Monsoon Mansion: A Memoir(28)
“What do you think of the place, Mohandes?”
“This place, sir? You mean the desert?”
“You believe it can be a good site for a project?”
“It depends on what kind of project, sir.”
“Mohandes, you are to do something no one has done before. You are to build a greenhouse—the first greenhouse in the Arabian Desert.”
“A greenhouse?” Papa said, scratching his head and scanning the rolls and hills and dips and kilometers of sand around him. “Good god, a greenhouse.”
Papa knelt down, forked his fingers into the warm powder, scooped up a sample, and examined the specimen he was ordered to tame. In his hand, he had a fistful of dust, of ashes that formed an ancient royal kingdom—a kingdom controlling the entry and exit, the digging and exchanging, the exporting and withholding of oil. In his hand, he held mighty microbes that once belonged to Bedouins, sons and brothers and cousins, wanderers belonging to nothing but caravans, the scarcity of water, and the waywardness of the wind.
There must be a reason why the Bedouins never settled, Papa thought. This is an impossible place to live, to build. Then again, studying the particles in his hand, sifting them through his wrinkled fingers, he found bits, dots, a peppering of hope: soil hiding in sand.
“Sir, if you bring me soil, I will plant you a garden.”
Papa spent the evening drafting plans to modernize agriculture in the Middle East and praying under his breath for a miracle in barren land. He slept in his camp house not knowing what was to arrive in the morning. In the land where sinking air motioned you to slumber, and scorched skin and a parched throat woke you up in the morning, Papa woke to clouds of dust and smoke rising and puffing from a convoy of trucks, bulldozers, drillers, graders, and forklifts. Al-Ajmi was adviser not only to a family who yearned for Arabian-grown vegetables, but who also owned distributorships for Japanese construction equipment and Dutch supplies.
“Mohandes, while you were sleeping, these arrived from Narita and Rotterdam.”
“But . . .”
“But you thought, Mohandes, it was impossible. Let me tell you, my friend, with Saudi Arabians, nothing is impossible. Nothing.”
Papa spent his first two weeks overseeing the construction of workers’ barracks, ordering air-conditioners, utensils, bedding, and toiletries from Al-Ajmi’s office. It was then that Al-Ajmi introduced him to Abdullah, the Egyptian foreman who’d been on-site for several years. Abdullah had been supervising the hundreds of Egyptian and Pakistani workers hired for other projects, and he was now to partner with Papa in making room for Filipino workers. A Filipino who had been driving Papa around from site to site tipped him off about the animosity that once existed between the Egyptian and Pakistani workers, and the new tension now felt because of the expected arrival of Southeast Asian logging and farming men. Abdullah declined to shake Papa’s hand and cut his introduction short to “Here is where we eat and there is where we sleep. I am in charge.”
Papa allocated the third week for hiring men from Nueva Ecija—loggers he had met on the sierra, rice farmers from the Maligaya Rice Research and Training Center, and low-paid professors from Central Luzon State University, an agricultural college. He recruited men who knew the nature of foliage and flora, men who could give life to plants with their gardening hands, who could direct a vine to turn up or bend down, but could never satisfy the yearnings of a wife for heft in the bank and ardor in bed. He uprooted them from the rice fields and blue mountains, and brought them to the Middle East for a promise: that for every shrub they kept alive, for every crate of produce harvested, they each could pocket more than their wives could ever ask. Thousands signed up and boarded planes. Papa’s first venture at being an enlister convinced him that one day, recruitment would be a more-than-viable source of income. Saudi Arabia and its neighbors had dreams bigger than the subcontinent, but a population of princes reluctant to do manual labor. And there it was—Papa’s gold mine: a wealthy state eager to hand out employment to whoever was willing to break their backs and scald their skin for the expansion of an empire.
When the first wave of workers flew in from Manila, Papa proved to them and to Abdullah that he was there to protect and serve his men. Abdullah had instructed the cook, his Egyptian ally, to feed hard-boiled eggs and rock-hard dried fish solely to Filipino and Pakistani workers. After a week, the workers took to protest and asked Papa to act upon the issue. So he acquired a written consent from Al-Ajmi, saying that Abdullah ranked lower than Papa, and that he was to hire two additional cooks—one Pakistani and one Filipino—to make varieties that reminded the workers of the sweet, spicy, savory tastes of home. Papa took on the task of going to market so that Abdullah and his cook couldn’t pinch away a portion of the stipend for themselves. Mohandes wanted to care for and protect his men through and through.
One afternoon, Papa and his driver went to the souk for items requested by the three cooks. He bagged kilo after kilo of fruits, nuts, and grains, bargaining with the merchant and winning him over with his stories. In mid-conversation, loud calls came from speakers and horns. Men purchasing halal foods turned to one direction, knelt down, and prayed. Papa—a first-timer in a Muslim land and a Catholic by heart and heritage, unaware of the forbiddance of human activity at such a moment—kept bagging crops into woven sacks. Before the merchant could warn or instruct him, a mutawa—a religious policeman—struck Papa with a leather cord and flogged him until he fell to the ground. The driver waited for a pause in the beating, pulled Papa by the arm, and carried him off to the freight truck without any of their bags of sundries. For over a week, Papa slept on his stomach and worked under the Arabian sky, bleeding through the cloth on his back.