Top Quotes: “Temporary People” — Deepak Unnikishnan
“ANNA VARGHESE WORKED IN Abu Dhabi. She taped people. Specifically, she taped construction workers who fell from incomplete buildings.
Anna, working the night shift, found these injured men, then put them back together with duct tape or some good glue, or if stitches were required, patched them up with a needle and horse hair, before sending them on their way. The work, rarely advertised, was nocturnal.”
“”You are not going to believe this,” he told Mo-Mo excitedly on Skype. “I have three men who tell me Dubai grows its labor. Sprouts workers like sheaves of corn.””
“The first female prototype germinated stark naked, which made handling the specimen cause for concern. She died of loneliness in her little petri dish.”
“MALLUS were also designed to have an average life span of twelve years, after which each would report back to headquarters like a dying pachyderm and be driven to the desert for the final chapter in its cycle.
But Moosa was now standing trial on corruption charges.
After years of being feted by his patrons, Moosa woke up one day and had a change of heart. He doctored his seeds and didn’t tell a soul. The new formula produced canned Malayalees designed to prioritize reason, with minds difficult to tame. “Cantankerous twits,” observed leaked ministry memos. Moosa improved their immune systems, increasing their life spans. In March 2006, a large number of these redesigned canned Malayalees took to the streets near what was going to be the tallest structure in the world, and went on strike in a country where dissent is not tolerated. As the men rioted, onlookers, startled by actual rioting, fished out their cameras and took pictures.”
“Behind hind him were plant stalks balancing little brown babies hanging upside down like napping bats. A sign in the foreground said “BATCH 24, July 2003.””
“Moosa programmed the laborers to follow orders. Every eight to ten years, factories would load these men in trucks. The trucks would drive to the desert. And that was that.
What was what?
They would leave them there, Sabeen.
In the desert?
In the desert.”
“41,282 BROWN MEN AND WOMEN in their sixties, pravasis, every single one of them, will leave the United Arab Emirates in the middle of June. 65 percent of them have lived in the Emirates for over two decades. 18,964 of them will board planes from Abu Dhabi International Airport. All of them were informed of mandatory retirement from their respective companies at the same time.
May 13, a Thursday, will be their last working day. Within weeks, they will be expected by the labor ministry to pack up their lives and leave the country for good.”
“The largest exodus of brown folk leaving the Emirates since August 1990, when thousands fled after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, assuming the advent of darker times.”
“Pravasi means foreigner, outsider. Immigrant, worker. Pravasi means you’ve left your native place. Pravasi means you’ll have regrets. You’ll want money, then more money. You’ll want one house with European shitters. And one car, one scooter. Pravasi means you’ve left your loved ones because you’re young, ambitious, filled with confidence that you’ll be back some day, and you probably will. For a few weeks every year, you’ll return for vacations, but mind you, you return older. Blacker. News hungry. Before you’ve had time to adjust to power cuts and potholes, like they had in the old days when phones were luxuries or glued to walls, someone’s going to tell you so-and-so died. And it’ll be a shock, because you didn’t know. And when you go to this person’s house to pay your respects, you’ll discover someone else has died. And as you continue to see people you know you’re required to see, you’ll hear about more dead people. Or ailments. Or needs. Then you’ll see the new people, fat babies or wives or husbands. And you’ll look at what they’ve got. Inevitably, you’ll think about your own life, the choices you made. How far you’ve come, if paying for those shitters was worth it. And by the time you’ve done the math in your head, everything you’ve missed, what’s been gained, you’ll come to realize what the word pravasi reallv means: absence.”
