This is Dubai. Sheikh Zayed Road lit up the night sky as the beacons atop the Emirates Tower and the Fairmont Hotel blinked, as if surprised by all the construction work around them. The cars blazed a path through the concrete leviathans while pedestrians peered into window displays wondering if that Gucci handbag would clash with their Dunhill luggage set.
I sat, along with a friend (both fresh off the proverbial boat) at the Gallops pub in the Admiral Plaza Hotel in Bur Dubai. All around us was the mob of humanity. A group of Indian labourers drank in the dingy corners, afraid to invade the space of the number of ‘white’ faces that lined the bar, and looked anxiously at the door. The digital clock flashed seven o’clock.
A few minutes later the doors swung open and in walked a bevy of gorgeous ladies dressed to send a man wild with lust, and aching to part with the money in his wallet.
Among them was arguably one of the best-looking women I have ever seen. At over six feet she wore an air of stoic confidence that Eastern European women are so famed for. She walked up to a table of labourers and sat down amongst them. They seemed apprehensive, but a conversation ensued. Minutes later she walked out with four of them in tow. She stood out in the group as they walked passed me — not because she was taller than the lot of them — but because the scent of her perfume jostled for space with the stench of sweat and sun-baked skin that emanated from the men. Her clothes hugged her body, as if protecting her from the grimy, shredded apparel of her suitors.
The door shut behind them and I stared at it for a while.
“New in Dubai?” asked the Irish bar manager. She had obviously seen my eyeballs try to unscrew themselves from my socket and march up to the woman to profess their undying love.
I nodded. “It’s the first of the month,” she said. “It’s payday. The labourers usually come in here and blow their month’s salary on whores and alcohol in one night.”
It was only weeks later, after I had met the girl’s ‘sister’, that I found out her name was Jana. They came from Kiev in the Ukraine, and her favourite colour was blue.
Three months after this incident, Jana and a few other girls were said to have been deported from Dubai for speaking up after one of their friends was allegedly raped and murdered by a group of local men. Her body was found in the desert between Dubai and Abu Dhabi...a stone’s throw away from one of the country’s infamous labour camps.
Dubai’s labour camps are out-of-bounds for journalists, nay forbidden. My favourite newspaper, The Guardian, has been banned from the Middle East because it rarely pulls its punches when it comes to reporting on the region’s human rights record.
Beneath the shimmering veneer of Dubai’s burgeoning real estate market and its skyrocketing tourism numbers, lies a river of Styxian proportions. Labourers from the sub-continent toil in 12-hour days under a blazing Arabian sun — sometimes seven days a week — for as little as Dh1,000 (Rs10,700) a month: many send a large portion of this back home to their families, whom they haven’t seen in years. In some cases their ‘accommodation’ sees them herded 10-to-a-room; the room in question being a dank part of a 500 unit whole. Hygiene levels are disastrous and freedom, as Janis Joplin sang, “is just another word for nothing left to lose”.
A taxi driver once told me that the only reason he didn’t return to his hometown in “Trivandrum [sic]” — where his family live — was because he wasn’t sure of getting a job with a similar salary. He was earning Rs12,000 a month, sharing a room with six other drivers, and was allowed one-month’s leave every three years.
“To leave the Gulf and return without a better job is a sign of weakness. Also, my boss has told me that if I leave, he will ban me from coming back to the Gulf,” he told me. He hadn’t seen his wife in 18 months, but had just celebrated the birth of his second son.
“Things are like that in my village. No problem,” he reacted to my inappropriate calculations.
In all likelihood, Dubai will emerge as one of the world’s premier cities. But while the well-to-do expatriates draw their shades against the setting sun, and clamber into downy beds, another part of the city fitfully sleeps. And in the darkened alleyways of the camps and the graffiti-adorned streets of the city’s poorer quarters, a labourer counts his coins and looks up as a blonde walk towards him.
This is his dream, as much as it is hers.
“Dubai”, I was once told, “is a land of prostitutes. The only difference is in the things you sell.”
A soul and a body are hard to align, but every now and then they combine to form a whole. This is Dubai.
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