“Dad, quit sweating on me,” laughed Manish as his father tried to steal the soccer ball from him.
Bikash smiled at his son’s confidence and sense of humor, and then he shook his long black hair side to side, spraying the much too fast teenage boy with drops of the offending bodily fluid. “If I can’t catch you, I’m going to drown you.”
Manish groaned, put his foot on the ball, then exploded past his thirty-five year old father. Bikash was beaten. He watched with pride as his son weaved his way past Bikash’s best friend, Kumar, and rolled the ball into the goal made from old fence posts. Manish spun around, high fived his teammate, Kumar’s son Sunil, and jogged happily back to his own end of the worn, dirt field.
Bikash and Kumar looked to the west. The sun was dropping behind the mountains of the Annapurna range. The two men became very quiet. Each father knew this would be the last night, for at least a year, that they would see a sunset in their home country of Nepal. The chance to share the late afternoon chasing their sons on such a perfect April day was bitter sweet. In the morning the two friends would board a plane and begin their journey to Qatar.
Bikash and Kumar were construction workers. Both men possessed Annapurna mountain stamina and an almost supernatural ability to work at great heights, on narrow beams, with seemingly no effort or fear.
What the two men did fear was the journey to Qatar. Neither man had ever left Nepal. But the promise, in just a year’s time, of wages equal to five year’s earnings in Nepal was enough for the two lifelong friends to swallow their fear like the Annapurna mountains swallow the sun’s light each night.
“Come on, dad, let’s play another game to three. Maybe you and Sunil’s dad will finally win,” kidded Manish. Sunil pointed at the two thirty-something year old men and grinned. “Never happen.”
Bikash and Kumar looked at each other. They knew they should go inside for supper. They knew they should sit around the dinner table with their children and wives until the mountains to the east spit out the new day’s sun. But there had to be time for one more game.
They were going to build some of the most magnificent soccer stadiums in the world. They had been telling their soccer loving sons stories about all the people, from all over the world, who would be sitting in the stadium’s their fathers would build. This was how they convinced their sons that leaving for an entire year was worthwhile. But right now, there was time for one more game.
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The flight, on a plane emblazoned with the logo Emirates had been crowded with many men like Bikash and Kumar. Eighteen to thirty-something-year-olds, all hiding nervous anticipation, chasing a dream of money that would allow them to return home and start a business or build a new home. Some of the men had never been on a plane before. Some could not help but be sick. The construction workers of Nepal are a rough-hewn group. Good-natured laughter followed each man’s failure to be tougher than the rising and falling plane.
Now Bikash was sitting on a cot, his bed for the next year. His new bosses had walked smartly down the middle of the long building which housed the stadium construction workers. Each new man from Nepal was assigned a bed in a room which slept four. Two small dressers were pushed up against the whitewashed walls. Two men would share each dresser, two drawers per person. Bikash eyed his surroundings as a tiny drop of sweat rolled off his forehead and slipped past his right eye. He could make do. For a year, he could make do.
The walk across the compound to the sleeping quarters included a glimpse of the stadium site, dirt and sand had already been shoved this way and that. Piles of equipment, steel beams and concrete block waited patiently for the men from Nepal.
There wasn’t much in Bikash’s new bedroom to keep his attention. His mind began to replay the sights he had seen after the plane had landed. Busses with Budweiser, Castrol and Johnson and Johnson painted in giant letters from nose to stem pulled up to the Emirates plane. The Nepalese men walked directly from the plane onto the busses. The air in Qatar, hot, even in April, surprised the mountain men.
Driving through the streets of Doha, the capital of Qatar, the Nepalese men stared through the windows trying to find something familiar. They were unsuccessful. People dressed in white walked the streets. No mountains anywhere. The trip to the construction worker’s compound was short. Bikash did recognize one sign near the entrance to his new home, a giant yellow M on a tall metal pole. Bikash had seen this on television before. It was the sign of an American restaurant. His stomach had rumbled, and he had elbowed his friend Kumar. Kumar had absently nodded without turning away from the bus window.
Bikash stopped daydreaming about busses and McDonald’s. He set his backpack on the floor and sat down on his bed. Night was near in Qatar. The morning would bring work. Bikash tried not to think, too much, about his family and home.
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Despite the long and exhausting trip the previous day, Bikash had found sleep hard to steal from his new surroundings. He, Kumar and their two new roommates tossed and turned. Late in the unfamiliar night, Bikash sat up on his cot. He stared at the white wall, his strong leathery hands resting lightly on his knees. Finally, he stood, quietly exited his room, and walked the long hallway. Bikash counted the doors he passed. There were twenty-two, eleven on his right and eleven on his left.
At the end of the hallway he paused to look out the windows in the double door at the end of the building. Bikash pondered the meaning of the windows. There were none in his room. And there were no windows in the rooms he had looked inside the day before, as his bosses marched the men along the hallway. The meaning escaped him.
He tried to open the door. It was locked. “It would be easy to break the door open,” thought Bikash. “It is so fragile, why lock it?” He was tired. He turned around and began counting bedroom doors once again.
When he reached the other end of the narrow hallway, having counted a total of thirty-two bedroom doors this time, he stared out the window and rattled the door handle, locked. Bikash wondered once more about the locked door. “Silly,” he thought. “Reminds me of the tiny cemetery back home.” A smile found its way to his lips.
When he and Kumar were children, they would sneak out of their houses late at night and slip through the metal gate at the entrance to the cemetery. The gate was always locked, but was simple enough to slip through or jump over. The two friends would race in the moonlight, up and down the narrow pathways between the graves, counting the gravestones.
A hand touched Bikash’s shoulder. He almost screamed as he spun around. Standing inches from him was a man he did not recognize. “This man must have already been here when we arrived yesterday. He has probably been working with the crews digging the foundation of the stadium,” reasoned Bikash. The man stared blankly at Bikash. After a few seconds of silence, the man spoke.
“You’re new.” It was a statement, not a question. Bikash nodded. The blank faced man tilted his head slightly to one side. “Go back to your room and go to sleep. Do not ever wake me again. The moments of rest here are like diamonds you cannot touch, and they are the only treasure you will ever find in this desert.” Before Bikash could respond, the man turned and slipped silently back into the bedroom closest to the doors with the windows.
Bikash stood for a moment longer and then walked as carefully as possible back to his room.
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Bikash lifted a concrete block from the pile nearest the deep trench that would become the foundation for the east end side of the stadium. He walked a few steps, bent over, and handed the block to a workmate who was standing in the trench. Bikash immediately walked back to the pile of cement blocks and got another. The heat was intense in the middle of the day. “Funny though,” thought Bikash. “I don’t seem to be sweating.” He handed off the next block.
A loud scream startled Bikash as he reached for the next block. All the workers on the site stopped what they were doing and looked over to the area the scream came from. At the north end of the stadium, near a large billboard showing a man drinking Coca Cola, a bulldozer idled in a shallow trench. A crowd of workers stood along the edge of the trench near the dozer’s large blade. Bikash walked quickly towards the crowd. Kumar joined Bikash, and they reached the crowd together. No one spoke.
On the ground, pinned under the bulldozer’s blade was a man that Bikash and Kumar had flown with the day before. Both of the man’s legs were crushed under the blade. The skin, muscle and tendons of both thighs, below where the blade rested, had been ripped away from the shattered bone. Blood spilled freely from the man’s torn legs and seeped into the dirt at the bottom of the recently begun hole. The man was either unconscious or dead. Bikash turned away as the stadium foreman yelled for the men to get back to work.
Bikash and Kumar huddled together. They had seen men injured, and even killed, on work sites before. It was usually very easy to determine what caused an accident like this at a work site. They mumbled to each other about what they had just seen.
“It looks like one of the trench walls crumbled,” whispered Kumar. Bikash nodded. “The poor man must have been watching from the edge of the trench when the ground crumbled beneath his feet,” he replied. Both men pawed at the sandy ground with their work boots.
“This should not have happened,” said Bikash.
“You men, get back to work! This is not your concern,” came a shout from behind the friends. Bikash and Kumar looked around. Most of the other workers were already back to work. Bikash didn’t like it, but he walked back to his pile of concrete blocks.
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For three months, Bikash and his friend toiled under the ever increasing heat of Qatar. Both men had lost at least twenty pounds, and neither man had been overweight when they arrived. The ten and twelve hour days were devouring all the men who worked in the unforgiving desert. Two months earlier, Bikash had complained, but the men who had been there longer told him to keep quiet. They told him he would be lucky to get paid, let alone get a shorter work day or a break during the hottest time of the day.
Only a week later, Bikash found out that his wages were not being sent to his home in Nepal, as they were supposed to be, neither were Kumar’s. They had threatened to leave, but were told they could not. Their passports were being held, and they would have to honor their one-year contract. Promises to send wages, soon, were made by the bosses. To make matters worse, small plastic cards with the word VISA stamped on them were given to the men. The men were told that a portion of their pay was on the cards and was deducted each month for their housing and food. In Nepal, Bikash and Kumar had been told that their housing and food were free.
Bikash missed his family.
Some men, “too many” thought Bikash, got to go home to Nepal or India early. Those men were either shipped home in a box or without an arm or a leg. Bikash was keeping track of all the accidents at the building site. It was a gruesome way to occupy his mind, but there were so many, he felt someone must make a record.
In just three months eight men had died building their stadium. Another eighteen had been seriously injured. Many men collapsed from heat exhaustion. Half the men who died, died from that very cause.
Despite the stress, from fear of wondering if he was next, Kumar occasionally found escape from his plight. Sleep was deep. Dreams were vivid. He cherished the moment each evening when his head found the pillow on his cot. Those nights were precious.
More so, because, every two weeks the men would change shifts and work under the lights at night. Construction was most dangerous at night. Men were tired, shadows fooled the usually sure footed. Sleep was not as deep during the day. It was hot in the tiny, windowless rooms. Dreams rarely came to Bikash when he worked the slender metal beams at night.
The things that the bosses thought amused and entertained the workers: rides into the city in Hyundai cars; television on Sony TV’s; and supposedly free Adidas clothing did little or nothing for men who knew tomorrow might be their last.
Bikash didn’t want his last memory to be of his friend, Kumar, looking down on him while Bikash’s life-blood soaked into the shifting sand. He wanted to go home. He wanted to see his family and chase his son around the makeshift soccer field in the back yard. He wanted to tell his son that the stadium he was building was not so special. If Bikash died, he didn’t want his son thinking that this particular stadium was such a meaningful place, not when it was built upon the blood of so many.
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Kumar was dead. Bikash could not speak as he held his lifelong friend’s lifeless hand in his own.
A beam, poorly welded, had come loose. It had knocked Kumar from his perch near the top of the west stands. Kumar’s fifty-foot fall ended with his head striking the concrete wall that would someday be a part of the locker room in which the world’s finest and richest athletes prepared to take the field.
Despite loud orders from the bosses to leave, many of Bikash’s fellow workers lingered around Kumar. Bikash picked up his friend and carried him all the way back to their windowless room. Bikash counted the doors as he walked. Ten. He placed his friend on his cot and thought, while looking down at Kumar’s body clad in Adidas sweat pants and t-shirt, “I hope you find one last dream my friend. Maybe a dream of mountains and dirt soccer fields.” A small bead of sweat slipped from Bikash’s forehead and landed on his friend’s chest.
