Temporary People

by Deepak Unnikrishnan

  “What about blood, make you faint?” She pondered the question, then said no again.

  “OK, start tomorrow,” said Khalid. Doing what, she wondered, by now irritated with Cousin Thracy for talking her into seeking her fortune in a foreign place, for signing up for a job with an Arab at the helm, and one who clearly didn’t care whether she knew anything or not. “Taping,” Khalid replied. “The men call us Stick People, Stickers for short. It’s a terrible name, but that’s OK—they’ve accepted us.”

  Construction was young back then. Oil had just begun to dictate terms. And Anna was young, too. Back in her hometown, she assumed if she ever went to the Gulf she would be responsible for someone’s child or would put her nursing skills to use at the hospital, but the middlemen pimping work visas wanted money—money she didn’t have, but borrowed. Cousin Thracy pawned her gold earrings. “I expect gains from this investment,” she told Anna at the airport.

  When Anna arrived, flying Air India, Khalid was waiting. “Is it a big hospital?” she asked him as he drove his beat-up pickup.

  “Hospital?” he repeated. Over lunch, he gently broke it to her that she had been lied to.

  “No job?” she wept. There is a job, Khalid assured her, but he urged her to eat first. Then he needed to ask her a few questions.

  “Insha’Allah,” he told her, “the job’s yours, if you want it.”

  Anna built a reputation among the working class; hers was a name they grew to trust.

  When workers fell, severing limbs, the pain was acute, but borne. Yet what truly stung was the loneliness and anxiety of falling that weighed on their minds.

  Pedestrians mostly ignored those who fell outside the construction site, walking around them, some pointing or staring. The affluent rushed home, returning with cameras and film. Drivers of heavy-duty vehicles or family sedans took care to avoid running over them. But it didn’t matter where labor fell. The public remained indifferent. In the city center, what unnerved most witnesses was that when the men fell, they not only lost their limbs or had cracks that looked like fissures, but they lost their voices, too. They would just look at you, frantically moving what could still move. But most of the time, especially in areas just being developed, the fallen simply waited. Sometimes, the men fell onto things or under things where few people cared to look. Or they weren’t reported missing. These were the two ways, Anna would share with anyone who asked, that laborers could die on-site.

  Then there were those who would never be found. A combination of factors contributed to this: bad luck, ineptitude, a heavy workload. A fallen worker might last a week without being discovered, but after a week, deterioration set in. Eventually, death.

  Anna had a superb track record for finding fallen men. The woman must have been part-bloodhound. She found every sign of them including teeth, bits of skin. She roamed her territory with tenacity, pointing her flashlight in places the devil did not know or construction lights could not brighten. Before her shift ended in the morning, she returned to the sites, checking with the supervisor or the men disembarking Ashok Leyland buses to be certain no one was still missing, and that the men she had fixed, then ordered to wait at the gates for inspection, included everybody on the supervisor’s roster. The men were grateful to be fussed over like this.

  Anna wasn’t beautiful, but in a city where women were scarce, she was prized. She also possessed other skills. The fallen shared that when Anna reattached body parts, she spoke to them in her tongue, sometimes stroking their hair or chin. She would wax and wane about her life, saying that she missed her kids or the fish near her river, or would instead ask about their lives, what they left, what they dreamt at night, even though they couldn’t answer. If she made a connection with the man or if she simply liked him, she flirted. “You must be married,” she liked to tease. If she didn’t speak his language, she sang, poorly, but from the heart. But even Anna lost people.

  “Sometimes a man will die no matter what you do,” Khalid told her. “Only Allah knows why.”

  Once, for four hours Anna sat with a man who held in place with his right arm his head, which had almost torn itself loose from the fall. A week prior, Anna had a similar case and patched the man up in under two hours. But in this case, probably her last before retirement, nothing worked. Sutures did not hold. Glue refused to bind. Stranger still was that the man could speak. In her many years of doing this, none of the fallen had been able to say a word. “Not working?” he asked. Anna pursed her lips and just held him. There was no point calling an ambulance. No point finding a doctor.

  “Remove the fallen from the work site,” Khalid had warned her, “and they die.” It was simply something everyone knew. Outside work sites, men couldn’t survive these kinds of falls. If the men couldn’t be fixed at the sites, they didn’t stand a chance anywhere else.

  The dying man’s name was Iqbal. He was probably in his mid-thirties and would become the first man to die under her watch in over five years. In her long career, she had lost thirty-seven people, an exceptional record. She asked about his home.

  “Home’s shit,” he said. His village suffocated its young. “So small you could squeeze all of its people and farmland inside a plump cow.” The only major enterprise was a factory that made coir doormats. “Know when a village turns bitter? If the young are bored—” Iqbal trailed off.

  He’d left because he wanted to see a bit of the world. Besides, everyone he knew yearned to be a Gulf boy. Recruiters turned up every six months in loud shirts and trousers and a hired taxi, and they hired anyone. “When I went, they told me the only requirement was to be able to withstand heat,” Iqbal said. Then there was the money, which had seduced Anna, too. “Tax-free!” he bellowed. They told him if he played his cards right, he could line his pockets with gold.

  Before making up his mind, Iqbal had visited the resident fortune-teller—a man whose parrot picked out a card that confirmed the Gulf would transform Iqbal’s life. He packed that night, visited Good-Time Philomena, the neighborhood hooker, for a fuck that lasted so long “a she-wolf knocked on the door and begged us to stop.” Then he sneaked back into his house and stole his old man’s savings to pay for the visa and the trip.

  “Uppa was paralyzed—a factory incident. Basically watched me take his cash,” Iqbal said. Anna frowned. “I wouldn’t worry,” Iqbal reassured her. “My brother took good care of him.”

  “And how is he now?” Anna inquired.

  “Died in my brother’s lap,” he replied. “I couldn’t go see him.”

  As Anna continued to hold Iqbal’s head, he told her he expected to have made his fortune in ten years. By then, he’d have handpicked his wife, had those kids, built that house. His father, if he’d lived, would’ve forgiven him. Former teachers who scorned him by calling him Farm Boy or Day Dreamer would invite him to dine at their place. But then he fell, didn’t he? Slipped like a bungling monkey. He was doing something else— what, he seemed embarrassed to share.

  “What were you up to?” Anna urged. “Go on, I won’t tell a soul.”

  Iqbal smiled. “I was masturbating on the roof. The edge,” he confessed. He had done this many times before. “It’s super fun,” he giggled. “But then a pigeon landed on my pecker….” The bird startled him. He lost his balance.

  “You didn’t!” Anna laughed.

  “Try it, there’s nothing like it. It’s like impregnating the sky.” Or, he added, “in your case, welcoming it.”

  “Behave,” Anna said. “I could easily be your mother’s age. Or older sister’s.”

  “The heat,” he said softly. “The heat felled me.”

  “Not the bird?”

  Iqbal broke into a grin. “I came on a bird once. It acted like I’d shot it.”

  Like Anna, Iqbal had known heat ever since he was a child. He knew how to handle it, even when the steam in the air had the potential to boil a man’s mind. But the Gulf’s heat baked a man differently. First it cooked a man’s shirt and then the man’s
skin. On-site, Iqbal trusted his instincts. Water, sometimes buttermilk, was always on hand, but frequent breaks meant a reduced output, and Iqbal knew his progress was being monitored. He had trained as a tailor, as his Uppa was a tailor; he knew learning a new trade took time. So he followed one rule: when his skin felt like parchment paper, he stopped working and quenched his thirst, sometimes drinking water so quickly it hurt. The sun never conquered him. His body was strong. But what he couldn’t control, he told Anna, were the reactions of people he passed in the street, especially if he volunteered to go to one of those little kadas to buy water or cold drinks for his mates in the afternoon.

  “How so?” Anna wondered.

  “In the summer,” Iqbal continued, “you burn, the clothes burn. You smell like an old stove.” Then he asked her, “Don’t you burn?”

  “Everyone burns here,” she replied quietly. “But you fell today? What was different?”

  “It seemed like the perfect day,” Iqbal said dryly. “What do the others tell you?”

  “The others?”

  “Those who fall.” Iqbal didn’t wait for an answer. “Outside, whether you believe it or not, heat’s easier to handle. For me, anyway.” On building tops, he insisted, most men shrivel into raisins. “Men don’t burn up there; they decay.”

  “But it’s cooler up there, no?” Anna asked.

  “Fully clothed, in hard hats? No,” said Iqbal. “I once saw a man shrink to the size of a child. At lunchtime, he drank a tub of water and grew back to his original size.” Still, the open air allowed the body to breathe. “You have wind.” Indoors, in the camps, in closed quarters, packed into bunk beds, not enough ACs, bodies baked, sweat burned eyes, salt escaped, fever and dehydration built. Bodies reeled from simply that. Anna nodded. There was a time Anna patched up a man with skin so dry, she needed to rub the man’s entire body with olive oil after she pieced him together.

  Even though they were all immune to death by free fall, there was nothing they could do about the heat. At lunch break, getting to the shade under tractor beds and crane rumps became more important than food. With shirts as pillows and newspapers as blankets, the men rested.

  Iqbal asked Anna if she would mind scratching his hair. “You’re new,” he teased. “You look new, like a bride.”

  Anna smiled. “I have grandkids now.” She dug her nails into his scalp.

  “They told you to fear the sun, didn’t they?” said Iqbal.

  “Who?”

  “Recruiters,” said Iqbal.

  “No,” she replied.

  “Well, no one mentions the nighttime,” Iqbal sighed. “They should.” At night, heat attacked differently, became wet. “I knew a man,” Iqbal continued, “who collected sweat. He would go door to door with a trolley full of buckets. After a week’s worth, this man— Badran was his name—dug a pit near the buildings we lived in. It would take him a long time to pour the buckets of sweat into that pit. The first couple of times, I watched. Then I began to help. Soon we had a pool—a salty pool. It was good fun. We floated for hours.”

  “Didn’t Badran get into trouble?” Anna asked.

  “Badran was a smart fellow,” said Iqbal. “He resold some of that pool water to this shady driver of a water tanker. The driver would get to the camp at around three a.m., take as much water as truck could carry. Everyone knew. The important people all got a cut.”

  “Where did he take the water?”

  “I asked Badran many times,” said Iqbal. “He never said.”

  “Badran must be doing well for himself,” said Anna.

  “He was, I suppose,” said Iqbal. “He died a few months ago.”

  “How?”

  “Accident,” replied Iqbal. “Was his time.”

  “Where?”

  “We were returning home in a pickup. Near Mussafah the driver hit something. Badran fell. . . the wheel. . .” Iqbal paused.

  Anna didn’t push him. She knew what he meant. Every night, Anna told Iqbal, she had dinner at this little cafeteria owned by a man from her town who served her leftovers that weren’t on the menu. She ate for free while Abdu, the cafeteria owner, gossiped. Abdu made a good living. Where his place was, every night, trucks and buses ferrying labor would stop. Badran and Iqbal may have stopped, too, sitting by the windows, worn out.

  “Maybe,” said Iqbal. “Once I sat next to a man who was so hot he evaporated before my eyes. I took his pants; someone took his shoes; his shirt was ugly, so no one wanted that.”

  Anna laughed. Iqbal’s speech was slowing. She continued massaging his scalp.

  “I once knew a man who wanted to die,” said Iqbal. “He’d realized pretty early it was hard to die in the workplace or in the camps. He wasn’t unhappy. He just wanted to die.”

  “So, did he?” asked Anna.

  Iqbal grinned. “You see, that’s how this story gets complicated. Charley knew what he wanted, but he was also fair. He had a wife and kids back home he wanted to make sure were provided for. He’d figured the best way to do that would be to die performing some work-related task. That way they would be compensated.”

  “Did he succeed?”

  Iqbal thought about the question. “I am not sure,” he finally said.

  “What happened?”

  “Well, he asked me to help. I liked him, you know. I said yes. He said it would take some time, a year or two, but it could work. So Charley tells me that every couple of months he would give himself an accident. He’d start with small ones. Fall off the first floor, lose a few toes. Then he would build up: third floor, sixth floor. Thing is, he’d tell me beforehand. A note, some secret code indicating when he planned to do this, and where. So I’d wait for the deed, and before anyone found out I’d go to him, remove one piece of him—don’t know, a finger or something— then throw that into the trash bin. Stick People would fix him up at night, but there would be a part missing. He promised himself four accidents a year. If he played his cards right, in three years, he’d be properly broken, just not fixable, and the company would be bound to inform his family. So that’s what we did for a while.”

  “His family wouldn’t have gotten a cent,” Anna confided.

  “Let me finish,” said Iqbal. “We’d done enough for me to administer the hammer blow in a few months; it had taken longer than we had anticipated—six years. One night, Charley sought me out. ‘I want to live,’ he said. I didn’t know what to say. I had removed a few fingers, toes, a kidney, his penis. His legs were half the size they’d been when he arrived, and now he wanted to live.”

  “What did you do?” Anna asked.

  “He’s very happy now,” smiled Iqbal. “Sometimes he asks me if he can watch me jack off since he can’t anymore.”

  “Was he there today?”

  “No, not today.” Iqbal’s breath grew increasingly labored. “Soon,” is what he said. Anna nodded, gently touching his face. Iqbal turned towards her. “Do you know the prayer for the dead?” She shook her head.

  “There’s this dream I’ve been having. . .” Iqbal began.

  “Listening,” said Anna.

  “A man I knew, Nandan, kept a bird, a pigeon in a cage, that he brought to work every day.” As Nandan worked, Iqbal shared, he never let this bird out of his sight.

  “Never?”

  “Not for a second,” Iqbal confirmed. “The bird could fly, but he weighted it down with an iron lock around its neck. It weighed enough to make the bird stoop all the time.” Iqbal felt bad for the bird, trapped in that cage, so he made up his mind to set it free when Nandan wasn’t looking. “I almost succeeded,” he said. He was on the roof, picking the lock, about to set the bird free, when Nandan cornered him. Someone had seen Iqbal headed for the roof with the birdcage. Nandan demanded Iqbal give back his bird. “I wouldn’t, of course,” said Iqbal. In a fit of rage, Nandan lunged for the bird. Iqbal slipped, losing his grip on the bird; it fell to the ground a few feet away from both men, not far from the edge of the roof, eighteen stories up. The bird
, in a panic, or perhaps, hope, began hopping toward the edge and jumped. “But I hadn’t had time to remove the lock,” said Iqbal.

  “That’s terrible,” said Anna.

  “In a way,” said Iqbal. “After the incident, I began having these dreams.”

  “Dreams?”

  “Promise not to laugh,” said Iqbal.

  “I promise,” said Anna. Weeks after the pigeon fell to its death, Iqbal began having dreams in which he stood atop the roof of some building he helped construct. “My family’s with me; we all have wings. The sun’s cold. You following me? Cold! We fly.” And as they fly, he shared, he notices that their feet possess talons, with which they can grip the top of the building, and they pull, and they fly, and they pull, and they fly, or try to fly, until they rip the building off its foundations, taking it with them, towards the gelid sun.” It was Iqbal’s final tale. Before dawn, he was gone.

  Anna stayed with him for a few minutes, wondering if she ought to wait until morning, but she decided against it, filling out a note she attached to his chest. Deceased, it said, listing Khalid’s company’s name and address and a point of contact. Then she got back on her cycle.

  *

  Hamdan, Anna’s haunt, her hood, was growing, from a tiny city center to a mutating worm that refused to tire. The streets grew streets, parked next to slabs of steel and glass towering over trees planted to grow in exactly the same way. Roads were widened and swept regularly to keep them spotless and black. Imported planners erected tall, stringy American-style street lights. If you paid attention, you could hear mercenary architects barking instructions to create the perfect city: Move. This. There. That. They never slept, shouting orders into the night, into the wee hours of the morning, never resting. The city was a board game and labor its pieces , there to make buildings bigger, streets longer, the economy richer. Then to leave. After.

  Hamdan had once been little, with a runt-like city center, unsure and uncertain, but was now coached in ambition to exact maximum mileage from death-proof labor as they constructed its buildings. Anna had trouble keeping up with the pace. More workers than ever were falling.