December 28, 2025

Illustration by Sophia Deng

They were young men when they first met. Both of them in skinny jeans and American-branded T-shirts, purchased at a greater cost than either would have admitted to his family. Samar’s T-shirt read “GUESS?,” and Yogan’s “American Eagle.” The meaning of these inscriptions did not matter to them, though Yogan suspected that his had something to do with the American postal service, and this excited him. Samar’s T-shirt was tight around his chest in a film-hero kind of way, the polyester adhering to the curves of his boyish biceps, and he later admitted to Yogan that this elasticity, rather than the English word on his chest, was what had convinced him to make the purchase.

It was the T-shirts that had sparked their first conversation, each asking the other, “Do you speak English?” English was necessary in order to navigate the airport, and, they expected, life in this new city called Dubai, which was in so many ways an imitation of a major Western city. But English had come to both men only piecemeal, from the dazzling, incongruous lines in Bollywood films. The plots of those movies and their many twists had vanished; what Yogan and Samar recalled was Shah Rukh Khan, with his signature wide-eyed look, ordering Kajol to “take a chill pill!” And Kajol, mocking her hoity-toity London neighbors with “Would you like some tea?” Thanks to a joint effort drawing on both men’s vocabularies, they made it through immigration and baggage claim and out to the arrivals hall, where a red-haired woman with a laminated sign motioned for them to wait for the shuttle that would take them to their accommodations.

Only a few months earlier, Yogan’s wife had sent him out to look for more long-term work. His last construction contract had recently ended, and Roshni had suddenly vomited a hot stream of bile onto her bare feet after her morning tea. That afternoon, a drug-store test had informed them that she was pregnant with their second child. And so Yogan had been sternly dispatched to pass under a sign that read “KISMAT JOB AGENCY,” and into a roadside shop that smelled of a sporty, masculine cologne. Inside, another banner in lowercase English script read “quick overseas enquiry all welcome.”

Overseas, quick: the words themselves had a certain voltage.

The shop had a running air-conditioner, pristine white walls, and a statuette of Lord Ganesh attached to the plastic desk with a hardened dollop of liquid glue. Behind the screen of a laptop was a heavyset man, sitting as still as an oracle.

“Your name, your date of birth, your phone number,” the man said. He wore a thick gold chain over his collared shirt and repeatedly clicked one of two buttons on his wired mouse. Once Yogan had delivered the requested information, the man licked his index finger and handed him a sheet of paper setting out the conditions of his potential employment. The compensation, converted to rupees, was more than triple what he had made on his last contract.

“This is the only job I have available at the moment. You’ll go abroad?” the man asked.

Thanks to local gossip, Yogan already thought of the man as someone he needed to impress. He had worn his American Eagle T-shirt to the appointment. But the possibility of this new future made him aware of his own timidity. “What is it like over there, uncle?” he asked.

“Big, big buildings,” the man said, not once looking up from the screen of his computer. “And the roads are clean. Food and all is expensive, of course, but the quality is much better. Everything is imported, no? You’ll see, beta.”

It relaxed Yogan to be called “son.” He wondered if delivering this word, so affectionately, was part of the man’s training. But he felt disarmed enough to hint at his other question, which had been weighing on his mind since Roshni had broached the idea of his working in Dubai.

“My wife is expecting, uncle. Our second. We have one girl. I thought I should tell you that. I’ve heard the stories, you know.”

“What stories?” the man asked. Now he looked up from his computer and caught Yogan’s eye. No longer fatherly, Yogan thought, but shrewd, gruff.

“These men who hire us—I’ve heard they might arrange things so we can’t come back.”

“Rubbish!” the man said. Small, yellowish teeth appeared under the heft of his mustache; he was silently laughing. “If they did all that nonsense, then why would I have so many applications to process, hmm?” He pointed at a towering stack of folders behind him.

“Times have changed,” the man added. “Those stories are old. Bygone.”

Relieved, Yogan filled out his application and waited, over the next few weeks, for his phone to ring.

It had all happened differently for Samar.

Samar was from Mumbai, itself a big city, one that Yogan had always imagined as a sparkling place, the backdrop of his favorite movies, where A-list actors could be spotted sauntering through bazaars with their big sunglasses and hotheaded bodyguards. Samar wouldn’t have been as easily swayed by the hum of a working laptop and unstained white paint, Yogan guessed, for his new friend had laughed in a slightly superior way at these details of Yogan’s story.

“So why did you come then?” Yogan asked.

Sitting against a concrete wall outside the airport, using his duffel as a backrest, Samar told the story of the time he was hired to install a stripper pole in a Bollywood heroine’s Pali Hill flat. “The work order listed it as exercise equipment,” Samar said, “but I’ve seen enough movies. I know what people do with something like that.”

The actress was not there at the time of the installation, Samar said, but her home was decorated more extravagantly than he could have imagined. There, he saw furniture that he hadn’t known existed beyond film sets. A circular mattress, a crystal chandelier, lavender carpeting throughout. Samar had looked around not with envy, he said, but with reverence. The pole was to be installed in a third bedroom, which was also a dressing room, or so he guessed from the light bulbs around the mirrors and the many racks of frilly clothes. Later, in the chawl where he shared a single matchbox room with his wife, Samar began compulsively picturing the actress moving through her flat as he moved through his own. As he refilled the water drum at the communal taps for their morning tea, Samar imagined the actress draping her shoulders with the impossibly soft shawl that had been flung over the sofa, before dropping a tea bag into one of her many porcelain cups. In a moment of contemplation, she might hold the cup against her chest for warmth, he thought, for her air-conditioner would be rattling fiercely, set to a temperature of seventeen degrees Celsius.

“Seventeen degrees!” Samar said, bringing his hands together to clap at the number. “We were sweating and shivering at the same time as we worked!”

Yogan listened to his new friend with a dignified silence. He had never known anyone who had seen a stripper pole in person before. “Wow,” he said.

Samar appeared relieved to have told someone. He’d had to keep all this a secret, he admitted. He was newly married to a woman named Chanda, and it had been enough of a scandal that they’d met in a park and not through a relative’s introduction. The story of the actress’s apartment would have infuriated Chanda’s brothers, who had never liked Samar and, he predicted, would never try to.

It had been difficult not to talk to his wife about that day, how it had changed the way he looked at his life, Samar continued. The next morning, he had shaved his head to a greenish stubble in front of the bathroom mirror—a way of taking fewer trips to the barber. When Chanda saw him, her first reaction had been to howl for help. In their dimly lit room, she’d thought him a stranger. When she’d finally accepted that it was him, she placed her hands on his shoulders, his neck, the base of his skull, and, finally, his prickly scalp, which Samar rubbed now, sitting outside the airport. He wondered aloud if Chanda had been able to tell that there were desires in him that hadn’t been there before, if she had worried about what this could mean for her own life.

“I came home and really saw everything,” Samar said. “I saw where we lived, and it hurt me to see so clearly.”

What did he see? Cracks in the walls, rat pellets in the cupboard, a sudsy creep of water under the door, because the aunties outside were forever washing their saris and utensils. For once he was bothered by the many abuses that the warring grandfathers who lived above them hurled at each other through the night.

Chanda had unrolled her thin bedding on the floor, to sleep. Her long braid, tossed behind her when she turned, was held at the end with a knot made of her own hair. For months, Samar had heard her complain about her hips and knees, tender after her days of squatting in rich people’s flats with a wet rag, wiping their marble floors from end to end. He had always dismissed these aches as inevitabilities of their lot, but now he felt his wife’s pain under his own skin.

Samar had expected this new clarity to pass, the way drunken bouts of insight and sadness often did, but visions of the actress’s apartment continued to follow him. Nights when he got home, he could hear her blowing air-conditioner. He could see her silky two-piece pajamas, hanging from a crystal hook in the bathroom. Samar understood that Chanda and the actress were two women separated by money and luck. He had control over one of those things; he could find better paying work.

Some days later, he told Yogan, he woke up to his heart pounding with impatience, which told him that it was time to find a solution. He went to a recruiting agency down the road and signed a contract that very day. It was still early when he got home. In clouded morning light, he lay on Chanda’s mat with her and told her the news: soon he would start working for a construction company in Dubai.

Sixty or so men had flown in that day from Karachi, Kathmandu, and Mumbai. The red-haired woman appeared again a few hours later to usher them onto the bus that would take them to their camp, about an hour outside the city. But, before that could happen, some men were called by name and asked for their passports. The company needed to process their visas, the woman said, but Yogan already suspected that he’d got himself a different deal than the men obediently lining up before him. Could he, from where he sat, a flutter in his own chest, issue some kind of warning? Yogan silently watched as Samar placed his blue-black booklet into the woman’s outstretched palm.

On the bus, one or two men tried to broach the subject, curious as to whether the others had been made to give up their papers earlier, at immigration or baggage claim. No verdicts had been reached yet, but already the passports were a touchy subject. Those with elderly parents or young children put an end to the discussion: “Brother, if I keep thinking about this, I’ll fall into a depression.”

Illustration by Sophia Deng

The bus travelled on roads that were like wide, gray tongues, merging onto highways and underpasses, where the walls were speckled with artful blue mosaics or ads for upcoming appliance sales. Out the window were the glimmering buildings that Yogan was expecting, as tall and confident as rockets, their surfaces engorged by the harsh sun. From time to time, Yogan looked down at his cellphone and reread the messages he’d received from Roshni since he’d landed.

She wanted to know whether he’d arrived safely, if he could send her any pictures. He slipped his phone back into his pocket without responding. Watching the bright, silvery buildings, Yogan wanted to enjoy the solitary bolt of desire that was beginning to course through him. He imagined that this was how Samar must have felt as he walked around the actress’s flat—as if something divine and chemical were taking shape in his body, the birth of a new ambition.

Behind and in front of him, there were conversations about how clean the city was. Not a single crushed bottle of Coke or a billowing plastic bag, just miles and miles of pure asphalt. The men wondered where the poor without homes slept, where the stray dogs with bitten ears and tragic faces prowled.

“Maybe they bring out cleaners at night,” one man suggested. “They must have machines that do it.”

“I’ve heard they make the prisoners do it,” a voice from the back said.

The silver buildings grew smaller and smaller, until they became like motes of dust on the horizon. As the bus turned in to their accommodations, the men’s chatter began to slow. In their silence was the realization that the streets surrounding where they were going to live were as littered as the others had been spotless. Here, it seemed, were all the city’s tossed water bottles and flattened cartons. Rumbles coursed through the bus as the men understood this, one by one.

There were well-circulated rumors about the camps—the unlivable conditions, the filth. White men making documentaries had uploaded clips to YouTube. On his phone, months ago, Yogan had watched one of those men, retching at the smell of the camp bathrooms, fight his way past disgruntled security guards to an open courtyard where he could breathe fresh air. It was an old video, from the early twenty-tens, but it was still the one that had the most views. These days, a new generation of vloggers, armed with hair gel and smartphones, were uploading their own clips detailing their day-to-day lives inside the camps, as a way of encouraging other men to make the move. One vlogger, a man from Kabul, went live on Facebook once a month to counsel other men from the region on how to secure employment in the Gulf. Yogan and Roshni had spent hours, after their daughter was asleep, watching this man’s pixelated face as he walked the halls of his accommodations, answering questions.

Yogan suspected that everyone on the bus had watched the man from Kabul’s videos, and felt, as he had, their plans for another life coming joyously together. Though the man had been careful to temper his viewers’ hopes. Recently, he had begun signing off at the end of each of his videos with a disclaimer: “This is only one humble man’s experience, please remember. God has different plans for each of us.”

As Yogan disembarked from the bus, he recalled the man from Kabul’s warning. The sight of the accommodations heavied his chest. Here were stout buildings of cement, not shimmering glass; men already residing in some of the rooms had fixed yellowing newspapers to the windows, to block out the heat. Others had gathered to watch the slothful procession of newcomers file out of the narrow bus doors and into the courtyard, where fallen wickets lay from an abandoned game of cricket. Yogan leaned into Samar’s shoulder to try to put words to what they were both feeling: “You think we’ll ever see the inside of those nice buildings?”

Samar seemed to eye him with a twinge of anger. “I’m just here to work,” he said.

In the room, they agreed to share a bunk, Samar at the top, Yogan at the bottom. They’d known to expect it, but still, as the door kept opening and closing, and one man after another walked in with suitcases and basmati-rice sacks stuffed with clothing, with burners and steel pots, with statuettes of Krishna and leather-bound Qurans, they grew more and more disheartened, until the last man entered and looked at Yogan’s bottom bunk with entitlement, and Yogan knew to climb up and lie beside his new friend, too exhausted by then to care that their calves and elbows were touching.

In the dark, they looked at each other wordlessly, all the rapture of their stories blunted. The man from Kabul had warned about the number of men assigned to each room. “I won’t lie to you,” he had said. “You’ll be uncomfortable. You’ll have to adjust.” But Yogan had hoped—though he didn’t admit it—that this, too, was a story of bygone times. When Samar began to cry, a mewling, stifled sound, Yogan brought his friend’s head into his chest. He whispered that they’d arrived, not only to a big city but to a new country. They were abroad, and the sun would bring them a new start. He was sure of it.

“Listen, blokes, we’re on a tight schedule, everything is very tight, including my pants and my shirt, and as our time gets tighter we’ll be in tight shit.”

Scattered laughter.

It was late one night, almost a year after they’d arrived. Samar was impersonating his supervisor, a beer-bellied foreigner who, the men had decided, hailed from either Australia or New Zealand. They weren’t sure of his origins, in part owing to his confounding accent, which required him to repeat instructions five different times at five different speeds, but they had eliminated the possibility of England because of the supervisor’s coffee flask, a ceramic blue-lidded thing with the emblem of a crown on its front.

“No British person actually cares about the Queen,” one of the men declared, his legs dangling from his top bunk across the room. “To them, it’s just another loaded family living in a big house, running a family business.”

Samar said, “In one of the houses where Chanda does her cleaning, there’s a glass cabinet under lock and key. Inside there are plates of every size and color, with the Queen’s face on them. They are not for eating, her madam said. They are for dis-play.”

At night, the men usually returned to the accommodations in silence. Most of them worked construction in different sites across the city. Samar’s group, which included a couple of the other men in their shared room, was building a highly anticipated sporting stadium that was already six months behind schedule. This meant that their work was now proceeding at double speed, for there was some kind of televised event nearing, something glamorous and exclusive, that required tickets to be purchased months in advance. Under the new schedule and supervisor, the stadium was expected to open in just a year.

“You come to these places free, and then they put you in chains,” another man said, pursuing his own, separate line of thought.

The others were used to this man’s abrupt, tragic declarations. “Oh, tell Baldy to go write his poems elsewhere!” someone called.

Yogan had heard that the supervisor on Samar’s project had limited the men’s bathroom breaks to once a day. Twelve hours of work, with just one sliver of peace in which to piss. Some men had taken to climbing down to a basement floor, where there was no light, only rubble, to relieve themselves. Their previous shift manager had allowed them to use the bathroom to wash their hands before eating, but the Australian told them to use the water from their bottles to rinse off, and, when those bottles were empty, he said, they would make adequate vessels for holding urine. There was no refilling water bottles during work hours. Men who ran out had to wait until they got home. In just the last week, two men had fainted from heat stroke, and another had coughed up a smear of bloody phlegm.

The men speculated that the heat was making the Australian insane. The high temperatures must have overloaded the synapses of his brain; this was the only possible explanation for his howling and redness and reverence of the Crown.

Yogan listened to all this night after night, shaking his head when a show of disapproval was required. He had yet to encounter any such cruelty in his own working life.

Now Samar said, “You don’t come to places like this already free. You come looking for freedom.”

“Maybe the Australian’s wife left him,” the man with the dangling legs said. “Maybe one day he came home, his skin peeling everywhere, and she said, ‘Enough of this! You think I want to spend my life applying ointment to your red-red nose?’ ”

“Wife! You think a man like that ever had a woman waiting for him at home? Feeding him biryani?”

“Someone is keeping him well fed.”

Laundry was hung on lines across the room, blocking Yogan’s view of some of his friends’ faces. He was lying in his bed beside Samar, freshly bathed. In the next room, the air-conditioner was switched on, and the gentle vibration of it through the wall lulled him closer and closer to sleep.

Hours later, from the darkness of his dreams, Yogan was woken by the sound of cloth snapping against air, a quick, practiced swatting, the kind an overworked mother might deliver to the fat behind of her wailing child. “Shoo!” one of the men was saying, as if to a mosquito. “Go bother someone else.” Others in the room groaned at the noise.

It was difficult for the men to drop back into sleep when they awoke in the middle of the night like this; they became aware of the vivid odor of sweat hanging in the air, the white floodlights seeping through the broken blinds.

“Come fan me for ten minutes and I’ll give you a dirham,” a man on Yogan’s side of the room said.

His eyes now adjusted to the half-light, Yogan sat up and saw a figure cross the floor to where the voice had come from. After the room’s air-conditioning unit had broken weeks ago, the men had started collecting old newspapers to wave in front of their bedmate’s face at night. This way, at least one man in each bed could sleep decently in the heat. Yogan watched as the figure crouched to pick up a newspaper then hit his head on something metal, the railing of the bed, perhaps, on his way back up. “Ouuuch!” the man said. The clang reverberated like a gong, a sound that should have signalled the coming of sunrise or morning prayers, but only reminded Yogan that it was still night, and he’d have to find a way to return to sleep.

Yogan reached over to the other side of his bed, to alert Samar to the scene. This was the kind of incident they liked to feast on together in the daylight, drawing out the small animosities that grew among roommates. Gossip made them feel alive, childlike. Yogan’s hand found only a cool, empty patch of sheet. It took him a moment to understand that Samar was not in the bed, and that, if he wasn’t in the bed, it had to be Samar out in the middle of the floor with the newspaper, Samar getting swatted.

“What are you doing, you idiot?” he called into the dark.

“What do you bastards think this is, a fish market?” another voice said.

Yogan watched his friend drop the newspaper on the floor and return to their bunk. With a sharp breath, Samar hoisted himself up and collapsed beside Yogan, a palm on his forehead, as if he were checking himself for a fever. Countless nights over the past few weeks, Yogan had opened his eyes to the sight of Samar propped up on one elbow, holding a newspaper above Yogan’s bare chest, fanning committedly. “Go back to sleep,” Samar would urge. “Tomorrow it’s my turn,” his voice so sweetly nurturing that Yogan had wondered whether he’d forgotten to mention some secret child back in Mumbai. Now it was Yogan who propped himself up; he unfolded a newspaper from under their mattress and began to create a small wind for the two of them. “What were you doing?” he asked.

“Nothing,” Samar said. “Don’t make everything your problem.”

Yogan lightly smacked Samar’s forehead with the newspaper. “Oho, what drama!”

But Samar wouldn’t speak. Another voice in the room answered for him. “He was asking for spare change. What else does he ask us for?”

At this, Samar clicked his tongue, sending his reply to the middle of the room. “You’re a real son of a bitch, you are!”

“Why do you need their money?” Yogan asked.

Samar again clicked his tongue, that universal sound that meant, Leave it, leave me. Drop the conversation. He turned away from Yogan to sleep.

“Do you have any news?” Roshni’s voice on the phone was booming, blooming, both.

“News, how?” Yogan said.

“You know—news!”

His wife’s questions on the morning bus to work filled Yogan with energy. He bounced his leg without pause, as if he were once again balancing his older daughter upon his knee.

“Yes, yes, I have news,” Yogan said. Now he was whispering. “But we’ll have to talk later, O.K.? I’m on the bus. I can’t talk freely.”

Beyond Roshni, the cry of his infant child erupted like a shard of lightning. He jerked his phone away from his ear for a moment, then brought it back. His daughter’s voice—already hearty and strong.

“You can’t talk freely? Listen to what I have to deal with! I don’t care if all your friends are jealous. I’ve been waiting six full months for your news!”

“Roshni, please, my jaan. Six months is nothing.”

“Six months is nothing? Wait until you see your daughter and you find how little she looks like you!”

Yogan leaned his forehead against the window; he didn’t want the man sitting next to him to witness his pleasure. “So you’ve been naughty with someone else, have you?”

“Don’t start with me now,” Roshni said. “I haven’t even had my tea. Call me later, or else I’ll have to call my new men. Men, you understand? More than one!”

“You deserve nothing less.”

“You don’t know how your oldest child is eating my brains asking for news. But don’t worry, I’ll tell her that her father is a little social butterfly who is afraid of spreading his own good fortune.”

With a laugh, he said, “Maybe I won’t tell you then.”

“Don’t tell! I’ll find another husband! I have so much time to myself these days!”

“And you should spend it wisely. With me, well, you just let your parents decide.”

“Fine, I’m putting up posters to advertise my freedom then. This time, I’ll have a love marriage.”

“Nobody too handsome, O.K.? Two beautiful faces make an ugly duckling.”

Yogan hadn’t told anyone his good news yet, not even Samar. There seemed to be much, these days, that they kept from each other.

No longer did Yogan have any use for his mustard-yellow construction hat, though he walked out of the accommodations with it under his arm each morning. From where the bus dropped off the men, Yogan hailed a taxi to the metro station, then rode the train to a shopping mall at the center of Dubai—a sprawling, bluish structure, which housed the ice rink that Yogan had been contracted to build a year ago. At home in Lucknow, he had helped build football and cricket fields before moving up to glossy hotels and office buildings. Buildings paid more, but Yogan had been happier working on the sporting fields, seeing the skinny young boys swinging wooden bats, sauntering onto freshly rolled grass, adrenaline already running through them. Yogan and his brothers had had to make do with the frequently soggy pastures behind their house. When they ran to retrieve a lost ball, they were guaranteed to feel the splash of mud across their smooth calves. The splattering sound of a bare foot against wet earth was a pleasure Yogan would never forget. When he returned home, his mother would exhale decisively, ordering him to pour water over his legs before coming inside. What had then been an annoyance seemed now an ecstasy—the cold well water licking at his bony knees, sending rivulets of red dirt worming down to the ground around his toes.

Building an ice rink was different from installing a sports field, but the spirit behind it was similar, Yogan thought. He’d been part of the team that had laid the tarp and the ice mat, and opened the water supply to fill the rink. He had checked that the pink antifreeze had made its way through every single tube of the ice mat, a moving wonder that had reminded him of the disco floor he and Roshni had once danced on before their children were born, their arms daringly clasped around each other’s waists.

To make the ice, the men had used ninety thousand litres of water, which felt like more than he’d used in the entire duration of his childhood. The water Yogan had known growing up was trickling, soft, and unalarming, except for the seasonal rains that required his parents’ roof to be re-thatched. What he saw at the ice rink, in comparison, was the water of stories, of cinema. The blast came from a hole twice the size of Yogan’s head, with enough force to drown an encroaching army. As the water exploded out of the pipe, Yogan gave a shocked giggle that swept among the other men, some of whom cheered and clapped, while others quietly removed their hard hats and held them in their hands. Yogan felt as if he had seen a waterfall, the Swiss Alps, all those stills of Europe that were used as backdrops for the best romantic numbers. As he conjured these pictures, he closed his eyes to enjoy the delicate cold spray that hovered above the torrent.

The rink was completed almost three months ahead of schedule. Because the men were being let go on short notice, an opportunity of further employment was communicated through the rink supervisor. If a handful of men wanted to stay on as skating instructors, they would be trained for free.

In a locker room behind the rink, Yogan donned a pair of formal black trousers, a white dress shirt with a slight tea stain on the collar, and a shiny, satin vest with three pearlescent buttons down the middle. He sprayed himself with a strong oud cologne he’d bought on sale at the supermarket, then rolled on his thick woolen socks. The skates he’d been given were made of pristine, stiff leather; the blades were sharpened for him when he hung them up at the end of each week. Now he tottered across the rubber mat of the back room, and in a single, practiced gesture, he was off gliding across the fresh morning ice.

For a long time, like everyone in his family, Yogan had believed in fate, the old idea that the same souls were reincarnated into the same families in order to relive past mistakes, at least until one lucky fool broke the spell. When he was growing up, his mother had often said that she was living out the life of her own mother, so it was no coincidence that she’d encountered the same hardships—a lame foot, an abusive mother-in-law, a savage bout of cancer that would surely see her to the end. Because she had predicted her life so accurately, Yogan and his siblings were convinced that she was clairvoyant, and, in moments of privacy, they would fearfully ask her whether she could tell them anything about their futures. Her mood usually changed at this question, as if the idea of her sons outliving her, loving women and children of their own, meant that her life would be shortened. Bitterly, she would toss them futures so bleak and unappealing that, more than once, Yogan had to talk his youngest brother out of hanging himself.

“You’ll live your father’s life, what else?” his mother would start. “You’ll owe every neighbor a debt and spend every holy day at a brothel. What? Did you think you were going to become a king?” She laughed at the audacity suggested by her own question, then opened her arms to welcome her son, whom only she could comfort, for it was she who had opened the wound to begin with.

Yogan, too, had believed some of her predictions. How could his life turn out any different than his father’s? Those first few years with Roshni, he had kept himself at a comfortable and loveless distance, in order to protect both of them from whatever qualities he might or might not have inherited from his father. But Yogan had become living proof that his mother’s predictions were bullshit. Yogan, who now spent his daylight hours gliding across ice, teaching children and adults to spin like dancers—he had not grown up to resemble anyone he knew.

“Morning, gentlemen,” the instructor, Felix, had said at the start of each training session.

He spoke only in English, and Yogan had been surprised at how quickly he was able to catch on. “What do we say, chaps? Slow and steady is the way of the coward.” Felix had held his trainees’ hands as he guided them across the rink. He’d skate backward, observing every shudder and slip of Yogan’s inexperienced ankles. “Gliding, you’re just gliding,” Felix would coax, and Yogan, holding Felix’s hands, found the courage to move his hips forward, one and then the other. “Now back on your own,” Felix would say, trailing at a slight distance.

Arms raised in caution, Yogan had imagined that he was learning to skate just as his younger daughter would soon learn to walk. Every time he’d fall, every time another man’s bladed boot slid within an inch of Yogan’s fingertips or earlobe, he thought of his daughter’s waddling footsteps, the many tumbles she would take, and he believed that this vision of the child he had yet to hold in his arms somehow kept him lucky. He’d stand and dust the frost off his backside, and, with the muzzy picture of her in his mind, set off with more and more force, until he was able to make it from one end of the rink to the other without anybody’s support.

Now Yogan skated in an elegant, sinewy line around the rink, something his father never could have dreamed of, and he understood that he had been keeping his success to himself because there was no conceivable way to explain any of it.

“Morning, Yogs,” Felix said as Yogan swished past him.

“Good morning, sir,” Yogan said in English.

“You tell your wife yet?”

“No, sir,” Yogan grinned. “I am waiting.”

“You tell her soon, all right? Don’t let the lady get away.”

He had meant to tell his wife earlier that day: with his raise, he had managed to arrange a work visa for Roshni, who would be able to join him with their two daughters within the next few months. When they arrived, Yogan would move out of the accommodations and into an apartment on the other side of the city, in Karama. He would once again share a bed with his wife, their daughters in cots beside them.

“Yes, sir,” Yogan said. Out of respect, he had turned around so that he was facing Felix as they spoke. Now it was Yogan who skated backward, scanning the rink for anyone who needed his help.

Later that week, Yogan once again woke to the sound of a swat, but this time it was his own hand that was stinging. He sat up quickly and with little confusion; Samar wanted to know if Yogan would fan him.

Yogan found and unfolded the sodden newspaper they kept between their mattress and the bed frame. Leaning over Samar, Yogan saw that he was wide awake. He placed a palm on Samar’s forehead to indicate something he wasn’t sure how else to convey—his affection, or his willingness to listen.

“Will you tell me now what happened to you?” Yogan asked.

“Just let me sleep,” Samar said.

“Listen, I have something to tell you, too.”

“I need three lakhs,” Samar said. “Do you have that?”

Yogan laughed at the figure. It was about what Samar would make in a year. “What do you need that for?” He accommodated his own arm under the warmth of Samar’s neck in order to fan him more comfortably. Again, Samar went silent; he wore a calm expression that told Yogan he was not exaggerating. Then Yogan put down the newspaper and used his free hand to turn Samar’s face toward his own. “Are you sick? Do you need to pay for medicine?”

“It would be better if I was,” Samar said.

“You’re going mad without Chanda or what? Your moon’s been hidden.”

At the sound of her name, something between them seemed to crack. Samar shook his head and covered his eyes with his hands. His voice lowered in shame or remorse, he began to speak.

There had been an issue with the contract he’d signed, he said. He hadn’t read it. The contract was typed in English with an Arabic translation stapled to the back. Only when his most recent paycheck was withheld had Samar called the recruiting agency to complain and discovered what the conditions of his employment really were:

According to this contract, the EMPLOYEE (“SAMAR BOBAL”) accepts the terms of the EMPLOYER/SPONSOR (“AL KHATIB AND BROWN CONSTRUCTION LLC”) as put forth by the Recruiting Agency (“SILVER HAWK RECRUITING”) that the EMPLOYEE agrees to pay the Recruiting Agency a non-refundable fee of Three Lakh Rupees (Rs. 300,000) as facilitated through a standard loan by the Recruiting Agency in exchange for employment and visa services.

In the mail, they had sent him a version in Hindi that he had read so many times he had it memorized.

What the woman had made clear to Samar over the phone was that the recruiting agency had neglected to charge him for his loan over the past year. From now on, they would withhold his salary until he earned out the cost of his loan. They had no answer for how long this would take—the math was Samar’s to do.

“I’m a dead man,” Samar said.

The air of hope seeped out of Yogan. “Run away, then,” he said. “Take a flight back tomorrow. How will they find you?” He was trying to sound practical, unworried, but his voice broke.

“I don’t have my passport,” Samar said. He turned away, and Yogan could think of nothing to do but pick up his newspaper and wave it rapidly over Samar’s neck.

“Everything I made,” Samar said, “I’ve sent home. I have nothing on me. I’ve barely eaten today, man.”

Yogan started to give Samar what he could. A Lucknowi man he had befriended worked at the coffee shop near the ice rink and would give him sandwiches and airy bags of potato chips for free. At the end of the day, Yogan would carry these items home in his hard hat and stash them in their top bunk, along with whatever else he could spare: a spotted banana, a Tetra Pak of strawberry milk, a sleeve of Parle-G biscuits.

There were others like Samar in the city—trapped men, men who had signed the wrong papers, men who’d walked into cool roadside offices with the same idea as Yogan but emerged with a different fate. There were others in the accommodations, too, and everyone chipped in what they could to keep these men afloat.

With morning came the sound of men unrolling their carpets for prayer, the clang of steel tumblers of tea and coffee, and, through the blinds, the harsh orange glow of the day. Someone in the room always shared his cup of tea with Samar, who sat alone by the window, picking at his skin, trying and failing to phone Chanda, who had stopped answering his calls once she heard about his situation. Sometimes Samar would leave her soft, pleading monologues as voice mail: “How can your brothers say I’m a fool? I came here for you. Everything was for you.”

Later, as the men lined up for the buses that took them to their respective workplaces, Yogan squinted into the raw white light to follow the shape of Samar’s body as it approached the doors of his bus. What did he expect to see? A sign of endurance? Resolve? There was just the tall, skinny hook of his friend, thinner now than he’d ever been, his shoulders slumped, getting on the bus with a full water bottle in hand, the bright shine of his shaved scalp replaced by a thick mop of black hair.

Yogan remembered one of their first nights in the city, when the men in the room had jousted and jabbed at one another, laughing until their voices wavered with sleep, and then fell, one by one, to silence. Yogan and Samar were the last two awake, and talked late into the night about things Yogan could no longer recall, though he did remember the man on the lower bunk issuing a weak punch to their mattress at some point, urging them to go to sleep.

“Have you found some new boyfriends, then?” Yogan asked. “I’ve been thinking about you. You and your harem.”

“What dirty thoughts you think!” Roshni said. “Thank God your youngest daughter has another father.”

“He can also come. Tell him to pack his suitcase.”

“Why did you call me?”

“I’m just missing you!”

“Missing me? Why don’t you use your brain for something better!”

“What could be better than thinking of my beautiful wife?”

Yogan was full of happiness. Earlier that morning, he had selected the apartment they would move into, a one-room flat with enough space for all four of them and their small accumulation of objects. The bathroom had a pristine white tub that looked as if it had never been used before. Above the tub was a small window of pebbled glass that gave the ceramic sink a flickering shimmer. It was agonizing to hold all this in his mind, Yogan thought, to have to wait to share it with his wife.

He was skating along the side of the rink, his phone back in his pocket. He had called his wife to share this dart of anticipation, this pulsing in his jaw. Now he slowed his stride and watched a child with the same dark complexion as his older daughter gain confidence in her movements. The girl glided on jaggedly in a pair of purple skates, with Yogan following some distance behind. He gave her space until she began to skid, and then he happily skated over to ask if she needed help.

“Can you stay close?” the girl said in English. He continued to skate alongside her, in case she lost her footing again.

Most afternoons passed this way. Yogan skated the length of the rink, stopping whenever a child seemed to be attempting a particularly risky move, full of speed and reckless bravery. He’d wait, hoping, always hoping, that the child would pull it off and then try again.

He found it strange to see so many people who looked like him on the ice. People whose countries were rarely cold, people who had never seen a world caked in real winter. How brave they were to try to balance on two blades as thin as the tips of pencils, pushing off from the sides, hands outstretched for balance, their panicked eyes searching for a groove in the ice they could use, then flashing skyward to catch the glance of a proud mother or father watching from the stands. Look at my child, these parents would think. My child is doing the impossible. My child is dancing on ice in the middle of the desert.

He often imagined his daughters skating, their pleated skirts wrapping around them as they spun. For them, it would be as easy as walking on land, he thought. It was their inheritance after all, their father’s fate. But skating would not be a career for them. He would not allow that. It would be only a supplementary detail on applications, something that would win them admission into exclusive, wintry places. For once, he wished that all he’d believed about fate was true, for it would mean that his daughters would inherit his luck, that it would take them to far-off lands and give them impossible chances.

After his shift, Yogan changed into a T-shirt and new jeans that were faded and fashionably ripped at the knees, and took the metro to the Mall of the Emirates. A sensor pinged as Yogan stepped onto the shiny marble floor of the store. The man from Kabul sat behind a brightly lit display of gold and diamond jewelry, dressed in a crisp white shirt and sand-colored pants. The men in the accommodations had started referring to him as King Kabul, KK for short. This was because KK had recently chronicled the full story of his ascent on his YouTube channel.

He had first moved to Dubai to work construction, as they all had. Soon after, he was hired as a personal driver for one of his employers. When his employer began trusting him to pick up orders and mail confidential paperwork, he was given a laptop, a magical thing. A year later, having proved himself, King Kabul was instated as the general manager of the employer’s family jewelry store. These days, he spent each Eid with his employer’s family, eating meat and drinking sugary sherbet from the family’s expensive and fragile china. But the best part of all that had happened, KK had told the camera, was that he had been able to bring his family to the city. KK’s wife now worked as a cook for his employer’s family, who paid full tuition for his son to attend a rigorous international school.

“Look at you, brother,” Yogan said to KK now, his nervous hand flat on the cold display table. “I don’t want to invite the evil eye, but I need to tell someone. My Roshni is coming here, too.”

KK pointed at an amulet of a blue-and-white eyeball above the door of the shop. “There’s no evil eye here. Your good fortune is my good fortune. How old are your daughters? Maybe they can meet my son, Abas.”

“One is three. The other will be one soon.” Yogan inched his phone out of his pocket to show KK one of the photographs Roshni had sent. A selfie, with his youngest daughter sleeping in the crook of her elbow, swaddled in a pink blanket. “I hope we can put them in good schools,” Yogan said. “Like Abas.”

“There’s no end to what we hope,” KK said. He added that he and his wife had recently started thinking about sending Abas abroad for college. The boy was only twelve—he still had time to decide—but KK would need to begin saving, in case his employer became unable to sponsor Abas’s education. KK had heard of other children at his son’s school getting scholarships for colleges in London and America. “Imagine,” KK said.

“Inshallah,” Yogan said.

Behind the man from Kabul, a display case of gold and silver chains gave off small flashes of starlight.

“Hey, how much?” Yogan asked, pointing at one.

KK keyed open the glass case and held a delicate gold chain between his thumb and middle finger. From under the counter, he brought out a dark velvet tray, upon which he laid the chain gently, as if it were worth millions. Yogan touched the smooth gold clasp with the tip of his index finger; the metal was still warm from the powerful display light.

“When you’re ready,” KK said, “I’ll give you a discount. But not now. For now, you save all your change. There are lots of expenses coming for you.”

Yogan returned home to the accommodations that night a little dazed. He wanted to call Roshni again and tell her about KK’s hopes. He imagined that she would laugh, then fling an insult or two in his direction. “Abroad this, abroad that, it’s a mania these days,” she’d say. “If my girls are that smart, let them be smart near their mother. Why should I send them away?”

But she wouldn’t stay angry for long. After a moment, she would admit her own secret hopes. “Do you think if the girls go, we’ll ever get to visit?”

These days, no matter what Roshni was saying, the sound of her voice made Yogan part his lips in anticipation. How different this felt from his first few months in the city, when he had avoided her calls. Back then, the men had lined up with their phones and chargers at the two available outlets, some crying discreetly, others saying quick, important things like bank-account access codes and routing numbers, before cutting to the bye-bye.

Without fail, Samar had called Chanda each night before she went to sleep.

“Did you braid your hair?” he would ask her, and, if she said yes, it meant that she would be sleeping soon, and, if she said no, it meant that she could talk for another ten minutes.

The men had grown used to hearing Samar’s romantic conversations before bed. Sweetie, pinkie, and darling—all those sugary monikers that followed on the heels of “hello.” When the outpouring of such terms stopped, the men had noticed that, too.

“Where’s our Romeo these days?” they teased.

Four months had passed since Samar had learned about his debt. The men no longer mocked him; they were anxious to know if Chanda had responded to any of the hundreds of messages Samar had left her.

That night, as Yogan scrolled through his phone, another man approached Samar, who was sitting on the floor, gently peeling a banana. “Heard anything, or no? About Chanda?” the man asked.

Samar looked up and smiled a little crazily. “Don’t talk to me about that whore,” he said.

The following night, Samar returned from work and climbed straight up to his bunk without food or a shower.

Yogan came in from his own shower shortly after. “At least change into something clean,” he said. “I also have to sleep in that bed.”

Samar gave no response, only a kind of whimper that must have escaped accidentally.

“You want something to eat?”

Samar didn’t answer, but the other man in the room, hearing the question, looked at Yogan as if he were an idiot, as if he’d asked a fish if it wanted to swim.

Yogan went downstairs to the common kitchen with some cash in his pocket. He found one of the men he knew heating a bowl of lumpy yellow daal and a frozen paratha in the microwave. The man watched as Yogan counted out his asking price and placed the bills on the countertop. Only once the cash was secured in the man’s pocket did he hand over his warm plate of food.

In the room, the other men moved in silence as Yogan sat beside Samar on their bed, the plate in his hands. “Eat something,” he said. With his free hand, he traced the rope of Samar’s spine protruding from under his damp T-shirt.

“Did something happen?” Yogan asked. A question for anyone in the room.

“Nothing,” another man answered. “He’s just being dramatic.”

Then Samar sat up. His eyes were webbed with strawberry capillaries.

“How are you always home so early?” he asked Yogan. “Did you get fired, or what?”

“You should eat,” Yogan said.

Samar looked down at Yogan’s feet, on which he wore a pair of bright-red chappals. “Where did you buy those? Are they real Nikes?”

Yogan’s instinct was to jump off their bed and kick his slippers into the darkness under the bottom bunk. Just then, the plate of food, which he had rested on the bed beside Samar, went flying to the floor, the daal splattering across the linoleum.

“Sorry, I’m sorry,” Samar said. He held his own wrist, as if to discipline it. Then he eased himself onto the floor and began scooping the hot food into his cupped hands. His eyes had gone small and dark with tears, and he brought the inside of his elbow to dab at his wet nose.

A wave of misery and unease passed over the men, who regarded one another. Yogan crossed over to where Samar was crouched and placed a hand on his back. “Leave it,” he said, offering him a bath rag.

The other men began to collect the broken shards of the plate.

When Samar’s voice finally came, it was thick with phlegm. “Her brothers found someone to void our marriage. She’s marrying someone else,” he said.

“Shit.” It was all Yogan could say. He opened his arms for Samar to collapse into.

The metro ran mainly aboveground, but it was different from the trains in India because it did not rattle or jostle or violently assert itself. Rather, it slid to its stop. The doors opened with a gush of cool, sweetly scented air, and most of the seats inside shone in want of a patron. The train re-started with the rush of an airplane taking off, and within seconds it was speeding above the roads on cement beams tall enough to allow a panoramic view of the city. The number of skyscrapers had doubled since Yogan and Samar had first arrived in Dubai, almost two years earlier. Yogan had heard the other men saying that the towers were getting taller and more complex, and as he considered these rising obelisks of the future he thought of them not as a builder, evaluating materials and weight distribution, but as a father, anticipating the wonder of his daughters. Far beyond the skyscrapers, Yogan could see the still unfinished sporting stadium that Samar and others were working on. It was shaped like a disk, a silver mound.

It was National Day, a rare day off for all the men. Yogan was sitting beside Samar on the metro. It had been ages since he had seen Samar in his everyday clothes, and he noticed how the T-shirt his friend wore hung off his shoulders and neck.

When they’d first arrived in the station, Samar had seemed overcome with awe. He had never been inside a metro station in Dubai and couldn’t grasp how to read the digital maps that flashed on large screens above them. It was then that Yogan had admitted that he’d used the train before.

The day out was Yogan’s treat—an attempt to inject some life back into his friend, who hadn’t spoken to him since the news of Chanda’s engagement, other than to convey blank thanks for his rare acceptance of a nighttime meal.

Yogan also had to deliver his own news: he was moving out the following week.

At the mall, Yogan led Samar toward the sandwich shop. “Let’s have something? I’m hungry” was how he put it. Samar nodded his head thinly, as if he were doing Yogan a favor by agreeing to eat.

They ordered swarthy, buttered paninis full of ripe tomatoes and melted mozzarella. To Yogan’s surprise, Samar had an appetite. He appeared windswept by the ebullience of the mall, whipping his head left and right to examine the surrounding shop windows with their pedestals and handbags and slender, faceless mannequins.

“You’ve come here before?” Samar asked.

“This is what I wanted to tell you,” Yogan began.

He led the way to the ice rink, where the jaunty receptionist recognized him and allowed him access to the back room to get his skates. She handed Samar a pair of skates while Yogan paid for their day passes.

If Samar was confused, he did not show it. He had taken on, instead, the buoyant air of a dazzled child. “You want me to wear these?” he said, laughing. “I’m going to break my legs!”

“I’ll help you,” Yogan said. He already had his own skates knotted tight.

Yogan went down on his knees to fit Samar’s feet inside the skates, pulling at the laces to insure that his ankles were well secured. As he tied the knots, he explained that he’d been offered a job as a skater. He told Samar about the apartment in Karama.

Samar gave Yogan’s shoulder a brotherly punch, and said, laughing, “You bastard! This is your job?”

The laughter filled Yogan with relief. Holding his friend’s hand, Yogan ushered Samar onto the ice. Yogan suggested that he hold on to the side barriers, but Samar remained tethered to him, their damp fingers intertwined. The movements did not seem to come easily to Samar; he lifted his feet one at a time, as if he were marching. When they gained some speed, a wild, coy look appeared on his face.

“Try to lead with your hips,” Yogan said. “Let me show you.” He guided Samar to the barrier and pushed off alone, pointing down at his feet so Samar could understand what he meant.

“Do it again. Let me watch you,” Samar said when he returned. He was grinning. “Do you know any tricks?”

Again Yogan pushed off, swerving past the children and the teen-agers on the ice as Samar whistled at him from the side of the rink. “Look at this hero!” Samar called.

As Yogan skated, the chorus of an old Bollywood song began to ring in his pocket. Knowing that it was Roshni calling for their afternoon chat, he sent the call quickly to voice mail. Each time he heard that ringtone during this time of his life, he remembered how he and his siblings used to sit in front of the television with unbreakable focus, watching the finale of the movie in which the song featured. It was a declaration-of-love song, the hero and the heroine in their best clothes, dancing at the helm of a choreographed cast with clinking bangles and shimmying bellies. Finally, they were no longer bashful and had confessed their affection, which was too vast to convey in dialogue; it had to be set to music. Yogan remembered the great smile that Saif Ali Khan had worn as he danced. He had understood something about that smile even as a child. Where Yogan came from—a village outside Lucknow where sons were still preferred to daughters, most marriages were arranged, and a man out of work for a single week could render a family utterly damned—a dance number like that, in which the hero follows a girl in a shimmering blue lehenga, telling her that she looks like a piece of the moon, proved that somewhere in the world there was romance. It made life seem bearable.

Later, when Yogan looked back on this day with Samar, it was this song that he remembered, this song which became, over the years, a kind of engine for him. It unstuck him from himself when he needed it to, buoying him forward when he hesitated. That day at the rink he was moving inside a fantasy. In five days, his wife and his daughters would land in Dubai. In five days, he would hold his wife’s waist between his palms. He would cup the soft head of his new daughter, make a show of searching her face for traces of himself. It was Roshni that Yogan was thinking of that day with Samar, Roshni he imagined when their fingers were intertwined.

“Let me try,” Samar said when Yogan returned to him.

He made a few unsteady strides, his hands in front of him for protection, then gained confidence, his movements nascent but full of speed. Then Samar leaned back to avoid crashing into someone, and Yogan knew before it happened that he would correct himself by tilting too far forward too quickly, which would cause him to lose his footing. He watched his friend fall onto his knees; with his palms, he kept his body from hitting the ice.

Yogan skated over. Samar appeared more subdued than he had earlier, perhaps a little embarrassed. Yogan offered his hands to pull Samar up, and Samar took them awkwardly. He sent a crystalline wad of spit to the side.

“Why did you bring me here?” Samar asked. “To show off?”

“Come on, bhai,” Yogan said, urging him to the side of the rink.

“You want to watch me hurt myself so you can feel good?”

Yogan felt Samar’s hands grab his collar, and then he knew to anticipate the approach of knuckles, which flashed by his cheek like a pink ribbon, narrowly avoiding impact. Yogan glided backward to catch himself, one of his hands on his cheek, which had grown warm with shame. Then he heard a whistle that he recognized as the sound of his boss approaching. Yogan put up both his hands, as if in surrender. “There is no problem here, Felix,” he said in English. “This is my good friend. We are enjoying on our holiday.”

“I’m going to have to ask your good friend to get off the ice,” Felix said.

On the way home, Samar rested his head on Yogan’s shoulder. On the open plain of Samar’s neck, the skin appeared to have been shaved carelessly; there was a thin scabbed line across his Adam’s apple. Yogan lightly tapped his fingers against the healing skin, if only to show that he’d noticed it.

“You’re going to have to take care of yourself,” Yogan said. “When I’m gone, you’ll need to become close to someone else who can bring you food.”

“I’ll handle it,” Samar said.

“I’ll visit you. Every Sunday. Don’t forget.”

“Can you give me some money before you go? To tide me over until I find someone else?”

Yogan had prepared for this question, and also for its answer. Still, his throat swelled painfully, and he waited for the taut feeling to pass. Quietly, he managed to give his response: “I need the money for my girls. My oldest needs a school uniform. She needs textbooks.”

“I’ll manage,” Samar said.

He pointed at Yogan’s lap to ask whether he could use it to rest, and Yogan, with an open palm ready to catch his friend’s head, said, “Come.”

Some months after Yogan moved out, Samar disappeared from the accommodations one day, like a frame cut out of a movie. He didn’t get on the bus to the construction site. He wasn’t in his bunk when the other men came back.

The local news rarely picked up such a story; you had to dream of the dead, then wake up with a premonition. A text message received late at night, read over and over in the morning, would confirm what had happened. A young man had fallen—or jumped—in front of an oncoming train.

He had been only twenty-seven. His hands and feet were always colder than the rest of him, Yogan remembered, despite the incessant heat of those days. In bed, Yogan used to warm Samar’s rawboned fingers with his own, teasing him for his poor circulation.

There were no last rites; a ceremony would have been too expensive. No one went to claim the body. Samar’s clothes, his razor, his smartphone, and his charger were distributed among the men in the room. And, as for them, what could they do but line up for the morning bus, letting their thoughts wander, until someone issued an order, or asked sweetly, through the phone, what was new and had they eaten? ♦

Kanak Kapur currently teaches at Colgate University, where she is an Olive B. O’Connor fellow. Her short fiction has appeared in the Sewanee Review and The Rumpus, among other publications.

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