Fiction: A teacher from Kerala takes a job in Dubai in the 1990s, but being an immigrant isn’t easy

The day that is a fork in the road for Nita, the one with a switch to a far-out bomb, dawns light and cool. The heat of the last few weeks has broken and the smell of chembakam flowers is in the air. Ani spots a cloud in the sky that looks like a rabbit, points it out to her. The resemblance is uncanny, down to the two symmetrical ears and puffy tail.

Nita used to believe that these moments of shared joy would be a frequent, easy thing between mother and son. But Ani’s and her moods are opposite poles. Nita is often too busy, distracted and irritable when he pulls at her clothes, wanting attention. People might think her son’s name is Ani Stopit, she says it so often.

But this morning they hold hands as they walk to school, searching the sky for a cloud carrot that the cloud rabbit can have for breakfast.

So when she arrives at the employment agency, she is upbeat and more hopeful than usual. But nothing has changed; there are no new openings in town. Most jobs are in construction and at the cashew factories – well-paying unionised work that has been cornered by men. Occasionally there is a request for a female typist at one of the seedy second-floor businesses on the main street, in buildings with tinted windows and no ladies’ bathrooms, that are run by men who reek of Hercules rum in the mornings.

“Are you willing to branch out?” the agent asks her. A chain made of manjaadi seeds, meant for good luck, peeks out of the collar of his shirt. Irreligious but superstitious is a common bent in her communist town. God is easy to let go of, but people here still believe in luck and buy lottery tickets in specific numbers, wear citrine stone rings and check the weekly astrology column in the local paper.

Nita waits as he rummages through the pile on his desk. His is the main employment agency in town, but his office is small – a single room with a storage closet. He is a pack rat, every surface is piled with files bursting with job applications, some dated from several years ago. His assistant sits in a corner, typing, his hair in a sweep across one side of his face, a damaged eye peeking through. It’s unwise, Nita thinks, to hide an obvious deformity. It only makes people curious and has them imagining something far worse.

The agent pulls out a piece of paper. “I do have a new opening, if you are willing to go outside.”

The job sounds good – great, even. An Arab family in Dubai wants a live-in English tutor for their seven-year-old daughter.

Nita has a dual MA in English and History, and taught the language to second and fourth-graders at the job before this one. The shoe fits. Maybe if she was still doing that – teaching primary school instead of these arch adolescents – she wouldn’t be looking for work. Her young students had been sweet and malleable.

But even if her job had been going great, her pay is barely enough to live on for a widow with a young son. Last week, she found herself adding water to Ani’s milk while trying to save money for a toy he wanted.

The Dubai salary the agent quotes makes her eyes go wide – it is five times what she’s making now. That kind of money could be life-changing for her and Ani, pole-vaulting them from the working class into the upper middle; it is money that makes toy brick sets, new textbooks and even a scooter possible. It seems like a loophole someone has forgotten to close.

She needs to think about it, she tells the agent. A couple of days pass, during which time their small fridge stops working, and she has to take out a good portion of her savings from her bank account to get the compressor fixed. They are stretched thin and living dangerously. The next time she goes to the employment office, the agent has a picture of the family for her to see. It’s a studio photograph, deliberately posed, the family’s demons disappearing in the flash.

Nita squints at the picture, studying the little girl’s wide-eyed face, trying to divine something of her personality in the fuzzy lines.

“What do you think?” she asks the agent. As if this man, eager to get his cut of the deal, would be an impartial observer.

He pretends to consider her question, furrowing his brows and stroking his chin before giving her the expected response.

“You should take it,” he says. He smiles counter-productively, his eyeteeth curved and sharp like a carnivore’s.

“Hmm.” She is desperate to say yes.

“They are good people. Look at the mother, she looks like she has a soft heart.”

Nita, who thinks that men are particularly susceptible to reading softness in women’s faces when there is none, looks anyway. She does like the mother’s face. She doesn’t really examine the husband.

These jobs, the agent says, tend to disappear quickly, considering the dirham–rupee exchange rates. Everyone wants to go to the Middle East.

Nita has always been the kind to do her homework. She’d asked around about people’s experiences in that country and heard success stories as well as bleakly cautionary tales. Some people returned with suitcases filled with Toblerone bars and M&Ms, new electronics, good whiskey and enough savings to buy a house. But there were also the other stories, more whispered than told, often about women who left to become au pairs, nannies or household workers and were abused for years at their employers’ homes, or forced into prostitution, and others who didn’t come back and were never heard from again despite repeated attempts by their families to track them down.

The laws in these Middle East countries were silent on worker protections, allowing widespread exploitation. The workers with the worst luck were treated like slaves.

Still, Kochi is a port city and for the people here, the need to journey outwards is an old instinct –people have set out to sea, crowded into the bellies of junks and ships, for at least a thousand years. “You should go,” the teachers in her school told her when she mentioned the opportunity, their eyes lighting up with something like envy.

The money is persuasive. And need is a creature that is hard to argue with. The money would help her be a better mother, she thinks. A better provider. Ani could live with her sister, Divya, and two years would pass quickly. Besides, Dubai is just three and a half hours away by plane.

Also, if she really thinks about it, it’s not like she has much of a choice.

“All right,” she says, “I’ll take the job.”

Excerpted with permission from The Outsiders, Devi Yesodharan, Penguin India.