The chicken pieces hidden inside the rice
The services provided by the shop where Einstein worked included helping people access government facilities and English document drafting, offered specifically to poor laborers. And in the twenty-kilometer radius, Ibn Battuta was the only shop that dealt with these services. Thus, all workers depended on the shop to communicate with the government and their management in an official way. The place was a twenty-kilometer radius full of multi-floor accommodation rooms for laborers. The studio was located in the central part of these whole buildings.
When one person came to the shop to take pictures for his official documents, another came for passport renewal. When one person came for a VISA application, another came for resignation letter typing. One person came for buying lottery tickets, while another came to print his wife and children’s photos on a heart-shaped marble frame.
Einstein realized that the communication process among the cities in the Dubai region totally varied from the industrial regions.
Cities in Dubai with corporate companies ran as fast as they could the whole week and took rest on Sundays. Meanwhile, the industrial regions moved slowly the whole week but didn’t take rest. When people in cities mentally lived in the current world around them, industrial region laborers stayed here but mentally lived in their home countries.
“Surviving here was a big challenge, so how can we even dream about staying at least one more day here?” a Nepali kid asked Einstein while renewing his insurance. That guy worked as a cleaner. While typing his date of birth on the computer, it gave a shock to Einstein as he realized the kid was just eighteen years old.
Being a cleaner was not a bad job if one chose to be a cleaner and was well-paid. But what if a kid ended up being a cleaner and closed all the doors in front which could have helped him to become someone else in the future?
Einstein gave a little more priority to African men, Nepali teenagers, and Pakistani old men than other general laborers. He had his own reasons for it. African men in the industrial regions seemed more powerless, as the race was considered bad people, and no African men owned a shop in the region or became supervisors in the popular life guard, security guard, and housekeeping companies. And no one was a truck driver. All these spaces were filled mostly by Indians—mostly Keralites in the region. All the truck drivers were Indians—mostly Punjabi people. Nepal was considered the second poorest country in the region after Africa. The little kids came as cleaners. Old Pakistani men were another language minority, according to Einstein; he realized the old Pakistani grandpas didn’t even speak Hindi—the widely spoken language in the region—or English, the widely spoken second language. Even though it was the Middle East, no one in the region spoke Arabic- was another surprising thing to him. So Einstein gave more priority to these three categories of people.
One day, an upper-caste guy from India asked Einstein to draft his documents before the Nepali kid’s job application, even though he came late and the Nepali kid had been waiting for so long.
“I have duty, bhayya(brother). These people will wait; they don’t have work,” the Indian uncle-ji said to Einstein.
“Everyone here is on duty, ji, one way or another. Please wait until your turn,” replied Einstein.
That incident gave a heart-touching feeling to the six or four Nepali kids present there. Some of them were about to cry, as it was the first respect they had received in the industrial regions, maybe in their whole life. While some humans are greedy for more admiration and consideration from larger groups of people, many crave just a little respect they deserve from others whom they depend on very much because of life’s situations.
All people want to be understood by at least one person in this world, especially when they are in the struggle phase. The Nepali teenagers, the African men, and the Pakistani grandpas saw that one person in Einstein. But both parties knew in their hearts that it wasn’t going to last forever, as Einstein was a traveler, and everyone had to take responsibility for their fate because of the world’s system.
One day, Einstein randomly drew a picture on waste paper when he got free time in the Ibn Battuta studio. and gradually it became a cartoon story.
The story was like this:
An alien came to the Dubai industrial region and asked Einstein to pass its new announcement to the laborers. So what were the ways to reach out to these people?
Shop posters? Posters and videos on the social media groups? Pamphlets in the random gathering spots?
But the main question was: through which language?
The alien didn’t know any of the human languages. Einstein understood the alien language but didn’t know all the languages widely spoken in the region.
For example, Hindi. Hindi was one of the widely spoken languages in the Middle East industrial regions, as Indians were the most significant human resource there for so long. Though Einstein was Indian, he didn’t speak Hindi. Because he was from the southern part of India, where they spoke a very unique language instead of Hindi, he was against the language monopoly or single-language imposition by the government, so he intentionally customized his brain to not detect Hindi. But when a Nepali migrant laborer or Pakistani grandpa, who didn’t know English or any language known to Einstein, asked for help to do their medical insurance documents and struggled to communicate, he thought to learn that language.
Now, for passing the alien’s announcement, he also needed it. After Hindi and English, the widely spoken language was Malayalam. All the truck drivers spoke Punjabi. All the Pakistani citizens spoke Urdu and Pashto. Nepali people spoke Nepalese. Bangladeshis spoke Bangla. Filipinos spoke Tagalog. Africans spoke English, French, and some indigenous languages.
Einstein suggested two languages in the ears of the alien and one medium for dissemination.
The alien was happy and paid some ice cream to Einstein. After drawing the random cartoons, Einstein folded the paper and kept it inside his diary.
While walking out of the studio during his break time, Einstein saw random laborers walking in front of him. Some waved at him, and some rushed to their rooms to do their personal work. He thought he was a snake among these innocent people because he aimed to transfer the alien’s announcement to the people for the ice creams. But they saw him as help for navigating the government’s tricky bureaucracy files. Even though the laborers were intelligent, they weren’t blessed with the situations to study and understand the bureaucracy files. That made them dependent on someone else for that. But they liked Einstein not only for doing the drafts for them but also for other reasons as well. Even Einstein didn’t know why it is.
One night, Einstein went to a local restaurant and ordered very minimal food (normal biryani) as he didn’t have much money. While eating his normal biryani, he found fried chicken and beef pieces hidden in it. While passing near him, the waiter gave him a smile, and Einstein understood it didn’t happen because of someone’s mistake.
That night, while sleeping, he thought: he ended up with the laborers for some unveiled purpose—the one world around him which made him think like this, is the one going to reveal it to him as time comes.
(To be continued…)