The Arrival
1984
My father arrived in Saudi Arabia. A distant land, far from the corruption he’d left behind, though he understood by now that distance meant nothing. The rot existed everywhere, it just wore different clothes. But he was here. And he would try again. Not because he believed it would be different, but because he didn’t know what else to do. He carried with him his precision, his stubbornness, his refusal to bend. The greener pastures he’d been searching for might not exist. But he would keep searching in the desert anyway.
Saudi Arabia in the 1980s was booming. Oil money built cities overnight. Construction projects stretched across the desert like monuments to ambition. Indian and subcontinent workers poured in by the thousands, chasing the same dream: send money home, build something better for the family left behind.
My father found work in a printing press, with the country’s only newspaper, called Arab News, in Jeddah. This was nothing like home. This time, the challenges was different. They existed in the treatment of migrants, in the way companies held passports like leverage, in the hierarchy that put white Western immigrants at the top and brown subcontinental workers at the bottom. But the work itself? That he could keep honest.
No one asked him to falsify reports here. No one threatened to bury him. The system was impersonal. Structural. You could keep your head down, do your job correctly, and survive. It wasn’t the greener pastures he’d imagined. But it was enough. There was something engaging about his work. My father loved fine-arts. He could paint professionally. And the printing press allowed him to work on his talents. It wasn’t exactly art, but it was close and he enjoyed it.
He worked long hours though. He lived simply. Sent money home every month to his mother, who was still hustling, and to his siblings. He kept almost nothing for himself. This was the inheritance from his mother: you work, you provide, you don’t think for more than you need.
Before leaving for Jeddah, he had a little heartbreak. My parents almost didn’t get married. My mother, whom he was fixed to marry, was diagnosed with tuberculosis. And this was devastating news. People wouldn’t survive diseases those days. Eventually though, my father flew back to India for the wedding. It was efficient, practical, like everything else in his life. Despite seeing the world grind down their ideals. There was romance in it. There was love and respect.
My mother was quiet, observant, practical, like his mother but gentler in her execution. She didn’t ask for much. She understood the life they were building was one of discipline and purpose, not excess. After some hard years where my mother was left alone to fend for herself, they returned to Jeddah together. They were happy together.
1988 The years passed in routine. Wake before dawn for prayer. Work. Come home. Eat. Sleep. Repeat. The monotony was its own kind of peace. No drama. No crises. Just the steady accumulation of days.
My mother made the small apartment feel like something more than a temporary shelter. She cooked meals that reminded him of home. She kept the space clean. She didn’t complain about the heat, the isolation, the foreignness of it all.
They talked. He had learned long ago to keep his thoughts to himself. He read about Bosnia burning, Palestine, news from Afghanistan, there was an unrealised unease that he never fully understood. She spoke to him about it, the heaviness, but they didn’t hold on to it. She had a way about her. One where she could make you feel really heard. Enough to lighten your shoulders and ready to take on the next mountain. Maybe she had her own heaviness. Everyone did.
But there were moments of quiet understanding. The way she’d place his tea exactly where he needed it. The way he’d notice she was tired and insist she rest. Small gestures. Small kindnesses. I guess. This was what marriage was: partnership in survival.
1989 I was born in a hospital in Jeddah. The son. Healthy, loud, demanding attention from the moment I entered the world.
I imagine, my father held me carefully, this tiny thing, too heavy for a newborn, but somehow felt like everything. So small. So fragile. So completely dependent on my father to protect him from a world he knew he couldn’t actually protect him from.
But he would try.
He would try to raise me with the same precision he brought to his work. The same refusal to compromise he’d carried forever. The same quiet resistance his father had modelled, without ever speaking it aloud.
I knew I was loved. Not in grand gestures. My father didn’t know how to do grand gestures. But in the steady, reliable way a foundation supports a building. Invisible. Essential.
He’d believed the world operated on principles. But a different kind. A stubborn hope. The kind that says: the world is broken, but I will teach you to fix it anyway. I will teach you to be better, and give you better than what I had. I will show you that integrity matters even when it costs you everything.
Five years after arriving in Saudi Arabia, my parents had a son.
Me. I think it made my father happy. I think, finally, he had found a purpose, his life came back full circle, what he’d been looking for all along, not greener pastures, a home to belong, a reason to keep his head up, a reason to keep believing.
End of Part One