The Bathroom Roster at Two A.M
The Bathroom Roster at Two A.M.
Jebel Ali. I could hardly believe it.
Ajith was waiting when I pulled up in the white Pajero, gleaming under the Dubai sun. Even before I got out, I felt the eyes on us. An Asian man in a big four‑wheel drive was still a curiosity then, a small violation of the natural order the Gulf preferred: certain bodies in certain places, certain faces behind certain wheels.
We hugged as soon as we saw each other. No ceremony. No awkwardness. Two young men in their folding, for a moment, back into the boys who had once shared beds and secrets and lateness in Colombo. Memory has its own arithmetic. Dance parties came back first. Then late nights. Borrowed sleeping space. That easy teenage understanding that my home was his, and his was mine, and that neither of us needed to ask.
He stepped back, looked me up and down and said, “I like your haircut.” He paused, then added, “Now you are a big man.”
I laughed, but the words lodged somewhere I didn’t yet know how to name. A big man. The same boy he’d known, but now encased in the symbols of success the city respected: the job in a foreign bank, the car, the apartment with more rooms than people. I didn’t feel particularly big. I felt like Denzil. My friend from school was still just Ajith.
It was my mother’s letter that had brought me here. This was 1987; news travelled on thin blue aerograms. Your old friend Ajith will be in Dubai. That was enough. I drove to Jebel Ali without a second thought.
Only when I arrived did I truly look around.
The villa was large on paper: six bedrooms, a generous living room. Inside, it contained forty‑five Sri Lankan women, folded into those six rooms like laundry. About eight to a room. The harbab, the Dubai owner setting up the garment factory, had paid their tickets. That was the arrangement. They landed already in debt, owing a man they had never met, in a language they did not speak, for the privilege of stepping onto that concrete.
Ajith walked me through, room by room. Women looked up from corners, from thin mattresses on the floor, from the small spaces they had carved out of what was left. Their eyes followed us. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything. Sometimes language is too blunt for what you are seeing.
There were four bathrooms between forty‑five women. To manage this, they woke at two in the morning, on a roster, just to use a toilet and a tap. When their periods came, they needed longer. There was no column in the roster for that. At seven, a lorry arrived and took them to the factory. Twelve hours of stitching. Ten dirhams a day. Just under three US dollars.
The men — Ajith among them — slept in the living room. They were drivers, cleaning assistants, doing the work women could not be seen doing in the emirate. Their accommodation was an afterthought added to the afterthought. When they needed the toilet at night, they walked out into the desert. The bathrooms were not for them.
Then Ajith took me to the kitchen.
I stopped in the doorway. The Bangladeshi cooks were squatting on the floor, chopping vegetables directly on the concrete. No counter, no boards, no stainless steel. Just bare ground and food, the line between them blurred into one flat surface. “Unhygienic” was the only word I could manage, and even that felt too polite, too bureaucratic, for what I was seeing.
Behind me, a younger man — one of Ajith’s colleagues — hovered, trying to get close, eager to talk to the friend from the bank with the Pajero. I barely registered him. A part of me was quietly short‑circuiting.
Later, the numbers arranged themselves in my head. Ajith was earning six hundred dirhams a month. My salary was fifteen thousand. Twenty‑five times more. The same sun, the same city, the same adolescent start line in Colombo: dancing at the same parties, being fed by each other’s mothers, borrowing each other’s shirts. We had stood on the same patch of ground as boys. Somewhere along the way, the world had split us into categories: one life deemed worthy of a visa package, the other squeezed into a living room.
The women’s calculus was worse. Parents back home had sold land or borrowed against fragile homes to pay unofficial agents. They would have signed papers they couldn’t fully read, trusting that a daughter’s trip to Dubai would change their fortunes. And here they were. A bathroom roster at two in the morning. A lorry at seven. Ten dirhams and a patch of floor.
I had read about migrant exploitation in the Gulf. I had heard stories. But standing there, my friend beside me, the numbers and the bodies and the smells collapsed into something else. It was no longer a “labour issue” in a newspaper. It was Ajith’s life. It was my countrywomen’s lives. It was a system that depended on people exactly like us — brown, hopeful, disciplined — being cheap and quiet.
I didn’t know what to do with any of it. A humanist likes to imagine he will act decisively when confronted with injustice. Mostly, we stand in doorways and go numb.
So I did the most ordinary thing I could think of. I invited Ajith to visit me.
That weekend I drove back to Jebel Ali and picked him up. His friend, the young man who had been hovering in the kitchen, came too. I took them to my apartment, where my wife had cooked a proper meal and my small child was sleeping in the next room. Ajith walked around slowly, taking it in without comment. His friend was less restrained. He marvelled out loud — at the sofa, the carpet, the television, the nonsense abundance of it all.
I opened a bottle of whiskey. Ajith drank modestly, as he always had. His friend drank as if he were trying to make up for every evening he had gone without. He was unsteady before we even sat down to eat.
Later that night, I drove them back to Jebel Ali.
I thought about it for a long time afterwards. I still do. Ajith was not a statistic or a case study; he was my friend. We had once been equal in the only way that matters to children: equal in mischief, in hunger, in dreams. And yet Dubai had slotted him into a category I hadn’t realised existed in such sharp relief until that day — the category of people a city consumes quietly, without ceremony, and without any particular guilt.
The kitchen floor. The bathroom roster. The lorry at seven.
Some things, once seen, don’t leave you. They simply move into a corner of your mind and stay there, watching.
I wish I could say I became a different man immediately after that. The truth is that life closed over the moment the way water closes over a stone. I was busy — the bank, the targets, the young family, the sense that I too was precarious in ways I didn’t like to admit. I don’t think I saw Ajith again.
A few months later, the phone rang. It was Anil, his younger brother. Anil had always been different: darker, quieter, about five years younger, a little timid even as a boy. Now he was in Jebel Ali, working for the same company. Ajith, he told me, had gone back to Sri Lanka. He himself wanted to do the same, but his sponsor refused to pay for his airfare. The system that had trapped those forty‑five women had him too. A man could not even leave his own exploitation without permission.
That day, something in me refused to let the numbers win. I bought Anil’s ticket and sent him home. It was a small act, almost trivial against the scale of what I’d seen. But for one man, one family, it was the difference between being stuck in a living room in the desert and standing again on his own soil.
Over the years, Ajith and Anil have become, in my mind, part of a longer, uncomfortable ledger. The Sri Lankan women in those rooms were not unique. They were one thread in a vast fabric of migrant labour, stitched together by contracts and silences. In that same period, I was rising — thirteen companies, five banks, promotions, conferences, business‑class flights — in economies that ran on the invisible work of people like them. My own life was built on the same scaffolding, but from a different floor.
A humanist likes to think in terms of fairness, of shared dignity. Dubai showed me very clearly that the world does not organise itself around those values. It organises around labour, currency, passports, and who is allowed to complain. Seeing my childhood friend in that villa forced me to admit that my comfort — my Pajero, my salary, my view from the apartment window — existed in the same ecosystem as their cramped rooms and pre‑dawn bathroom rosters.
I still don’t know what to do with that knowledge. I only know that it keeps resurfacing, especially now, as I move toward my own retirement and look back at the paths we all took. Ajith and I started from the same place. The world, and the machinery of migration, bent our trajectories into wildly different shapes. One was called “expatriate banking professional”. The other was “contract worker in Jebel Ali”. Underneath those labels were two boys from Colombo who once believed the world would treat them roughly the same.
It didn’t. And if I call myself a humanist, I have to keep asking why.
Comments
Post a Comment