OxTravels

by Mark Ellingham

  THE AUCTIONS TOOK PLACE outside the da Souza house, beneath a large ancient tree. The tree is still growing, still casting a specked shade. Its roots protrude from the earth like the bones on the back of one’s hand, plunging underground just a few feet shy of a metal sign printed with the words Route des esclaves. As had da Silva’s slaves half a century before, da Souza’s slaves filed from under these same branches clustered with yellow berries, through the Quartier de Brésil, past crumbling merchants’ houses of luminous apricot, along a red dirt track.

  Martine da Souza is Chacha’s great-great-granddaughter and works as a guide at the museum. She leads us onto the Slave Road. It cuts for three miles through cane plantations and rice fields. We walk in the footsteps of the estimated twenty million Africans who trod this path between 1530 and 1901, with gags in their mouths and their feet in metal hoops.

  After a mile we come to a statue commemorating the Place de l’Oubli, where each and every slave circulated a tree four times to say goodbye to their country. The ceremony was intended to obliterate a person’s origins and cultural identity – which makes it all the more noteworthy that Rasbutta should abruptly remember, a few yards after leaving this place, a detail which has slipped his memory; and which suggests that Rasbutta da Silva is descended not from a slaver, nor a king.

  Rasbutta recalls in his fishing village how his grandmother described the marks on her grandfather’s ankles. Marks left by a chain.

  Another mile on, we reach the Casa de Zomai, ‘the house of darkness’. The slaves were locked for three months in this room, into which no light penetrated, to subdue them for the trip in the hold – an inferno described by one historian as ‘week after week of shitting, starving, shrieking hell’.

  ‘After three months in darkness,’ says Martine, ‘they were no more Dahomeans, no more human beings.’

  Back in the sun, Rasbutta speaks to my sister in a low urgent voice. ‘I feel I’ve been on this road before. I feel this is my road. We’re going to come to a river and a bridge.’

  ‘How do you know?’ she says. There is nothing in sight, only the dirt road.

  ‘I just feel it.’

  Right at that moment, we observe a three-headed statue on the verge. ‘Tohosu,’ explains Martine: the water divinity. And points. ‘There’s a bridge over there, crossing the river.’

  We walk over in silence.

  The beach is furrowed by black pigs with sandy noses foraging for shrimps.

  No one swims from this shore. There are so many sharks that, in 1879, the canoeists went on strike: too many had been eaten. As well, there’s a dangerous undertow. ‘Don’t go into the sea – ever,’ our honorary consul has warned. ‘We’re sending back one person a month in a box.’

  Close to the water’s edge, five men prepare to launch their pirogue. They run down the sand and paddle like mad. The waves engulf the grey dugout, overturning it. Nothing is whiter than the foam that hisses in a broad, bubbling band towards us.

  We watch the men flounder back through the crashing surf, cursing.

  There’s no shade and we are sweating. A local poet imagined this stretch of coastline as the doorway to hell. ‘It opens onto a blue sea. There is a woman with bare breasts who walks towards the prison of the waves. It’s my mother.’

  Today, the men who right the canoe and retrieve the glass floats are fishermen. In the past they ferried a human cargo to the ships. How much, I wonder, were Rasbutta’s ancestors bartered for? Sixteen Dutch clay pipes? Twelve Pondichéry handkerchiefs? Sixty pounds of soca?

  It has taken time to absorb this shocking thing. The people whom Rasbutta has met in Mama Africa are not, ancestrally speaking, his family, but his enemies. The Africans who stayed behind, the da Silvas, the da Souzas, the Kings of Abomey, were those who had connived in flogging his forebears for sweetened pipe tobacco.

  ‘Rasbutta, what do you feel?’ I ask.

  He goes on staring out to sea, towards Brazil, towards the young Rasbutta, the fisherman’s son who had no clue what he was singing about.

  ‘I don’t feel anything,’ he says after a long time. ‘They should be feeling something.’

  Madam Say Go

  SONIA FALEIRO (born Goa, India, 1977) is an award-winning reporter and the author of Beautiful Thing (Canongate, 2011), a non-fiction narrative about the secretive world of Bombay’s dance bars. She lives in San Francisco and Bombay. www.soniafaleiro.com

  Madam Say Go

  SONIA FALEIRO

  ‘Madam say, “Go!”’

  She scraped her scarf back on her head and I saw she was in her twenties, that her face was only large enough to accommodate her features. That one kohl-lined eye was swollen shut.

  ‘Madam?’ I said, trying not to stare.

  She nodded, tilting her good eye towards me. ‘Where going?’

  ‘Bombay,’ I said.

  ‘You?’ I asked tentatively.

  ‘Hyderabad,’ she replied. ‘This flight Hyderabad,’ she said decidedly.

  I shook my head. ‘This flight Bombay.’

  She turned to the window; it was dark outside.

  ‘You do want to go to Bombay?’

  She rummaged inside the box-like handbag on her lap, and retrieving her ticket handed it to me. She’d started her journey in Abu Dhabi and was to end it in Bombay.

  ‘Hindi?’ I asked, handing it back to her.

  She shook her head. ‘Telugu?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘English,’ she sighed. ‘Okay.’ She stuck her hand out. It was small, limp, and covered with scabs. ‘Padmavati Kadali, village Rameswaram, Andhra Pradesh. How are you?’

  ‘Good,’ I replied, shaking her hand gingerly. ‘How are you?’

  Kadali shrugged. ‘Last week job, today nothing. Madam say, “You stealer! Go!”’ Her face broke into a grin. ‘Madam cheat Padma out of salary and madam say “Stealer!”’

  She shrugged as though to say ‘the irony’.

  ‘Hyderabad going?’

  I pressed the call button for the flight attendant.

  ‘Just a minute,’ I told Kadali.

  She nodded.

  The cabin lights were dim, the other passengers reduced to shapes and sounds. The shape of a woman covered entirely by a thin grey blanket; the sound of a man’s rasping snores; the shape of a baby burrowing restlessly into its mother’s breast; the sound of the mother’s determined ‘Shhhs’.

  I’D BOARDED THIS FLIGHT in the UAE; it was a connection from Bahrain. I’d flown into Bahrain from Kuwait, Kuwait from Qatar. Technically, I’d started my journey in Bombay, but really, it had been months before that when I’d been in Kerala, taking a vacation from writing. I’d become intrigued by the adverts offering work in the Gulf that covered every public wall, alongside chalk paintings of gods and goddesses and life-sized, colourful posters declaring the latest Super Hit! film. Alongside these Help Wanted! In Dubai! Call Now! adverts were plastered cheaply printed offers of help with procuring a visa, and acquiring skills to be Best Maid! and Top Mechanic!.

  Later, I learnt that Kerala sent more than two million, or one in six, of its people to the Gulf, the most of any state in India, and that remittances from these men, women, and even children young as sixteen, boosted the state’s economy by thirty-five per cent. Five million Indians, many barely literate construction workers and domestic help, had been making this journey since the 1970s, signing on for a hard life, far harder than they might even have had in India, but one that was also meant to be far more lucrative.

  I wondered not just who these people were, but also, why they kept going back. For although their remittances, estimated at over fifty billion dollars annually, were life altering, so too was the abuse many suffered. In India government officials shared police reports – of a maid burnt with an iron for damaging a shirt, of a cook rescued from a home where he slept at midnight, woke up at 3 a.m., and was given dog food to eat.

  In Qatar, an official at the Indian Embassy said it wasn’t unusual for
an employer who couldn’t be bothered to buy his employee’s ticket home to drive her to the border with Saudi Arabia and abandon her. There was the story of a worker ‘encouraged’ to give up a kidney to his sick employer, of the maid whose ears were sliced off, of the IT employee promised an IT job, but who instead found himself herding sheep.

  The abuse didn’t start in the Gulf. Recruitment agents in India charged exorbitant sums; money that was borrowed, sometimes from a half dozen places, at a high rate of interest, sometimes in exchange for pledging a home as security; because the job seeker believed he would earn that amount back quickly. But the job he was given was, more often than not, not just different from the one promised, it was low paying and binding. Breaking a contract could nullify one’s visa.

  Agents were also responsible for what was known as ‘pushing’. An agent whose client had been rejected for a visa would pay off immigration officials, ensuring that when his client’s passport was to be examined, it wouldn’t be. He’d be ‘pushed’ through, turning him, instantly, into an illegal immigrant.

  Once in the Gulf, semi-skilled or unskilled workers were forced to live isolated lives. They submitted their passport to their sponsor or employer, and because the visa and work permit system in the Gulf was skewed to entirely favour nationals, it was virtually impossible for them to break a contract, even one that broke the initial commitment made to them by a recruitment agent, or that underpaid and overworked them, or made their life a previously unimaginable misery. To leave the country without the consent of their sponsor could result in them being charged with absconding; leading to arrest and deportation, ruining any chance they might have had to renew their visa and apply for a better job. The comparatively lucky ones experienced the ‘Taxi System’: an ‘absconder’ who’d made his way to the Indian Embassy was heard out, fed, and given legal counselling. He was then placed in a taxi and sent to the deportation centre where he would stay until his case was resolved and the embassy could buy his ticket home.

  While workmen were confined to their places of work and sleep, evidence of their toil was everywhere. In the perfect smoothness, length and curve of freeways, in the shimmering chrome and glass beauty of skyscrapers, in indoor ski slopes and outdoor Venetian-inspired water canals.

  At the Al Hajeri labour camp in Doha lived three thousand Indians who worked at the Ras Laffan Industrial City, one of the world’s largest LNG exporting facilities. The day I was invited to visit just happened to be the day the contractor decided that workers must put in an extra shift. When I arrived, the sprawling camp was empty except for a supervisor and kitchen staff. I was welcome to inspect the sleeping areas, the supervisor said, and the kitchen. Vegetables were imported from Kerala, he assured me; workers even ate fish and chicken. The men, I said, can I see them tomorrow? The supervisor shook his head glumly. ‘Out of question.’

  At least I’d seen workmen. Not at the camp, but almost everywhere else, drilling, digging, paving roads. They toiled in the steam of the hottest day, in the swirl of wind and dust storms; security guards oversaw their every move. But at least I could verify their existence with my own eyes.

  Domestic workers were entirely invisible.

  The homes they worked in were enormous domed villas with walls so thick, so high, one could only imagine what lay beyond. When contacted, the owners of these villas would invite me for a meal at an expensive restaurant, and they’d be courteous, recommending shopping malls, and because I was a writer, one of the few bookstores in town, and they would talk of how they couldn’t live without their help, how she was so clean, so loyal, and it was so sad I couldn’t meet her because she was currently unwell/on vacation/in India.

  My best bet, if I wanted to speak freely with a domestic worker, I was told by another official at the Indian Embassy, this time in Kuwait, was a deportation centre. Or, the flight home.

  THE ATTENDANT BENT over me. ‘Can I help you?’

  ‘She thinks she’s going to Hyderabad,’ I said, nodding at Kadali.

  Kadali looked up at the attendant eagerly. ‘Hyderabad?’ she said.

  The attendant was sympathetic. ‘Her madam packed her off to the wrong city, I suppose. Happens all the time.’

  The man in the seat in front of me swivelled his head. ‘Gulfie people are all rogues. Muslim sheikh mafia, I tell you!’

  ‘Let me talk to the chief attendant,’ the attendant said. ‘We’ll take care of her, don’t worry.’

  ‘We should boycott the Gulf!’ the man spluttered, his face bulging. ‘Why don’t we do it? I’ll tell you why. Because we Indians have no pride, that’s why – NO PRIDE WHATSOEVER!’

  The attendant gave him a look.

  ‘Blanket?’ he beseeched.

  Kadali turned to me. ‘My husband told this would happen. They always send home long way. Wrong way. “But never mind, madam,” he told me. “You can look after yourself.”’

  ‘He’s right,’ I said. ‘I’m sure you can. I mean, you have.’

  Kadali’s eyes lit up. ‘I told madam first time, “You beat!”’ She grabbed my wrist. ‘“You beat, I take police. Straight police!”’

  I burst out laughing. So did she. ‘Straight police!’ she giggled, slapping my knee.

  ‘But wait, what about your eye?’ I asked.

  She was sheepish. ‘Fell down airport rushing, rushing. So happy to go home.’

  I didn’t know whether to believe her.

  ‘You fell down?’

  ‘Uh huh,’ she nodded.

  The chief attendant came over. He appeared solicitous. ‘We’ll drop her off with the ground staff in Bombay,’ he said. ‘They’ll do the needful.’

  Nothing about Kadali’s expression changed. She was serene, like all she’d needed was a confirmation of her suspicions, and now she knew she’d been duped, she could move on.

  ‘What do you do?’ she asked, not appearing to give her own situation another thought.

  ‘I’m a writer,’ I said.

  ‘Housemaid,’ she pointed to herself. Digging into her handbag, she retrieved a plastic sandwich bag, and from it, a passport stored safely within. ‘Take a look.’

  Kadali posed with a wide smile, a gold chain at her neck, gold earrings in her ears, a dot of red on her forehead. Her dark eyes focused intently ahead, a mixture of curiosity and impatience. It was clear that she was, at whatever age the photograph had been taken, already a fully formed personality, who might be moved by the world, but would not be swayed by it.

  ‘How long were you in Abu Dhabi?’ I asked, handing back the passport.

  ‘First, Oman. Two years after, visa expire, come home, work hard, earn thirty thousand rupees, then only Abu Dhabi.’

  ‘Thirty thousand for the agent?’ I asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘In Abu Dhabi,’ she continued. ‘Madam sleep. Mister drink. He travel a lot and madam, oh so fat, so grumpy I can’t tell, every time mister travel she lose mind; walk up and down house like ghost talking non-stop crazy to herself. Four children she had, four big-big children, and who look after them tell?’

  ‘You did,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she smiled fondly. ‘I wash, I fed, I school bus took. I told stories of India. The children liked my stories. See my hands? So much work, hands need hospital!’

  ‘Were you happy?’ I asked.

  She thought about this. ‘The food was good … Because I cooked!’

  She grinned. ‘Cook well, eat well!’

  ‘But money? Some month 500 dirhams*, some month zero dirhams. And madam so crazy, I can’t tell.’ She tapped the side of her head meaningfully. ‘When my husband call from India, if madam hear, she pull my hair and scream, “Boyfriend?!” What boyfriend? Mister has been my husband for eleven years.’ She giggled naughtily. ‘Too much time!

  ‘But when madam go out, I call husband. I say, “Too much difficult without you. Too much sadness.” And he say, “You be okay, Padma, you be fine. Stay strong for me, for children.” “Okay, alright,” I answer.
“I’m okay.” But inside not okay. I think of husband. Of children without mother. I think, when I go home after three years, maybe four, they will call me “Aunty”. Not Mummy, Aunty. And then, after all this, madam say me, “Stealer!” “What did I steal?” I ask her. “Tell me!” “Like you don’t know!” she reply. So I said, “I don’t know, right. But I know you crazy woman.” Madam get so angry she come towards me to slap but I say, “Uh uh, remember, police!” That make her more angry than anytime! So angry she was, she make me clean full house, fill full fridge, iron all clothes, and then, only then, she say, “Go! I buy ticket, go!” When I was leaving, madam’s children how they cry. And why not? I love them too much. But madam? Madam watch TV and when I say, “Madam, goodbye,” she say, “Huh!” Huh?! Two years I clean after her and she say, “Huh!”’

  Kadali tut-tutted. ‘Too much bad manners.’

  ‘What will you do now?’ I asked. ‘Will you go back?’

  ‘Never!’ she said. ‘Never go Abu Dhabi. Go home.’

  ‘To your village?’

  Kadali leaned in. ‘My home in village have one room. Bathroom, kitchen, one bed four peoples all same room. At evening time, 5 p.m, lights go. Padma light candles, send children to rich neighbour with more candles, so children can study well. Padma’s husband has bicycle. He has chickens, goat, cow, also mother but she live in other village so no problem for Padma. In village nothing fancy like Abu Dhabi. No money like Abu Dhabi. That’s why I go Abu Dhabi. To buy for children things I never had – schooling in English medium, clothes, shoes, nice food. One boy of mine so crazy for film star Nagarjuna, must watch Nagarjuna film at least once month. Once month! Crazy boy!’

  ‘He our Baby Nag!’ She laughed fondly.

  ‘But who say to me if you go work there you get beat, you get shouting, they call “Stealer”? No one. People who stay say, “Ai Padma, when you come home get some gold for me also.” People who go say, “Come quick, this place better than USA.” Hah. Like in Abu Dhabi all eat gold. Eat gold, yes, but all? I’ll tell if someone ask. But no one ask, because no one want believe.’