DUBAI TO KARACHI--memoir-in-progress

 

 

Dubai to Karachi 

by Nighat Na-koja

 In the gargantuan spaces of Dubai airport’s transit lounge, I braced myself for the ten-hour wait. It was 10 am, and my Fly Dubai flight to Karachi wouldn’t leave until 10 pm. I leaned back on the recliners I’d discovered at the very back of the lounge. These amazing recliners were a respite for my back. But they were only along the back walls. I was glad I’d found one vacant.

I felt fuzzy after everything that had happened in the last three days. I napped fitfully, in between trips to the loo, people-watching, refilling my water bottle, reading Thomas Merton, and drinking overpriced, burnt-tasting coffee from Starbucks. The junta around me all seemed bored. They were talking loudly on their phones and getting even louder notification rings. Everybody had a face mask on. It was required. Sanitizer dispensers were placed every few feet along the walls.

I was glad to see many more brown bodies in Dubai airport. On the surface, more brown and less white seemed a welcome change until you noticed that most of the uniformed workers were various shades of brown. In Dubai, more than 200 nationalities are represented among the expat population. Racial diversity! But the less desirable jobs in Dubai, as elsewhere—essential shitjobs that are unsafe, insecure, and low-paid—were performed by people from poorer nations. Brown bodies in uniform thronged Dubai airport, grateful to have the shitjobs, because it was better than having no job at all.

Dubai airport is bad news for solitude-seekers. It’s a consumerist haven. Transit travelers could consume inside the confines of the transit lounge whatever they liked and could afford from anywhere in the world. There was plenty to ward off boredom until the next flight. The consumerist cornucopia offered food, alcohol, perfumes, books, designer clothing, jewelry, watches, etc., etc.

Continuous announcements further disrupted the almost absent silence. In this busiest of airports, reading a Thomas Merton book became a personal act of resistance. In the dreary hours before my flight to Karachi, I settled down on the recliner with my Kindle. I had a notebook and pen and I started jotting down notes from Thomas Merton’s New Seeds of Contemplation. Nobody around me was writing. Pen and paper seemed to have become archaic.

Using my daughter’s New York Public Library card, I had checked out Merton’s book. It became my travel guide. The e-book became available for borrowing the day I was leaving India. The significance of its arrival on the day of my departure wasn’t lost on me.

Merton writes:

For in this world it is not good to be too eager for the achievement of any, even the best of ends; and one who knows that God is always present everywhere…will not quickly prefer the uncertain value of human activity to the tranquillity and certitude of this infinite and all-important possession.

That fleeting insight—that God was present in my travels and trials, as my ultimate guide—had only grown in the past three days. I’m not a monastic or a Merton-like contemplative. My trials seemed monumental to me. So, it wasn’t like I was basking in the feeling that God was with me every minute. But it did seem miraculous that I was sitting at Dubai airport the day after the Taliban took over Kabul, and that I did get on that flight from Delhi to Dubai, which was as good as cancelled after the Taliban takeover of Kabul.

On my first attempt to board, I was crying because they refused to let me board. After buying a second ticket for the next day’s flight, I grew weepy when Fly Dubai texted that that flight had been cancelled. I remember sitting down to meditate that night in my hotel room to calm my nerves.

When I took a break from reading Merton, I watched the workers at the airport. Working people, using their bodies, their hands, their movements, fascinated me. The dignity and wonder of manual work was very different from the cerebral work done sitting at a desk. In the near future, manual work would be performed much more efficiently by robots, but for now, it is still mostly done by humans. I watched a janitor, who, I found out, worked twelve-hour days in post-COVID times instead of eight—emptying dustbins and sweeping and mopping the gleaming floors of Dubai airport. What would the wretched of the earth do if and when robots did take over? Worse than the pandemic-induced economic crisis would be the threat of AI-induced redundancy.

Where are you from? I asked the janitor.

“Uganda,” he said.

How were things here during lock-down?

Bad, he said. No work. I go back to Uganda for whole year. Come back because I need money. Now I work twelve hours, but pay is only for eight hours.

The airport isn’t very busy. Not too many people flying yet?

It’s slow. But picking up slowly, he said.

To survive in the post-COVID world, people like him had no choice but to accept whatever pay they could get, work hard, and hang on to optimism.

Where are you going? he asked.

To Pakistan. To see my father. Ten hours in Dubai. Still got eight hours to go.

I also have eight hours to go, he said, and moved away with his trolley.

I watched him as he bent, straightened, swept, mopped, wiped, and emptied dustbins. I imagined what it would be like to have his job. I was relieved I didn't have his job. Would 24/7 robots take over soon? Wouldn’t it be better if, instead of robots doing those jobs, they became better-paid, safer jobs for humans? But who wanted to provide respite for the wretched of the earth if profits and convenience could be maximized by using non-human machines?

 

***

When my Karachi flight was finally announced, it was nighttime, but inside Dubai airport’s dazzlingly lit transit lounge, it was perpetual daytime. I wanted to say goodbye, but I could no longer see the Ugandan janitor. Maybe his shift had ended, or he'd moved to another area of the labyrinthine airport with his trolley.

I was glad Thomas Merton was traveling with me. After boarding and settling into my seat, I pondered these words : “the wonder, the depth, the obviousness and yet the emptiness and unfathomable incomprehensibility of God.” Was it the unfathomable God who had sorted out my life? But was it the same God who had made life difficult for the wretched of the earth? Did God not care about the Ugandan janitor’s fate? His twelve-hour days? Or was it the uncaring men and women who ran the world who didn't care?

I reached Karachi safely, and it was pure relief to emerge from the airport into the humid, breezy air and see Hashmat waiting to drive me home. "I'm finally home," I kept saying to myself on the way to Abba's house.

After a very late dinner with Abba, I retired to my room, opened my notebook, and wrote: I’ve entered a “desert of aridity” where loneliness, doubts, sadness, and the “unfathomable incomprehensibility” of events will prevail. And yet, I feel at peace. So grateful to be here. Such a miracle—to be finally here with Abba.

What is this desert of darkness and aridity? Merton explains:

…a desert of aridity in which, although you see nothing and feel nothing and apprehend nothing and are conscious only of a certain interior suffering and anxiety, yet you are drawn and held in this darkness and dryness because it is the only place in which you can find any kind of stability and peace. As you progress, you learn to rest in this arid quietude, and the assurance of a comforting and mighty presence at the heart of this experience grows on you more and more, until you realize it is God revealing Himself to you in a light that is painful to your nature…because its purity is at war with your own selfishness and darkness and imperfection.

Through the veil of my selfishness, darkness, imperfections, and limited thinking, how was I to know that night that I had very little time left with Abba? In the ensuing eighteen months, time would slow down, time would seem depressingly heavy, and at times, time would fly by inexplicably. But one thing I did know that first night I saw Abba: he couldn’t be left alone. 

I said to myself: I’m staying with him till the end. Somehow, my unconscious mind knew what my conscious mind had yet to terms with—the end wasn’t far off.

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