pace. The bottoms of my sandals had worn thin, and the bones in my feet hurt from walking, but I matched her. There was no traffic on the bridge, and the streetlights made the water underneath complete darkness. We crossed and went down the slope, as I had the first time I’d met Minrada here and waded into the water. The tide was higher this time, and the water came above Ruka’s waist, but she said nothing and only gripped my hand tightly. She had avoided the shore since the great wave, treating it like a vicious dog.
“Hello?” I called into the darkness when we emerged from the water.
I could see some light now as we got close. Two bats darted in ragged lines in front of us.
“They …” Ruka took cover.
“Fruit bats. They aren’t interested in you.” It was a voice I recognized. “I’d heard you showed up in one of the work houses downtown. Did it make you appreciate where you were before?” Minrada’s words were caustic as she emerged from the shadows, adjusting her clothes. A figure scurried deeper into the night behind her. “I think you owe me something.” Her hand was outstretched, palm open.
“I’m sorry … It was a situation … I didn’t …” The words I had planned so carefully had abandoned me.
“No, no. I know you will make amends. Find a way into the house to retrieve the book.”
She couldn’t be serious. “But I don’t work there anymore. I don’t have access. He’ll never let me in.”
Empire of Mud Page 15
