Lucky Ticket

by Joey Bui

  She waded through sugary air all the way home. She had the peculiar feeling that, in this hour, the world was carved out for her singular misery. It was not yet dawn and all was quiet. There was no breeze to move the grass, kitchen windows were not yet open, and the roosters had been slain sometime in the night to stop the commencement of a new day. Even the ghosts of women and children who died howling for water in the tunnels beneath her could not be heard. Linh reached her house and pushed open the door.

  Nga was sitting on the bed. She took one look at Linh and it was clear she knew everything. Nga’s face was blotchy and her eyes bloodshot from crying. She let out a yelp, then started wailing at the walls. Her lips trembled uncontrollably. She clasped her thin elbows and cried and cried. Linh stood transfixed at the door. Nga cried maniacally, gasping for air, her throat rasping as she scraped at the skin on her arms.

  Linh fell to her knees. From the ground, she caught sight of her face reflected in the pots lining the wall. Her revulsion shocked her out of her body.

  ‘Of all the lives to be, why must I be me?’

  Linh was instantly saved by the futility of her words, and was able to creep back inside her bones, to her cloistered misery.

  This is where I depart. It has been exhausting and I am thoroughly disgusted with everyone involved, including myself. I will leave the girl alone. I think about what could have happened, if only I had left her as I first saw her. A silhouette of a skinny girl waiting by the highway. A name, and a hair elastic.

  It was by chance that I had come to work in the United Arab Emirates instead of Oman. For that I was thankful. I had heard about Tanzanians who worked in Oman. My wife, Grace, read a story in the newspaper about a Tanzanian woman who went to work as a maid in Oman and was beaten by her mistress with wooden clothes hangers and raped by the husband when she tried to run away. I told Grace that it was not appropriate for her to read such stories. I was also irritated; she knew I had signed up to work overseas, so why was she trying to scare me? I asked my older cousins and they said there were lots of stories like this online, about Tanzanian maids in Oman. Zanzibaris know how Omanis think of our people; we remember how they enslaved us in our own land, but the mainland Tanzanians forget easily. Still, my cousins said it was different for men. A man can take care of himself.

  I am the only son of five children. I have four sisters: Neema, who is older, and Sophy, Mary and Faith, who are younger. I was the only one my parents sent to a private primary school, where they teach in English instead of Swahili, so that I could get into secondary school. Neema was also selected for secondary school, but she dropped out after Form 2. Neema was always smarter than me, and by the time I graduated, she had helped my parents open a beef shop in the Stone Town market. She and my father began to take the dala dala, the share van, to work at six in the morning. Neema took over all the negotiations with our suppliers. She was also good with customers, and with the finances.

  The shop started to do well, much better than my parents’ shop in the Mwanakwerekwe market, which my mother was now running on her own. It was because of Neema, and our new shop, that I finally got to marry Grace. Her family also lived in Mwanakwerekwe, but they were wealthier than us. Her father was a beef supplier from whom my parents bought produce, and they lived in a new house and had a car. Grace’s father said that I had his permission to marry his daughter, but that a man who had completed his education should do more than sell food in a market.

  For a year, I tried to look for a better job, while still keeping my part-time work at the slaughterhouse. I joined my friend Saidy and his brothers in their garbage-collection business, but after the high season there wasn’t enough work for all four of us and I had to leave. I briefly trained as a mechanic, but did not like the work. I considered getting a taxi licence. My English would be useful with the tourists, I knew Zanzibari roads well, and it would be comfortable work if I had air conditioning. But Grace’s father, from whom we would have to borrow money, was not in favour. Finally, it was his idea for me to go overseas. His friend’s son was doing construction work in Qatar and had now sent enough money home to build new houses for both his parents and his new wife.

  Only once did Neema ask me if Grace was worth it.

  ‘It is not just this one time,’ she said, her voice strained. She was holding four pegs in her mouth as she hung out the washing. ‘This man will always interfere with your life. He tries to control you. Are you sure this is what you want?’

  I rubbed the callouses on my feet. Sitting cross-legged on a mat below the clothesline, looking up at Neema as she shook out clothes and sheets so smoothly, I felt like the chubby, fourteen-year-old boy who had come to her like this so many years ago, to tell her that I was being bullied at my new private school. She glanced down and it was as if she could see the thought passing through my mind.

  ‘You have nothing to prove, Fredy.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘No one calls you that name anymore.’

  But she was wrong. Some of my friends still called me Fredy Mpole, not maliciously, simply because the name had stuck. I had been infatuated with the English teacher at my new school, Miss Irene, who had come from Dar es Salaam. For our diary-writing assignments, I wrote long, personal letters to her, sometimes four or five sickeningly detailed and emotional pages instead of the mandatory single page. When my classmates found them in the stack of homework on Miss Irene’s desk, they passed them around, reading aloud sentences like ‘On Friday you wore a long-sleeved black shirt’ and ‘I like your yellow earrings with bells on them’. I ran from the classroom. After Miss Irene had cajoled me to come back, she asked the class to be kinder to me, ‘because Fredy is mpole’—‘gentle’. Which only made things worse.

  ‘Je, Uole Ni Udahifu? Fua kwa wororo, usisugue wala kukamua,’ Neema said to me now, just like she did when I was younger. But is it weak to be gentle? Be gentle, and do not knead or wring the fabric. It used to be comforting, but as I grew older, any reminder of the name irritated me.

  ‘I’m not a child anymore,’ I snapped.

  Neema looked down and nudged me playfully with her right foot.

  ‘I know, Fredy. Lighten up.’

  My father used to flinch in annoyance when he heard people calling me Fredy Mpole. And sometimes he yelled at me when I followed Neema around the house as she did chores, or when I was reading in my room—I was the only one with a room to myself. It didn’t help that my teachers told him I was too quiet in class, and needed to make more friends. Maybe he was afraid I was gay. In any case, he thought I was spending too much time alone and needed to get out and work with my hands. So he got me the after-school shift in the slaughterhouse by the market. But the other workers were all older than me and didn’t want to talk much. At school, I often still carried the metallic smell of blood from the slaughterhouse, which just fuelled my classmates’ teasing.

  My father was so excited when, at nineteen, I introduced Grace to the family. She was my first girlfriend. She was sixteen, sweet and shy. She made me feel strong and protective, even though I was short, quiet and known as Fredy Mpole. Grace seemed to love me unquestionably; I didn’t really believe then that anyone could love me like that. I agreed to sign up at the recruitment office to work overseas. Finally, Grace and I were allowed to get married.

  A few months later, when they first called about the work in Oman, my legs and back were aching so badly that it was difficult to walk. And then I got a fever. I spent eleven days in bed, cold and then sweating. Grace cared for me selflessly: she slept by me even though I was coughing and sweating and vomiting through the night. She soaked cloths in warm water and wiped my face and neck down, her own face full of worry. When she wrapped three blankets around me and held me, I loved her more than ever. We decided not to go to the doctor because we had just spent all our money on the recruitment fee.

  The other guys who had been recruited had left for the Gulf while I was sick. I was devastated. I thought at first that all
our money was lost—the money our families had given us as a wedding present. I knew Grace’s father would resent me for failing to fulfil the condition on which he had agreed to let me marry his daughter. For the first time, I yelled at Grace. I told her that she was a foolish girl, that she should have let me leave, sick or not, that her girlish doting had ruined our futures. I thought she would cry. Instead, she stared at me, her face impassive. I was struck by the terrifying thought that I barely knew my wife.

  When I went into town to speak to the recruitment officer, Emmanuel, he said that, although he could not refund my fee, he would keep me on a waiting list. He could not say how long it would take. I went down to the recruitment office every day for two weeks, until Emmanuel found work for me. He charged me an additional fee for off-season enrolment. What could I do? If I did not pay, he would have sent another guy instead. I had to borrow money from Grace’s father for the additional amount. In the end, all the recruitment fees cost more than two million shillings. After that, everything happened quickly. I didn’t even know I was being sent to the UAE until after the papers were ready. Three days later, Grace, my parents, my sisters and Grace’s parents came to see me off at Zanzibar International Airport.

  The night before I left, Grace’s mother cooked two whole fish in coconut and pilau, rice with spices. After dinner, Grace’s father said that he was proud of me. ‘It tells me that you are ready to be a man,’ he pronounced, ‘and only a man can take care of my daughter.’

  When I said goodbye to Grace at the airport, I was relieved to see her crying. She had been cold to me since I had yelled at her, although not so much that anyone else would notice. I hadn’t been sure how we would leave things. It had been a big shift from dating to marriage. It was not about the sex. That was good. We could finally be in a bedroom instead of deserted parks or beaches, where she had always been uncomfortable and I worried she wasn’t really enjoying herself. But I had never spent much time with Grace before, never seen her in the morning without make-up, never seen the blank expression she wore when she was doing chores, or how she was her father’s favourite. I was also living away from home for the first time, in her family home: everyone had agreed it was best for her to stay there while I was working in the Gulf.

  At the departure gate, Grace pressed her face against my chest, sobbing as I held the back of her head and squeezed her thick, long hair. I wondered what our marriage would be like when I came back. Then I had to go.

  Standing on the tarmac in Abu Dhabi and hearing the adhan, the call to prayer, for the first time in a new place, I felt like a stranger. The land was wide and empty and hot. In Zanzibar, the morning adhan was always peaceful, dark blue still hanging in the sky, and somewhere in the house was the sound of a woman awake, filing pots and jugs with water. That first morning in Abu Dhabi, the adhan sounded indifferent. The notes were musical, but they seemed abbreviated, and the deep timbre of the singing shocked me. It was like hearing the voice of a strange man in your own house.

  A shuttle was waiting to take me to ICAD, the Industrial City of Abu Dhabi accommodation facility for migrant workers in the suburb of Mussafah, a fifty-minute ride from the university where I would work. As we drove, I stared out at the cream-and-pink brick houses, some of them beautiful mansions with curved outlines. The streets were wide and clean, almost empty of people. I felt as if I was looking into somebody’s empty house while they were away, or walking around a school when the students had left for the summer holidays. Abu Dhabi was beautiful, and more so the longer I stayed there, but it always had that eerie, unreal quality.

  At ICAD, four storeys of grey concrete, inside and out, they were not expecting me yet, so I was given temporary accommodation for a few weeks in an empty block. Each room had four bunk beds wrapped in faded green-and-white-checked sheets. We had to keep the place spotless for monthly maintenance inspections. As we were reassigned every semester, no one bothered to decorate. There was a communal bathroom at the end of the hall, and a kitchen and lounge on the second floor. I had a restless first night in my empty room, unable to imagine what life would bring next.

  In the morning, I caught the shuttle bus to the university with other ICAD workers. There seemed to be nothing but highway and orange sand. Then a majestic, stark-white, domed building rose from the horizon. It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. The main entrance—which workers didn’t use—was a courtyard full of palm trees that reached as high as the sixth storey. The campus consisted of many separate buildings, most of which I would never go to, joined by an outdoor walkway along the length of the third storey. All the windows were gleaming.

  I was assigned to work in the cafeteria, clearing away and washing dishes. Work was erratic in the first week because I didn’t have my ID yet and they didn’t have me on the roster sheet for entering the university or taking the shuttle bus. They did not seem to have my name anywhere. When my supervisor, Adnan, told me to take a break and report to the Workers Affairs office, I thought the university did not need me anymore. Often during my first year in Abu Dhabi, I caught myself suspecting that I was not really supposed to be there. But it turned out they just had to arrange an orientation for me and a handful of other workers who had also arrived off-season.

  I had a lot of trouble with my recruitment fee and was often in the Workers Affairs office, where a woman named Farah told me she needed my recruitment fee receipt in order to reimburse me for the fees I had paid in Zanzibar—nine hundred and eighty US dollars. I didn’t know that I needed a receipt. I couldn’t remember if Emmanuel had given me a receipt. He had told me that my recruitment fee was all in the paperwork he had sent to my employer, but Farah had no record of it. I was very upset: it was so much money and I was supposed to be sending money home to my family and to Grace as soon as possible. Farah explained that Emmanuel’s recruitment office would have sent my paperwork to an official recruiting company, which would have sent it to a company in the UAE called ADAC. They would have sent it to one of their smaller branches, one of which was called RECO, the hospitality company that assigned workers to the university.

  Farah said that my receipt had probably got lost somewhere along the way, either at ADAC or RECO, or perhaps the Tanzanian government or the UAE government had to approve my application first. In any case, Emmanuel should have given it to me to bring to my new place of work. Back at ICAD, I looked through all my papers to check if I had the receipt. I had tried to be as organised as possible, but I didn’t understand a lot of the papers. There was no receipt. I returned to Workers Affairs at least five times, but I never got my reimbursement. There was nothing to be done, and I suppose it was nobody’s fault but my own.

  The stress of earning back the recruitment fee stayed with me through my first year in Abu Dhabi. I didn’t make friends straightaway. There weren’t many Africans working at the university. Most of the other workers were Filipinos and Indians; I got along well with the Indians in particular. Some of them were security guards, because they had good English, like Abdul, one of my roommates. Many of the workers assigned to the cafeteria or to my section in ICAD had arrived just a few months before me. We mostly kept to ourselves in the first year, all under a lot of pressure to send money home. I spent my evenings messaging my family. The wifi in ICAD wasn’t strong enough to make calls. The ICAD manager told us later that apps like Facebook and Skype were not permitted for calls in the UAE, that we had to use an Etisalat international calling card. Only Abdul bought the cards, to call his mother, until she yelled at him for wasting money instead of sending it home.

  Grace was very sweet in her messages to me. I didn’t know if her recent coldness had disappeared or if it just wasn’t communicated over messages. In the beginning, her words were comforting, but they became repetitive. Sometimes, when she was texting, I couldn’t confidently match up her words with the way I remembered her. My sisters messaged me photos of home, and then eventually there wasn’t much to say, and they stopped.

  My fri
endship with Abdul started a few months into my first year, one Saturday when he asked me if I wanted to buy KFC with him and some of the other Indian guys. He said he would kill himself if he ate another bite of ICAD food—watery, bland daal and a stiff bread roll. I hesitated. I was always calculating how much money I had and how much I could send home. But I wanted a friend. I gave Abdul twenty dirhams. The Indian guys went out and brought back bags of fried chicken. We ate in the lounge. It was the best food I’d had since leaving Zanzibar and probably the best moment of my first year.

  I found out that many of the Indian guys did not have receipts for the reimbursement fees either, but that most of the Filipinos did. Apparently, the Filipinos were not playing fair. A lot of them were supervisors and managers in the cafeteria and gave other Filipino workers better break times and more overtime shifts. They also got the African and Indian guys to carry heavier things and do the tougher jobs, and talked and joked more with the students, which meant the queues were longer and the dishes piled up. Abdul also told me that Filipino security guards got to work inside and put the Indians and the African guys outside, where it is always so hot. At ICAD, the Filipinos were always the loudest, especially at night, when the security guards got back at odd hours and sang loudly in Tagalog in the common area.

  Soon I was back at Workers Affairs to talk about my passport. I had handed it over when I arrived and had been waiting almost a year to get it back. The job contract stipulated that the university would pay for one return flight home per year. It was time for my trip, but I still did not have my passport. When they had sent us forms to register for our annual trip home and asked for our passports, I could not fill out the form. Another woman in Workers Affairs, Ashley, told me the university did not have it, that RECO was holding it for processing, so she had to wait to talk to them. I came back the following week and she said that RECO could not return my passport yet—it was still being processed with the government. RECO said that I should have formally requested the return of my passport months ago if I needed it now. Ashley could see how upset I was. She said she would flag my case as a ‘Level Four’ case and Workers Affairs would prioritise it. I sat in a conference room with Ashley and Farah while they sorted through my files and filled out forms to make an expedited request to RECO. But when I came back the next week, they told me nothing could be done. My passport was still with the government, and there was no possibility of me getting home for my annual leave. They assured me that I could still keep my room in ICAD for the summer months and that they would get RECO to provide a food stipend until I returned to work. But I would have to stay in Abu Dhabi for the summer. Three months.