City of Gold: Dubai and the Dream of Capitalism (33 page)

Dubai’s biggest cluster of labor camps is labeled on maps as Al Muhaisnah 2. Everyone calls it Sonapur, the City of Gold in the Hindi language. Sonapur is Dubai’s poorest neighborhood but, in a triumph of irony, its most important. The hundred thousand or so laborers who sleep in the hundreds of company camps are the men who make Dubai run. They are the construction workers building bridges and skyscrapers. They are the cooks and cleaners, the men who maintain Dubai’s elevators and air-conditioning systems, who tidy offices and polish floors. They drive the trucks that deliver the food and goods the city consumes. They fix cars. They guard the gated communities and troll for shoplifters at the mall. They are the slaughterhouse men who kill sheep, cattle, and chickens, and they’re the supermarket butchers who cleave those carcasses into steaks and chops. If Sonapur were to shut down—if its residents went on strike or some cataclysm befell it—Dubai would cease to function.

Sonapur lies in a far corner of Dubai reserved for refuse. Its northern border is hemmed by the city dump’s hills of garbage, which give it a satirical mountain backdrop. At the very heart of the square-mile district is an old cemetery with thousands of graves marked only by bricks
standing on end. To Americans, Sonapur might resemble the shanty-towns that ring the
maquiladora
plants on the Mexican side of the U.S. border.

The term labor camp, as it is used in Dubai, comes from the days when laborers lived in tents and trailers in the desert. Back then, the men rode to work packed like livestock in the back of trucks. Sheikh Mohammed personally banned the practice. These days, most camps are clusters of three-story buildings arranged around a central courtyard. They look like scruffy college dorms, with tin roofs, laundry lines draped with coveralls, and portable air conditioners poking from the walls. Toilets, kitchens, and bedrooms are communal. Men sleep in narrow bunks, four to eight in a room that would comfortably sleep two.

Sonapur is filthy. Most streets are unpaved. Talcum-like moon dust covers the ground. Every evening, when the cavalcade of labor buses roars back into the neighborhood, all of Sonapur is engulfed in a dust storm. The buses lurch over the hummocked dirt roads, headlights stabbing through the murk, delivering exhausted workers to showers, supper, and sleep.

Sonapur, like the rest of Dubai, has a sewage problem. The city produces more sewage than it can process. But Sonapur lacks the clout to do anything about it, so the black sludge flows in the streets and camps. At mealtimes, the pungent aroma of curry vies with the stench of human waste. In October 2008, I photographed a sewage-inundated camp run by the ETA Ascon Group, a conglomerate jointly owned by Dubai’s al-Ghurair Group and Hong Kong-based Amana Investments. Fetid sewage boiled up from an overflowing septic tank and formed an algae-fringed pond in the camp courtyard. The black waters lapped at the very doorsteps of hundreds of residents, just inches from the shoes they’d left outside.

Standards of living vary greatly from camp to camp, as do pay rates and benefits. The Al Bakhit General Contracting camp is small by Sonapur standards: just two low-slung concrete bunkhouses with corrugated asbestos roofing. It looks like a seedy Route 66 motel court. Each eight-foot by eight-foot room sleeps four to six of Al Bakhit’s laborers, electricians, and masons—about two hundred in all. The camp lies in smelling distance of a sewage lake, but feels salubrious. There is a shade tree, and the clean-swept brick courtyard is sprayed with water to keep the dust down. It’s not one of the better camps in Sonapur—there
is no recreation hall or staff canteen—but it’s less crowded than the giant camps and a short walk from the grocery store.

Rajesh is a twenty-four-year-old native of the southern Indian state of Kerala who’s been living at the camp since he was nineteen. He’s well built and fastidious, with coffee skin and a neat mustache. He’s also shy and doesn’t want his last name used. Rajesh lives with three others in a tidy room with a lumpy linoleum floor and a window privacy-pasted with Arabic newspaper. The yellowed newsprint mutes the sunlight to a pleasant apricot hue. When I enter, Rajesh picks up an orange juice bottle filled with water and offers me a drink.

“My father came to Dubai more than thirty years ago. He worked here for twenty-three years,” he says. He died of a heart attack when Rajesh was sixteen. That meant Rajesh, the oldest son, would take his father’s role in Dubai. His first job paid just $160 a month, or $1.30 per hour, in a country where the average wage is $2,100 a month. But that’s the basic salary for Al Bakhit’s laborers and helpers. This rises to as much as $275 for an experienced electrician. The salary comes with accommodation at the Al Bakhit camp, but not meals. A stack of cooking pots sits in Rajesh’s room, with a forty-pound sack of rice.

A short stroll away lies the labor hostel run by Japan’s Taisei Corporation. The difference is immediately apparent. The five hundred men building roads, overpasses, and roundabouts in some of Dubai’s most prestigious projects—the Palm Jebel Ali and Dubailand included—live in a solid complex with new windows and large, high-ceilinged rooms. They still sleep four or five to a room—bed space is at a premium in Sonapur—but the lowest-paid laborer gets $190 per month. The salary includes three meals a day. As soon as the workers are done eating breakfast and bussed to their jobs, cooks prepare lunch in the camp cafeteria and Taisei delivers it to sites across Dubai. Dinner is served when the men stream back after dark.

Taisei’s hostel is one of the better ones. But since Sheikh Mohammed’s 2006 tour of Sonapur, when he shuttered more than a hundred camps that the Dubai government described as rife with vermin and unfit for humans, there’s been a flurry of building activity. The grimmest blocks have been demolished. Others are being renovated, with workers fitting new windows and doors. New hostels look like college campuses, with a dozen or more apartment blocks linked by shaded walkways. One boasted ornamental cupolas with red tiled roofs and even a few date palms.

Friday is the only day off for 98 percent of Sonapur residents. It also happens to be the day the city all but halts bus service to the neighborhood. Residents believe the transportation cutoff is a move to prevent laborers, known in the UAE as bachelors, from spoiling the atmosphere in Dubai. The few Friday buses are overfilled before they reach Sonapur’s center. They pass through without stopping. Sonapur’s laborers are unable to visit the tourist and shopping destinations they built.

“They don’t want bachelors in Dubai,” Rajesh says. He likes to visit his uncle’s room in Deira, but it takes too much energy to get there. He spends Fridays washing, ironing, and watching Indian movies.

Most laborers only see Dubai’s marvels as they barrel to work in their white Ashok Leyland buses. Rajesh says he’s glimpsed the Burj Al Arab from the highway. The man sitting on the bunk next to him, a forty-six-year-old named Hanuman, says he’s never laid eyes on the Burj. That’s like a Parisian saying he’s never seen the Eiffel Tower.

“I never leave the camp. Why should I go out? My life is here,” the pockmarked man says with a smile. “I only leave Sonapur when I go to the airport to go back to India.” He’s the camp cleaner.

Rajesh is the point man for an Indian family striving to rise into the middle class. He sends his widowed mother $250 per month, with which she manages family expenses. Rajesh paid for his brother Radeesh to graduate with an MBA from Calicut University. And he pays tuition for his brother Ranju, who just entered university. Rajesh will never attend college himself. He won’t leave Dubai until his two brothers find jobs and the family is stable. That’s why, when he does spend a Friday wandering the city, he goes window-shopping. “I don’t want to spend money here,” he says. “My brothers are studying. They need this money.”

Rajesh, like most laborers, gets two months’ paid leave every two years. But the workaholic Keralite stayed in Dubai last summer, spending his vacation pay learning how to drive. By summer’s end, he’d landed a commercial driving license and a job with a German firm that installs high-end flooring. He’s raised his salary to $680 a month. Rajesh plans to pay his brother’s university fees and still sock away a nest egg for when he returns to India, perhaps in three years.

Rajesh’s story isn’t typical. He speaks English, which allowed me to interview him easily and increases his salary. And he got invaluable help
from his uncle, who has lived in Dubai for thirty years and handled his visa paperwork. Rajesh was able to circumvent the labor recruitment sharks who typically charge $4,000 to place Indians in Dubai jobs.

More typical is the story of Hanuman, named for the Hindu monkey god. Hanuman’s skin is nearly black, his wavy hair streaked gray. He wears an open-necked blue cotton shirt that has been sun-bleached nearly white. A purple-and-green checked
lunghi
wraps his waist. Hanuman has toiled in the Gulf for sixteen years: five in Saudi Arabia, six in Oman, five in Dubai. He spent his early years repaying the Indian labor agent who recruited him. His next years’ earnings bankrolled the weddings of his brother and sister. Only then was he able to return to his native Hyderabad and take a wife. Hanuman now has two daughters and a son. He supports the family, but they’re not likely to rise from poverty. Despite his experience Hanuman earns just $260 a month, including overtime. But he must feed himself on that salary, and inflation has cut into his earnings. In Saudi Arabia, where his company provided food and accommodation, he sent his family nearly $200 a month. A decade later he sends his wife and children only $100.

Hanuman hasn’t saved a single rupee. Everything goes to the wife and children he barely knows. While his earning power has dropped, salaries have risen in India. He says he could probably earn as much at home. Many Indians are leaving Dubai to find work in India. “Why don’t you go home and live with your family?” I ask.

“In India I can’t guarantee I’ll work every day. One day I might work as a cleaner, another day as a plumber. Here I have guaranteed work every day. I need to take care of my children. That’s why I stay.”

He smiles as he talks and his white teeth flash, but his message isn’t cheerful. “I’m not happy here, but what can I do? Soon I’ll have to pay for my daughters’ weddings.” Hanuman won’t go home unless Dubai forces him, it is clear. He’s at a loss for words. He looks at the man next to him, who articulates his thoughts: “We’re giving our lives for their happiness.”

C. P. Mathew is a social worker who deals with the men Dubai grinds up and spits out. He volunteers for a charity called Valley of Love. It’s not
a well-funded outfit. His office is on the third floor of a grubby commercial building in Dubai’s blue-collar Al Ghusais neighborhood, above a restaurant called Public Cook.

Mathew, a baby-faced man with the serene manner of a priest, sits at a glass-top table with a laptop computer. He scrolls through a series of snapshots and tells a story about each man.

Here is Raneesh Raj, a thirty-two-year-old electrician, who, like Mathew and many Dubaians, hails from Kerala. The picture shows Raj sitting in his hospital bed. He’s a burly, dark-skinned man with white teeth and a brushy mustache, and a healthy mop of wavy black hair. But he’s only got one leg.

Six months earlier, Raj was winching a giant spool of electrical wire to the twenty-third story of a half-built skyscraper. The cable hauling the spool couldn’t handle the weight. It snapped and somehow wrapped around Raj’s left leg. The falling spool yanked his leg off. Raj told friends that he watched his limb being dragged away.

When Mathew visited Raj in the hospital, the electrician had recovered from the wound but was a panicked man. “He was losing his job. He couldn’t support his family. He didn’t know what the future would bring.”

Raj’s company did the right thing. It gave the electrician a $30,000 disability payment, even though it didn’t have to, by law. The Valley of Love arranged for the cash to be deposited in an Indian bank account paying a high fixed interest rate. Raj was able to buy a house, and he and his family will be able to live off the settlement. In October 2008, he was in Jaipur, India, being fitted for a prosthetic leg.

Mathew taps his finger and another picture fills his laptop screen: four plywood coffins holding corpses for shipment to India. One of them belongs to a laborer who killed himself. He’s going to Lucknow. The other three are headed for Hyderabad. Mathew says at least one was killed in a road accident. He’s not sure about the other two.

Click. Here is the face of a dazed man. His blank eyes are wide, and his jaw hangs open, a patch of spittle in the corner. A plastic tube runs into a hole in his neck. “He’s in a vegetable state,” says Mathew. “His company isn’t cooperating, so we will sue them on behalf of the family.”

“I get a lot of these,” he says.

The man’s name is Bhawarlal Mulla Ram. He’s fifty and worked as a mason for a Dubai-based construction firm named Sun Engineering. He
was helping pour a second-story concrete slab in January 2007 when the framework holding it aloft collapsed. Bhawarlal fell with it. Another man was killed but Bhawarlal survived—in a manner of speaking. His injuries include severe brain damage.

Bhawarlal had lain in Rashid Hospital for nearly two years when I found him in the long-term neurology ward. The ward is crammed with a dozen contorted men, nearly all with feeding tubes protruding from their throats or noses, and bags of urine hanging on their bedsides. Just one of the patients can speak, and only a few slurred words. These men were healthy when they were either struck by vehicles or hurt while building Dubai. All but two are Indian.

Bhawarlal did not look comfortable in his hospital bed. He lay with his head turned to the wall, panting. Sweat covered his cheeks and matted his hair. His eyes darted. He appeared to be under nonstop stress. “Hello, Bhawarlal,” I said. He clenched his fists and cocked his wrists, both arms pressed so tightly to his chest that nurses keep them wrapped with towels. Every now and then his mouth released a gurgling sound.