The Mason Who Wore a Suit
In the labor camps of UAE, most people\’s jobs were security guards, lifeguards, cleaners, masons, and general helpers (who do all kinds of work as assistants). Among these people, there was a photo studio where Einstein was an employee, a new joinee specifically. The previous world around him had been filled with fake people, mostly. At one point, he realized that the place around him was developing a faker inside him. So he left and chose an unknown place. In this unknown place, Einstein\’s job was to take photographs of workers, which were used for their official documents and verifications.
The whole day, he took pictures of workers from different nationalities, including India, Nepal, Pakistan, Uganda, Cameroon, Ghana, and Bangladesh. Watching so many living people in close-up throughout the day gave him dreams of unknown faces. When he looked at a wall, some faces appeared there. When he gazed at the sky at night, he saw faces flying around the moon.
Gradually, he started seeing old people from his life on the faces of workers posing in front of his camera.
One day, he saw a stranger from his village in the face of a worker. The surprising part was that the stranger in his village was a nobody in his life. Einstein had never spoken to him. But Some days he saw this person sitting somewhere in the village. Nobody had ever told him any story about the stranger. He didn’t know his hobbies, who his first love was, what the worst situations in his life were, or what his life goals were—a person with nothing to do with Einstein.
But Einstein remembered that face and recognized the lookalike person.
Thus Einstein realised: A face is the biggest intersubjective thing among humans. It carries many stories without us knowing.
People from India easily recognized a Pakistani face and its skin texture, then considered them as enemies in the labor camps, even if they were meeting the person for the first time. In a dosa shop in the industrial area of Dubai—tucked in a dusty roadside—Einstein was eating his dinner among six Indian strangers. One big guy, who was drunk, shared two specific stories in his long post-drunken blah-blah.
The first story was about how he and his teammates were once the strongest people in the region. Among them, he was the most dangerous. He used to beat Pakistanis like anything in his prime. But when he got married, responsibility came, and he became a changed man—so he moved to a different place. If he had stayed, Pakistanis wouldn’t have dared to open their mouths for breathing or their anuses for defecating.
However, the drunk guy noticed that Einstein’s face didn’t seem impressed by his achievements, so he added one more story. This one has happened recently. A Pakistani guy had robbed an Indian man at noon on this very roadside. The robber had waited for the Indian man to come out of the ATM counter. The drunk guy couldn’t control his anger after hearing about the incident.
Einstein nodded his head and left the dosa shop. While returning to his room, he imagined encountering a Pakistani robber and tried to recall all the proper and improper self-defense moves he had learned in his life. He repeatedly told himself, \”First rule of Fight Club—you do not talk about Fight Club. Second rule of Fight Club—you do not talk about Fight Club. Third rule of Fight Club…\”
He fought many imaginary Pakistani robbers in his mind. He searched for a robber on the face of every person wearing a shalwar kameez who crossed his path. But, in the end, when he reached his room, he hadn’t encountered a single one. Still, he might tell these imaginary fights as real stories to some listeners in the future.
The next morning, he opened the shop as usual. A taller, middle-aged Pakistani man came into the studio for a photograph. Einstein took his photo and returned to the computer for editing. Suddenly, the Pakistani man asked in a low voice, \”Is it possible to edit a suit onto my photo?\”
Einstein, being a little skilled at image manipulation, was able to do it.
While editing the suit, he asked the man, \”Ji, what is your job?\”
The man replied, \”Me mason hoon\” (I am a mason).
Seeing his face in a luxury suit made the mason very excited and happy.
Two days later, the photo was rejected during the verification process, as mason workers were not allowed to wear suits in their pictures.
But that Pakistani mason kept the photo with the suit inside his purse on display.
(To be continued…)