3     THE JOURNEY TO ARABIA

Divendra from Nepal

Divendra knew that these late hours of the night would be his last moments with his infant daughter. When he saw her again she would be toddling, he figured, or perhaps even walking. He watched her as she slept, and he studied each line of her face in the hopes that he might preserve every detail in his memory. Tears welled in Divendra’s eyes, and he was overcome with emotion. Shortly before dawn he would make his way to the bus station in the city center, and after an arduous day’s journey to Kathmandu, and then weeks of preparation and paperwork, he would depart for distant Qatar. After months of anticipation, Divendra’s journey out into the world beyond the low Terai plain of southern Nepal was about to begin. At times he felt anxious about this decision, and he knew he would miss his daughter so terribly, but more often than not he felt a vague sense of conviction: he had to go. He had to provide for his family. He had to earn.

The events preceding this decision were noteworthy. Several years earlier Divendra had borrowed a substantial sum from his father, or more accurately, from his family as a whole. With that loan he opened a computer training facility in the central district of a small city on the Terai plain. Sadly, the business failed, and his dreams were dashed. Although complicated political machinations and the troublesome Maoist insurgency had made operations extremely challenging for the fledgling business, it was electricity—or lack thereof—that had most directly torpedoed his plans. In those years, electricity was available only for a few hours of the day, or sometimes night, in Nepal. How could he run a computer training facility when the computers could only be operated for a few odd hours of the day? As he discovered, it proved impossible.

In his description, afterward Nepal felt like a land without opportunity for him. Around that same time, his childhood friend Sam, currently at work in faraway Qatar, contacted him, and Divendra listened intently. Sam told him about an opportunity—they would work side-by-side in an office in Qatar until Divendra was fully trained. Then Sam would depart for home. Divendra would receive a salary of QR1000 (US$275) every month. This was more than he could earn in Nepal, and unlike most of the other returned migrants he had spoken with, there was no labor broker standing between him and this opportunity. Thanks to Sam, Divendra’s new employer would arrange everything, and in addition to this salary, the employer would provide both accommodation and a food allowance. Altogether this sounded like an excellent opportunity, and shortly thereafter, it was decided. With a last farewell, he bid his infant daughter goodbye and made his way into the night.

Divendra’s journey to Qatar was eventful and memorable. His luggage, stowed atop the bus to Kathmandu, was thoroughly soaked by a monsoon rainstorm on the ten-hour journey. Much of the pocket money he had saved was handed to the laundryman in Kathmandu, who cleaned and dried his luggage’s contents. He returned to the hotel for another few hours, and after calling his parents and family for one last goodbye, he found himself alone in his room, in tears. Perhaps he should call it all off? He pressed on. The airport was a new and confusing experience for Divendra. He was befuddled and out of sorts until a kindly, experienced traveler took him under her wing and guided him to his appropriate departure gate. The leg of his flight to a Dubai stopover was his first time aloft, and he marveled at the bird’s-eye view of Nepal. Unaware of the customs surrounding wine, Divendra took offense when the flight attendant poured only a tiny sip into his glass. Why was he being disrespected like this? Harsh words came from his mouth. His temper rose again when security agents at the Dubai stopover airport groped his clothed body and prodded his luggage in their standard procedure.

After arriving in Doha, and after enduring all the required entry procedures, Divendra exited the airport to find Sam waiting in the seemingly ever-present throng that coagulates outside the airport’s arrivals hall. His old friend was gladdened to see him, and Sam promised to take him to their accommodations straightaway. After a barrage of Divendra’s questions went unanswered, Sam ominously responded with a brief request: “don’t kill me, old friend—just wait until morning and everything will be cleared up.”

From the airport they skirted the central city on one of the ring roads before turning away from the glistening skyscrapers that hugged the urban oceanfront. Together they proceeded out to the fringe of the city, passed through several kilometers of nondescript suburbs, and just beyond the edge of the city they turned to enter the Industrial Area. This neighborhood would be the geographic epicenter of Divendra’s life in the years to come: the Industrial Area, as it is called, is an accumulation of light industry, warehouses, and dormitory style labor camps that house a legion of foreign workers. Sam and Divendra’s vehicle continued into the night, weaving its way through the vast grid of streets before entering the hardscrabble dirt parking abutting Divendra’s new accommodation—his “camp.” Upon arrival he was shown to the small dormitory style room he would occupy with Sam and several others. He unloaded his luggage on one of the bunks inside. He was then introduced to his new roommates, and although Divendra was brimming with questions, he was drained by the long journey. Questions would wait for tomorrow. Soon all the men were asleep.

The next day he awoke, and after a short journey to work, he began his new job. The office itself was a small, low-slung building in the heart of the Industrial Area—a far cry from the gleaming skyscrapers of West Bay he had imagined in Nepal and then glimpsed from the plane. Divendra would take over for Sam and run the small office, as the four Palestinian brothers who oversaw the business had little patience for the official forms, emails, invoicing, and accounting required of contemporary businesses in Qatar. Although not construction workers per se, the company that Divendra learned to manage was in the construction industry: they leased cranes, trucks, and other construction equipment to various larger concerns and projects, all of whom were in the business of constructing some component, project, or feature of this astonishing modern city arising from the sandy hardpan desert.

The ensuing years were full of travail. The unfinished labor camp to which they were assigned was overcrowded. The South Asian migrants—his coworkers—complained about the food almost constantly. The generator that provided electricity to the camp periodically broke down, stranding them in the fringes of the Industrial Area without light, water, and air conditioning. The four brothers who ran the small enterprise that employed them were difficult to work for; they berated Divendra and the other South Asian workers daily. Wages were withheld, salaries went unpaid, and monies for unspecified fees and penalties were deducted from the wages they sometimes received. The Egyptian component of the small company’s workforce clashed with the South Asian contingent, and those frictions—even fisticuffs—were an everyday reality for men at the camp. After training Divendra to run the office, Sam returned to Nepal on his contractually promised vacation, and in collusion with Divendra, planned to never return.¹ Divendra, now in the mastery of the office, struggled with his positionality: while he felt exploited and abused by the four brothers, as the accountant and office manager he was also the tool by which they exploited and abused the other transnational migrants, including his own countrymen. It was Divendra who had to prepare the forms, documents, and payroll ledgers that implemented these exploitations, and he grasped at the weapons of the weak to quell his comrades’ frustrations and lessen their difficulties (Scott 1985).

Divendra and I met shortly after his arrival in Doha, and we fit together in multiple ways: although an unpleasantly cold term, he was an anthropological “subject” in one of my ethnographic projects; he was subsequently a research assistant integral to the broader scope of my ethnographic fieldwork on multiple projects; and he was a friend I came to know well and upon whom I depended at multiple junctures. For Divendra, the city that he imagined and then glimpsed from the plane is a city that he would slowly explore over subsequent years, and one that we would sometimes explore together. Although his tribulations and challenges were far from over, those explorations of the city first helped me begin to see the city through others’ eyes. Although he would struggle mightily with extracting himself from the imbroglio of his employment, and there is much more to Divendra’s story in Qatar, we will depart his migration synopsis here.

Roshan from Sri Lanka

My first interview with Roshan was on his seventh day in Qatar. He was on his afternoon break, and we sat in a large, cool, and modern room in the institution where he worked as a custodian. As we talked, I noticed that his hands were covered with writing. I asked him about this, and he replied that these were simply the names of his family and loved ones—the people he missed so dearly, the people he had been thinking about every day in his first week in Qatar.

A quiet, kind, and graceful young man, Roshan’s demeanor was perhaps a strange by-product of a life immersed in conflict and violence. His natal village, just a half-day’s journey from Jaffna, lay deep in Sri Lanka’s northern province—the regional epicenter of Sri Lanka’s long civil war. His father was a farmer, and his mother was a homemaker. As his mother later described it to me, Roshan was born into war: the conflict first swept through the village when he was a young toddler, and like many of their neighbors, the family fled their home in search of safety. They lived as vagabonds, moving here and there, and were gone for nearly four years. When they returned, Roshan was finally able to start school. Although he was older than the other children, he flourished in the classroom, and by the conclusion of secondary school he was the strongest student in the class. Education beyond secondary school, however, would take him away from the small village, away from his family, into uncertainty, and perhaps into danger. His uncle’s family had already been interned in one of the state’s “welfare villages,” and in 2008 the conflict seemed to be reaching another crescendo. Danger was everywhere.

On a late April day of that same year, Roshan left the village with his mother and one of his uncles to attend a wedding some distance away. His sister and her fiancée remained behind with Roshan’s elderly father. Their journey to the wedding passed without incident, but shortly after their arrival a phone call from home sent them into a panic: the rebels had stormed through Roshan’s village and conflict had erupted. Roshan and the others rushed home to discover his future brother-in-law had been shot and killed in the melee between the rebels and the state’s forces. His family was devastated, and his sister was disconsolate. Months passed in a haze. Roshan gave up on the idea of school and eventually found work at a hospital. Slowly he grew comfortable with the job. At the end of that month, his supervisor asked him to accompany him and several other employees on a trip to a nearby town. The men were stopped at a military checkpoint, questioned at length, and then beaten by the soldiers. Their identification and money were confiscated, and Roshan and his supervisor were taken to jail. They were both accused of involvement with the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE)—the rebel forces in Sri Lanka’s long civil war. He was held for many days. Roshan’s brother arrived and tried to plead his case, but he, too, was beaten. Finally, his family raised 15,000 SR Rupees (US$75), which allowed him to be released.

Several other men from his village were working in Qatar, and his mother told him that he would go to Qatar as well. It was described to him as an amazing place—a great place to make a living. For Roshan, it would also provide an escape from the violence encompassing his life in Sri Lanka, his parents thought. It took many months for the plan to come together, and the arrangements were not straightforward. His mother sold the jewelry that she had accumulated in marriage, and the family borrowed lots of additional money to pay the fee for Roshan’s work visa, which totaled about $1,000. After paying this money to a labor broker, Roshan was shown his work contract. It guaranteed him QR 1,200 (US$330) per month, and he would be working as a custodian, or “cleaner” in the parlance of the migrants who work in Qatar.

The flight to Qatar was a traumatic experience for Roshan. It was his first time on an airplane, and he was out of sorts. He developed a fever, and the heat of Qatar only seemed to make things worse. For reasons that remain unclear to him, his employer shuttled him between different camps for weeks after his arrival. He moved and moved, and moved yet again. The food at these various labor camps was unfamiliar and, in his estimation, was roundly awful. Finally, his employer relocated Roshan to what would be his permanent camp on Street 43 in the Industrial Area. Other than the bus ride to and from work, the Industrial Area is the only Doha that Roshan really knows after more than a year in Qatar.

Roshan works sixteen hours a day, six days a week. He and the other men leave the camp at four in the morning, and they return at 10 p.m. He and his roommates cook when they get home, then sleep. Roshan, like most of his roommates, spends about QR 250 (US$69) on food every month. The camp itself holds perhaps three hundred men, all of whom are from India, Nepal, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. When he arrived, his small room was home to six other men. Recently, however, the company has doubled up all the rooms: the men sleep two to a bed, four to a bunk. They suffer in the cold of the winter season as they lack sufficient blankets. The camp has other problems, as well: a massive trash pile just beyond the camp walls caught fire near the end of summer, immersing the camp in a hazy stench. This continued for weeks. The water supply was also insufficient, and he and the other men clandestinely collected water for drinking and cooking at the institution they clean at Education City. The men smuggle water home on the bus, and Roshan showers at a friend’s camp on Friday, his only day off. In these conditions, it is difficult to do laundry, and the employees at the institution he cleans periodically complain about the workers’ appearance, their hygiene, and their smell.

When Roshan arrived in Qatar, he discovered that the company would not pay him the 1,200 Qatari Riyals (US$330) a month he was promised in Sri Lanka. Instead, they would pay him 600, although there were vague promises of possible overtime. Moreover, upon arrival his employers held his first two months of salary—this money, he was told, would ensure that he would not illegally abscond to another position in Qatar. He had not been issued an ID card after more than a year in Qatar, and is not certain that he will be issued one, as many others who had been working there a long than him still did not have their cards. Without an ID card, Roshan was unable to buy food on credit at the local store, and he was petrified of any chance encounters with the police.

Roshan has never met his Qatari sponsor. His point of contact with the company is a Filipina woman at the manpower agency that employs him, but she was not able to help with most of the problems he faced. There was also a Sri Lankan supervisor who monitored the men as they would come and go from the camp. With all the challenges, Roshan had not divulged much about his difficulties to his family back home. But he had trouble explaining to them why he had been unable to send home the money they were expecting. His parents were clamoring for his financial help—after all, he was working in the Gulf, where the streets are paved with gold!

On Fridays, he and a friend have been slowly cooking up a plan to sneak away and travel back to Sri Lanka. His only wish, he noted at the end of one of our interviews, was to leave this place and return home. For the two years of our friendship, Roshan was burdened by homesickness that never let up.

Binod from Nepal

In early 2008, Binod made the decision to migrate to the Gulf. In the years leading up to his death, Binod’s father had steadily whittled away at the family’s small fortune with his habits of drinking and gambling; since then, his family had invested heavily in his sister’s dowry via a combination of loans and mortgages. As a result, the family faced an economic crisis of spiraling debt. Binod had experience driving large trucks in the region of Nepal that he called home, and after contacting a labor broker in a nearby city, he secured a position as a heavy truck driver in Qatar. The debts incurred to this labor broker for the work visa were a substantial addition to the family’s debt, but Binod figured that within a year he could pay off the loan with his earnings, and could then begin to save some money for the family and for the future.

Binod left Nepal almost immediately. Once he arrived in Qatar, he was taken directly to a labor camp at the far end of the Industrial Area. Conditions at the camp were difficult: crowded bunk rooms, bad plumbing, and an insecure water supply were at the top of his list of concerns. For six months Binod drove a water truck to and from various construction sites in and near the city. Then, the company’s general manager told all the drivers that they were using too much diesel as they drove about the city for work. The manager refused to calculate for the fact that most of the drivers’ time on the road was spent in traffic—and often at a standstill. Unconcerned with those reasons, the manager began to penalize the drivers with deductions from their salary. In protest, the men refused to drive under the circumstances newly imposed upon them. Things continued to escalate; once they stopped driving, the company retaliated by ceasing to pay the men their monthly salary.

The striking workers eventually found their way to the labor court and filed a case. The court case took an enormous amount of time and a substantial investment from each of them. At one point, Binod persuaded his roommates to sell their collectively purchased television so he could extract his share of its value for court fees. In the subsequent six months, the men sat in the camp in a long, slow standoff with their employers as their case percolated through the legal system. Finally, many months later, the case was resolved in their favor. Binod would be going home with all the salary due to him. Good riddance to Qatar, he thought.

Before he could depart, however, the general manager of the company—a savvy and vengeful man—filed a countersuit claiming Binod had “misused QR 10,000 (US$2,747) worth of diesel.” The manager’s intention was to punish Binod; with a new case in the court system, Binod would be prevented from returning home. For several additional months the spurious case against Binod bounced through the court system in Qatar. Meanwhile, his employers began to cut off the electricity at the labor camp during the day, so Binod and the remaining drivers on strike suffered in the stifling heat as they endured the slow resolution of their case.

After months of languishing in the long summer heat, the spurious case was dismissed. Binod was finally going home. He received several thousand Qatari Riyals in back pay, but most of the money went to the various friends and acquaintances who had loaned him money over the many months he went without pay. He boarded the plane home with less than QR 500 (US$137) in his pocket—his savings for more than two years in Qatar.

Vasu from India

Born to a Christian household in a small agricultural village in the Indian state of Andrah Pradesh, Vasu’s mother and father both came from farming families. In the first decade of the twenty-first century, profits grew increasingly slim, and times grew tough for many in the village, including his extended family. Midway through the tenth grade, his parents informed him that they needed money for his sister’s dowry, and as a result, they could no longer afford his school fees. Moreover, by leaving school behind to earn a salary, Vasu might start contributing to household finances, they noted. Although his younger brother would eventually make it to the eleventh grade before departing for work, early departure from school was typical for most of the young men in the village, Vasu clarified in one of our earliest interviews.

As he sought some sort of gainful employment, Vasu joined an uncle in the nearby city of Vizag (Visakhapatnam). There he learned to drive in the bustling city. Eventually, Vasu returned to the agricultural village of his birth and continued to work as a driver there. It was at this juncture of his life that his heart was captured: Vasu fell in love with the young girl next door. Although her family was only slightly better off than Vasu’s family, her father was displeased with the prospects of this neighbor boy. But unlike a typical Indian marriage arranged by families, Vasu and Latha were in love. He began hastily planning their “love marriage” wedding. Latha’s father remained displeased and hinted that Vasu might compensate for his shortcomings by planning a truly grand wedding for his daughter. Driven by the possibility of acceptance, Vasu planned a truly impressive wedding for the whole of the village. Although Latha’s parents paid the customary dowry, Vasu borrowed even more from a moneylender and from another wealthy neighbor to pay for the lavish celebration. In retrospect, Vasu recognized that the legacy of his matrimony was debt, and in the months following the wedding, the moneylender’s ruffians ensured that Vasu’s financial obligations remained at the front of his consciousness.

Latha gave birth to a daughter the next year, and Vasu’s new family squeezed into a small, government-constructed home with Vasu’s parents and brother. Straining under the debts of his sister’s dowry and the costs of the wedding, the extended family scrambled for a viable financial path forward. Friends from the village were already working in Qatar, and his mother would soon join this migration; she departed shortly thereafter for work as a domestic servant in the suburbs of Doha. Those same friends reported back that Vasu might triple his salary abroad, and after his uncle also departed the village for employment in Qatar, his father made preparations for Vasu to follow the others across the Arabian Sea. The household took out a loan approximately equivalent to US$1,415 to pay for Vasu’s work visa and for the airline ticket that would carry him to a job that his uncle, already resident in Qatar, helped arrange.

Vasu worked as a tea boy for a service-focused manpower agency contracted to serve the offices of Qatar Petroleum. It was easy work, he recalled. Vasu worked from 6:30 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., five days a week, and that work required little more than preparing and serving tea in a large office. On the weekends, Vasu would always take one day to attend church. On the other day, and in the afternoons during the week, Vasu sought out part-time jobs washing cars or cleaning apartments to enhance his QR 900 (US$247) monthly paycheck. Settling into this routine, Vasu was able to limit his own spending to about QR 400 (US$110) a month for food, essentials, and credit for his mobile phone. The remainder he sent home to his father. After sixteen months of work, the debt incurred to send him to Qatar in the first place was paid off, and the monies that he and his mother remitted home now brought them ever closer to the dream of building a house large enough to accommodate the growing extended family.

Vasu sometimes cleaned a European man’s car and tidied up his apartment for a bit of extra money, and although his uncle pursued the same sort of work on the weekend, his uncle had not seen inside a European’s household. Vasu invited his uncle to accompany him, and on that fateful day they made their way through the streets of central Doha to the European man’s apartment. The city of Doha is seemingly always under construction, and as they were navigating past one of many urban construction sites, a speeding Qatari driver—busy texting on his phone—smashed into both men. Their bodies were catapulted through the air and into the construction site emptied for the weekend. The driver attempted to flee the scene. Although his legs were mangled beyond use, Vasu was eventually able to crawl back up to the road and wave down a passing car. The two men were transported to the hospital; his uncle would awake from a coma after twenty days only to perish from his injuries. Vasu survived.

The surgeries that followed were difficult, and the hospital seemed to dispense no pain medication, Vasu noted. The pastor and some congregants from his church visited him in the hospital, and he relished human contact. He thought to keep his accident and his uncle’s death a secret from his family at home, but word eventually made its way back to the village about the disaster. His aunt had convinced the entire village that Vasu was responsible for his uncle’s death, but he had no time to worry about village politics. His employer promised him three months’ salary for recovery, and his five roommates helped with caretaking during Vasu’s long recovery. During this period, he moved in with his mother for a few weeks, as the kind Qatari family that employed her was deeply concerned about Vasu’s well-being.

After a few months, he tried working again, but he could not keep up with the other tea boys. Supervisors at the company began to question his fitness for employment in Qatar. Maybe they were seeking bribes? Maybe he should just return to Andrah Pradesh? But returning home would be more difficult than he initially perceived: his employers retained his passport, and his Indian supervisors in the office would not process any of the paperwork without bribes. Moreover, after learning of the accident, the police visited him in the hospital, and he was prohibited from leaving the country until the courts cleared a case filed against the driver. Although he recognized it as a lie, the quickest path home was through a confession: by falsely admitting to the court that he and his uncle had been carelessly crossing the street when the driver hit them, he might be allowed to exit Qatar. As Vasu recalled, ‘I couldn’t say it out loud, so I wrote it on a piece of paper and signed it. I didn’t want to have to say it out loud!”

In our last conversation, his plans to return home were tabled yet again. The company had found employment for him at a gas station, although his salary there was significantly lower than before. The change in his job meant a move to a new labor camp, and he had just befriended his new roommates at the camp—other men from Andrah Pradesh. His new work schedule prohibited Vasu from attending church on the weekends, but he clung to the idea that more work in Qatar might elevate his family’s financial position. Perhaps the new house was still within reach.

In our closing conversation, I posed this question to Vasu: “If a young person in your village were to approach you and tell you that he’s planning to go to Qatar, what would you say to him? What advice would you give him?” Vasu’s response was sadly reflective of his travails: “I would advise him not to go to Qatar because you will have to pay a lot for the visa and the first two years you will only spend clearing these loans … I just think that it’s a colossal waste of time and energy, a waste of your youth. You’ll spend all of your young adult life here and for what? … Look at how much I lost by coming here: I lost my uncle, I almost lost my leg, I will not be able to ever drive again, and my family is tearing apart … He would be better off if he stayed in India, close to his family. A man needs to be with his wife and children.”

Concluding Thoughts

These four migration narratives provide a window into the building blocks of the analysis provided in this book. As any ethnographer would point out, none of these migration narratives should be framed as typical, for human lives are varied, different, and diverse. But in these four narratives—from South Asian men in the lower echelons of the migrant workforce toiling in Qatar—one can glimpse some of the recurring threads that connect these experiences and inform the anatomy of the Gulf migration system, to which I turn in the next chapter.