Gulf Bounty Is Drying Up in Kerala
By Amy Waldman
Malappuram District, India, Feb. 18 - Here in Foreign Junction, a neighborhood named for the overseas money that remade this coastal swath of southern India, the luck of life's draw is on display.The Persian Gulf oil boom built a two-story house here for Sheik Abdullah, a 47-year-old with a high school education. Twenty-four years with the United Arab Emirates' postal service paid for the stereo and microwave inside, for the car and jeep out back, for private schools and private hospitals.
But the gulf also lined the face of the man watering Mr. Abdullah's roses. Thin and gray-haired, dignified even with a hose in hand, Kannan Kutty spent 13 long years as a driver in Oman. His pay was cut by 40 percent as the gulf economy changed, until it was no longer worth staying. He left in 1997. So now, at 57, he works as Mr. Abdullah's driver.
Mr. Abdullah, who returned to India last year, earned enough to bring his family to the gulf while he worked there. Mr. Kutty did not. Giving his daughters a better life meant living without them, a choice with which he still has not made peace.
"It's so sad," he said. "I missed their growing up."
For three decades, Indians have helped build and serve countries like Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates and Kuwait - reflecting a world where, for many families, making ends meet means living apart.
The presence of more than three million Indians in the gulf has added to the Indian government's worries about a war there, prompting it to prepare evacuation plans. Prewar currents are felt here, too, as some rush home with jitters, and others rush to the gulf to seek financial gain.
But in truth, this area has been feeling the fallout from changes in
the gulf's economic and political landscape for years. For unskilled Indians, at least, visas, jobs and decent wages have become much harder to come by. Here, it is the equivalent of oil drying up.Many - perhaps half - of the gulf's Indian workers have come from the southern state of Kerala, driven abroad by a stagnant economy and population pressures. Hundreds of thousands came from this mostly Muslim district, Malappuram, alone, where more than 750,000 gulf returnees now live, according to the Center for Development Studies in the state capital, Thiruvananthapuram. One study by the center estimated that by the end of the 1990's, remittances from the gulf
averaged 22 percent of the state's income.There is scarcely a home here that did not send someone. Pullat Umar went to build his family a house. Rata Krishna went to earn his daughters' dowries. Kadavath Beeran went so his daughters could eat.
A few women went too, like K. Shopa, who worked as nanny, tailor and hospital cleaner to support four children after her husband died. She raised an Arab sheik's children - he would summon her by telephone when he wanted to see them - while her mother raised hers.
They all left the densely lush landscape of southern India for the aridity of the gulf, helping to construct immaculate, sterile cities of fabulous wealth. They sold vegetables, worked as office aides, made bricks.
They were, often, at the bottom of society, living four to a room
while working for men in mansions. But back home they built mansions themselves.Neighborhoods acquired names like Saudi City and Abu Dhabi Road; homes got flush toilets. Satellite dishes and new mosques sprouted. Billboards sprang up to peddle consumer dreams like "glittering bathrooms that fit your pocket."
But the glitter is wearing thin. India's professionals and skilled
technicians are still welcome in the gulf. But the district's
unskilled and semiskilled workers find it harder, as competitors
willing to work for less have flowed in from other nations, including
India's poorer neighbors, Bangladesh and Pakistan, and even from poorer Indian states. Others came from the Philippines, Indonesia or Romania."Russian women!" Mr. Abdullah exclaimed.
Gulf rulers, wanting to counter what they saw as a demographic
overload by Indians, made them less welcome. After 1999, the United Arab Emirates, where perhaps one million Indians work, stopped accepting visa applications from unskilled workers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh.Furthermore, to appease their own unemployed populations, gulf
leaders have adopted "indegenization" policies, reserving jobs once monopolized by Indians for Arabs. Mr. Abdullah observed that he would never be able to get that postal job if he went to the gulf today.So the future here promises little progress. Pullat Umar has worked in the gulf for the past 23 years, but his son, Hassan, 23, who was still in his mother's womb when his father left, can see no way to do the same.
Instead, Hassan works in a local industry, embroidering for a living, earning only 2,000 rupees a month, or less than $50. At this rate, he will never build a house like his father did.
Recognizing that Malappuram residents, in particular, will need new skills to compete for jobs at home or abroad, has little to fall back on, the state government is starting a program to try to make one person in every household computer literate.
Many returnees, meanwhile, have come home to large homes but small or nonexistent bank accounts. Most earned enough to pay back the hefty loans they took out to get to the gulf in the first place, to support their families and build their homes. But they have no savings and no work prospects, other than daily labor.
The slowdown in the gulf has hurt the job market at home, too. Some mosques and mansions remain half built, making mason work scarce for men like Rata Krishna, 55. A lean man missing a tooth, he spent four years in the gulf making bricks to earn money for his daughters' dowries.
He came home because the Indian contractor he worked for was not paying him. He still owes part of one daughter's dowry, having
borrowed one girl's gold to marry off another. It is a source of
shame and stress."There is no way to give the gold," he said resignedly.
Dowry inflation appears to have been an unintended consequence of the in-flow of gulf money. Potential in-laws saw bounty in a girl with a gulf worker for a father; gold stores spread like a rash. Mr. Krishna married off his first daughter for 56 grams of gold and his third daughter for 136.
The dowry prices have yet to come down.
Sociologists hope that over time, the migration may have one
healthier byproduct - the empowerment of the hundreds of thousands of women left behind. As absence became routine, so did self-sufficiency. Women, with family help, managed finances and disciplined children.The women do not usually talk of empowerment, though, but of
loneliness. Viriyamu, 35, whose husband left five years ago to earn their two daughters' dowries, has no phone and cannot write. Her children write for her; a letter from her husband, almost illiterate himself, comes every six months."It's very difficult for a marriage," she said, looking vibrant
nonetheless in purple and gold. Her mischievous son - at 10, without his father for half his life - scampered around her.The women still recall moments they ached for their husband's
presence. For Viriyamu, it was at her eldest daughter's marriage; for Amina Beeran, it was when a baby boy died in her womb.But they sutured their longing and kept on. Were the years of
separation worth it? Pullat Umar's wife and son were asked. Yes, they replied, for without the sacrifice, they could not have built the
house they moved into - without him - last week.Kadavath Beeran and his wife, Amina, weigh the costs and benefits of migration every day. He had no way to support a family when he smuggled himself to the gulf in 1968. He became a vegetable seller and watchman, staying for 30 years - enough to marry off three daughters and build a house back home.
He returned in 1998 when a crippled hand stopped him from working. He is now 65, and destitute, entirely reliant on the generosity of relatives and friends.
After 30 years away, he misses his bachelor life, and sleeps with a suitcase by his bed. If he had been able to, he said, he would have stayed abroad until he died.
He has no interest in his family anymore. "When he was in the gulf, he was so loving," Amina recalled wistfully. She recoils at his
sourness, frets over their pennilessness.He tells her every day that they should sell the house built on
decades of his sweat and their separation. For now, she is resisting.
The New York Times, February 24, 2003