Yunus
Yunus
A shy Indian bank clerk in 1970s Dubai, a daily walk to the Central Bank, a curious holiday in Thailand, and one kind colleague named Gagan. This is Yunus’s story — pint sized in stature, quiet in manner, but carrying a surprising share of humour, humility, hardship and human warmth.
Chapter I — Yunus the Wanderer
Yunus was a wanderer by habit, if not by map. He was a tiny fellow — a shade under five feet, as though the tape measure had lost interest halfway and gone off for a cup of tea — and so lightly built that a good desert breeze might have carried him from Deira to Bur Dubai without the help of a bus. His glasses sat permanently on his nose, and his hair was parted neatly down the middle like that of a conscientious schoolboy who had forgotten to grow up.
He was an innocent Indian lad adrift in the great adventure of a Dubai bank in the mid‑seventies, older than most of the young clerks around him, yet looking younger because he had never really mastered the art of frowning. He troubled no one and always seemed a little surprised that anyone noticed him at all. When he did speak, he used the same gentle key to unlock every conversation, offered to farashes and male clerks alike: “Yaar…” And with that one word, the noisy little world of the branch became a shade more friendly.
Chapter II — The One O’Clock Ritual
Yunus was the man of the one o’clock ritual. Every afternoon, clutching the bank’s slightly dignified Diplomat briefcase, he would set off across the street to the Central Bank with a wad of cheques, as if carrying state secrets instead of scribbled promises to pay. Inside, around a long table, representatives from other Dubai banks — mostly earnest young men with their own Taiwan‑made briefcases — would gather to swap cheques the way schoolboys swap cricket cards.
This was long before machines learned to read signatures and numbers. In those days, it was Yunus’s thin arms and careful fingers that helped move the city’s money around. Because he was friendly and unthreatening and always ready with a soft “Yaar,” he got on well with all of them.
Chapter III — Thailand, First Adventure
For all this responsibility, Yunus remained a bachelor for a long time, living a small, orderly life between a crammed room and a bank counter, until one day he decided to go on a holiday to Thailand. It was, as he later admitted in a shy whisper, an eye‑opening trip.
When he came back, he brought not brass elephants or T‑shirts, but a fat bundle of photographs from a massage parlour. There he was, tiny and stiff, wrapped in a crisp white towel on a massage table, surrounded by smiling, well‑rounded Thai girls in their bikinis. In some pictures he seemed to be caught in awkward poses, as if he weren’t sure where to put his hands or his eyes. The expression on the girls’ faces suggested they had never seen such a small, serious‑looking customer; in the middle of all that soft glamour, Yunus looked like a shy school monitor who had wandered into the wrong classroom.
To Yunus, it was all wonderfully innocent and rather grand. He would take out the photos in the canteen and show them off to the other male clerks and the farashes with great pride, carefully skipping the few women in the branch. It was his first adventure beyond ledgers and clearing cheques, and he wanted the world — or at least the canteen crowd — to know that quiet, little Yunus had seen something of life too, even if he still blushed every time someone said, “अरे, यार, और दिखाओ! Arrey, yaar, aur dikhao!”
Chapter IV — The Chute System
Later, when the bank moved to the new financial district, Yunus’s routine became more modern, though he did not. The old Central Bank walk across the street turned into a neat taxi ride. Every day at 12:45 pm sharp a regular taxi driver would appear in a brown Toyota Carina, and Yunus would climb in, briefcase on his lap, for the two‑kilometre journey. He sat very straight, as if the fate of the Arab world depended on his punctual arrival.
The new building had its own ideas about efficiency. Instead of farashes carrying vouchers and cheques up and down the staircases, there was a system of chutes — rather like a respectable drainpipe — running through the floors. Bundles of cheques would be dropped in at one level and come sliding out in the data processing department in the basement, where clerks waited to debit customers’ accounts and then attack their chapati and curry.
Every afternoon the data processing staff would listen for the thump of Yunus’s bundle arriving through the chute. If there was any delay, impatient voices would echo up from below, calling out his name. Sometimes the phone would ring too, and someone would ask, “Where is Yunus? Our stomachs are doing overtime.” They used to joke that one day Yunus himself might come sliding down the chute along with the cheques. He was that small, that light, and that harmless.
Chapter V — The Pay Cut
Not all changes were as comic. Before the move to the financial district, a new manager had arrived from the bank’s Chicago office — a city famous in the newspapers for speeches about human rights and fairness. The manager, unfortunately, seemed to have left all such notions behind at O’Hare airport. He had little regard for the clerks who were already struggling to support young families in shared, cramped flats.
One day, without much consultation, salaries for some of the poorer clerks — Yunus among them — were cut to almost half. In a country without unions, without labour rights, where your stay and your small share of prosperity depended entirely on your employer, Yunus had no choice but to sign the new contract. The ink was barely dry before the figures in his mind began to shrink like his pay cheque.
He could no longer afford to keep his wife and two children with him in Dubai. Quietly, he took a loan from the same bank and sent them back home, packing their lives into a few suitcases and his own heart into a smaller space. The day he returned from the airport, he came and sat at his desk, loosened his tie and flipped it over his shoulder like a defeated flag, and cried.
Chapter VI — Gagan’s Hand
It was not a loud crying. Men like Yunus seldom make a scene. His shoulders shook a little, and his glasses fogged up, and no one quite knew what to say. In a busy bank there is always work to be done and cheques to be cleared; tears are not in the manual. That afternoon, only one person went and stood quietly beside him.
It was Gagan, with his big body and bigger hair, who put a hand on Yunus’s narrow shoulder and stayed there without saying much at all. In a world of contracts and cancellations, that was the only comfort the bank could offer — one clerk’s warm hand on another clerk’s trembling shoulder, and the unspoken promise that, for all the unfairness of the place, a man like Yunus would not have to sit alone with his grief.
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