saratkanur

He didn’t believe a word I said and thought I had contrived the story for some sinister purpose and he could get into deep trouble going along with me. If Adrian had any serious doubt about my intentions, he had to report it and it scared me now, it could turn in any direction.

One should understand the milieu, this was war, security was tight and all were suspect and everyone a dangerous double agent and once the intelligence got a whiff, they made your life miserable shaking you down for the ‘real truth’. I had seen Jordanians caught snooping, being led away for interrogation by army intelligence and handed over to Saudi secret police, disappearing forever.Even innocuous acts were reported.

An amateur astrologer from India, , working as an office assistant for another contractor, was caught scribbling on a paper notations and figures that nobody could understand .He was reported and grilled for hours by the secret agents, twisting his mind so incontrovertibly that he had to be put on the next flight home. This fool was casting a horoscope by calculating exactly what stood in future for the next two hundred years for some nut , when nobody would even dare to carry a piece of paper with a telephone number on it.This was going the way of the quasi-astrologer, exactly as Darren warned me when I had called him.

I was exasperated, Adrian was going over every aspect of my act, beseeching me: how is that..., why is that, and when, where, how.....are you sure….??????, his doubts were the same and his Irish brain couldn't fathom that somebody would flush half a million dollars ,whatever may the circumstances be and his questions were phrased and rephrased to the point that I gnashed my teeth and hissed,

“Yes , you irish idiot……I’m not sure at all, ….really I’m so unsure that’s the fuck I want to go back an’ look for myself . As for the second part, you’re a better judge of volumes, I’ll give you the dimension, factor in the average load of shit per person and you’ll be able to arrive at a decent figure. My guess is that the shit will be deep, just about lip level..now tell me, what’s wriggling past your arsehole?

He didn’t speak about it for the next two days but I could sense something remained unsaid. Then the dam broke, he was in regress, a devolution into the juvenile world of treasure and fantasy, a jason hunting for golden shit. Adrian wanted the money more than I did and over the two days had dreamt simultaneous dreams of what he would do with ‘his money’, like he would travel the world and render poems in secluded parks to those unfortunates whom poetry had passed by, making them less appreciative of human nature. Yea I said , try Bangladesh , they are dying to listen to your moping Gaelic poems.

Mountains of paper and round the clock documentation, a task so onerous that whenever Adrian passed by, I had this urge to wring his neck. I was no prisoner and I could leave, but that small chance, the minute possibility of going back to Kuwait and retrieving the money niggled me from the back of the mind. Some where in Feb, I broke it to Adrian, on a night when he was reading aloud a poem He read it so well, poetry was his passion and recited it in undertone and connotation, that you enjoyed the poem in it’s depth. It was Robert Frost , The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I--
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

He was reading the poem again at my insistence and was to read another when I interrupted him ,surprising him and he slammed the book shut and glared at me.

What?.....what,what, what?.

November's eyes had the look of a predator calmly watching a distant prey,December was defenitely crosseyed and January, it had turned malevolent green.

Lambertin was now firing , salaries were headed south and the adrenalin rush when I saw the first cheque of the four thousand and more,was pissed when it was slashed by half. The situation was becoming so untenable that one had to worry when Lambertin would start charging us to stay employed. Once the job permit was cancelled, only a madman would stay behind in Suadi Arabia ,to be caught and thrashed by their police, whose ass we were trying to protect from the manniaakk.

Men stood in line for the severence package, "four weeks pay....some frigging package, mafucking paper" somebody said,and the plane fare home .Adrian handled the HR and I sat in the same room and had no reason to stand in line but I had to symbolically convey, after all my genius, I was just another expendable cog in his opportunist machine. When I reached his table he pushed me away , I hassled him further and thrust my papers in his face and said

"Why ,here's your your new slogan 'NOW FIRING'"

He brushed it off and asked me to fuck off.In Amman, when I had applied for the job with Lambertin, Adrian was the one of the three men at the recruiting centre.We had to fill in a questionaire and tick little boxes and one question asked was, why we wanted to work for an army contractor. I found the responses not worthy of reply, no infiltrator was going to publish his intentions, so I wrote that I loved firewoks.Adrian said he liked that and had passed on my paper after stamping his approval. Now he had further plans for me , so it seemed, for a measly three hundred a week, maybe licking his behind. All jobs had been taken over by the army and civilians were being run out for security reasons , so that left us with little else to do.

'Operation Desert shield had morphed into Desert Storm" and mid January , it was all over. I had always likened the war to a boxing match, where I stood at a corner throwing brave punches in the air, leading with the left, one to the head, an uppercut to chin followed by fast jabs to the body and then a mighty hook to the temple, while a ten armed tyson stood at the other corner, two arms dropped loosely on his sides, other sledgehammer like fists lay hidden behind , waiting for for the referree to blow the whistle. The rest is history, August to Feb, and I was hanging by a thread.

Ad Dhammam was the goof-up capital of the world. What we did near Jeddah was something akin to cars drawing up to our garage door with cartons from the supermarket and then sending it forward to neigbouring houses in smaller cars.

Dhamman was different. It was 'MAHA KUMBH' in military gear ,with added tanks and battle cars. In Dhamman, there was no respite , compounded by recalcitrant Saudi suppliers who they had their own ideas of how to run a war which was comic book class, but still great semblance of order was achieved and men and materaial still moved . The operation were run with ultra- hi tech equipments and satellite imagery by head honchos from Centar Logistical Command ,Army Command Support and Army Corps of Engineers .

Contract staff were hardly noticed and it was work and work all the time. Charles had his job well cut out , rapid engineering and consctruction being his specialisation ,and was in charge of that division. He was well ahead of his task, stocks of fast setting cement ,premixed slurry,welded steel formwork required for laying landing pads and strengthening roads were already moved into the many strategic points in a semicircle , many miles south of the kuwait-saudi border. These depots in the desert were " ready to run", laoded trucks that could be deployed at great speed in emergency . And that's how I lost my job.

Towards the end of October, Charles and his team had moved to Dhamman and Lambertin had moved staff and a thousand heavy load haulers to the east, some of which were sitting loaded in the desert and some of which was running free. Lambertin did not own the trucks, it was hired from as far as from Sweden to Pakistan and drivers from even further,who spoke in tongues from  excellent English to broken French which were all the same , nobody understood a thing the other said.Confusion is the general word that can be used mildly to describe the situation .

Mobilisation had been stepped up several fold , requests poured in every second, and goofups flashed like lightening, exposing the perpetrators for all to see. Every order had to be cheched ,rechecked and validated before action, which had to happen in seconds.

One day , a massive pipe burst and the crude pumped in high pressure , ripped the pipe that many million gallons of thick oil slick had turned the part of the desert into a quagmire. Three hundred abhrams were being rolled across the desert towards the Kuwait border and "shit,shit,shit" blasted from the wirless.

Charles swung into action, identified the nearest "ready to run" depot and asked me to move it to the site of the accident,Al Nijab , an oil installation, one hundred and fifty kilometers to the southeast from the dump. Al Nijab somehow became Al Nijaf and sixteen heavy loaders moved as I directed them on the radio. The lead driver was from my home town and we spoke the same language, so I was in constant touch, and they were moving south and responses matched the land marks.

Although on the same route up to a point,the convoy took the wrong turn and reached Al Nijaf,more than three hundred kilometers away from AL Nijab. These desert oil installations had almost similar names , land marks and the terrain looked the same and though we could have tracked their position , nobody did as nothing seemed wrong. Everything was an emergency and only very, very top priority sitautions got the attention from the communications command centre.The communication centre did.

It was mayhem after three hours,the projected time for the convoy to report. Any way , three hundred miles away, the convoy was hit by a blinding sandstorm which lasted several hours and by the time crawlers cleared the raod ,a good ten hours had passed and when the tanks crossed the oil slick,it was a 24.00 hrs. It raised the tank comandant's hackles.

The papers were fetched and validation had not been done! The first entry, Al nijab looked like Al nijaf , the second entry was al nijaf and third confirmation entry was al nijaf, which was mine. The rule was that the second person had to connect it to the earth's grid coordinates before confirmation .

Sometimes,in emergency sitautions, these were done after the things arrived at the place as nobody had time to go through these processes and goof ups were celebrated if it didn't cause to much disruption. But here, the officer in charge came back by copter and kicked out all Lambertin staff involved. Adrian escaped, but two Englishmen above me and I were cermoniously demoted to 'mess haul', driving food to bases.

Whenever Charles crossed my path he would draw imaginary grid lines in air and mark a point in air.....

" I am gonna sit there.. and don't send mafood to my mama in albertsville."

Charles sometimes talked like a black man, in jest, but I have never ever been with a person who spoke with such precision and diction. You could see what he was saying, so lucid and clear ,bereft of any slang,but for the American accent and he used his communication skills to such effect that it left hardly any scope for misinterpretation. He was aware that this was one of my rare mistakes and that too not solely mine. Anyhow we were to catch up soon, in Kuwait,after the war.

The war was not without lighter moments and always not so serious without any fun and there were many moments of mirth when elaborate practical jokes were staged.. In fact I had acted very casual when the angry tank commander had blown in to kick ass, thinking it was Charles plan to scare us.

We were a loose gang and some soldiers were our friends . I have to have a word about them especially the black Americans among us. .They were so different from the stereotypes projected to us that they surprised me to the point of adulation .High school grads mostly, with an easy presence and fine manners, but without the cloying show that got under the skin. , sensitive enough to appreciate others, easy to touch and without any hesitation would hug a poor grubby mechanic for a successful repair job done. Parties and late night bashes were enlivened by their vibrant talents. Dancing and singing came to them without practice, musical instruments were handled as if they were born with it and liked practical jokes that could make you laugh again and again in retrospect.

Lambertin hired trucks from local transporters. We had leased some heavy haulers from a Saudi gentleman and they broke down under the extra tonnage we loaded on them and repairs were his business and would sometimes take his own time getting about it. When we paged and killed him, he would sent one of his underlings with preposterous excuses or bribes to let him off without a penalty. One day we set him up. We sent word that the commander was so pleased that he wanted to honor him with a badge for exemplary services.

He came in fully decked and an orderly received him and bought him to Charles , behind whom five heavily armed men in uniform and war paint on their face stood to ramrod attention. . He came in to receive the honor, his head tilted upwards ,chin out, arching eyebrows with eyes looking sideways and fiddling his balls through his robe. That was a custom in this land, checking whether his male appendage had loosened itself from it’s moorings or was in free fall.

There was a single chair opposite ‘Charles Commander’, a title that existed nowhere, and he motioned the Saudi gentleman to sit. No words were spoken. I was called in and demurely gave him a file from which the ‘commander’ drew out enlarged pictures of the broken down trucks and clipped it on a board. At the same time, somebody lowered a noose in front of his face from the roof truss. First the man’s face shot a crimson red and then retracted and flit like a harried cock , gurgling sounds like “bluock..… goluck… aloaraghhhh escaped from his throat and made his first mistake,he didn’t wait for the question but ran for the door,which drew the men in war paint and two more soldiers stood with lethal weapons to shoot him down. Saudis are mortally scared of Americans and always believed they could shoot and kill anybody. What followed was straight slapstick.

First he hiked his robe so high,exposing his bare behind and dangling balls and tried to jump through , failing which he dived and tried to crawl between the soldiers’ legs and when he got to the end, one sat on him. The next sound was a croak followed by a bray of absolute terror ,a cow led to slaughter, that brought in the real security guards. They yanked him up , hooked him by his armpits and they hung him the air between them , his eyes now shone like a rat caught in a trap. He desperately tried to explain, cringed , entreating them by furiously moving his face left and right but they hauled him away..

For a moment we were caught unawares,Charles was slightly concerned as the security guys were not brought into the ambit, so we ran after them. . Fear shot from his eyes when he saw us running towards him ,he twisted and somersaulted a full circle in air to face us again. terror seeped from every pore in his body and he cried bubbubooo, we couldn’t stop laughing and my stomach ached and I bent double.
The security guards let him go. I don’t know whether he ever complained, but once, his assistant asked me what we had done to him.

“Why, what happened” I asked

“No Sir, from that day onwards he is behind the curtain and peeping out through the window”. He thought he had genuinely escaped execution.

Three men, two westerners and an arab sat in armless chairs with castor wheels, which they used as a vehicle to traverse a long table, at the end of which a row of bins were kept. .

"Passport and papers" the first man asked and scanned it .

"Can you read and write English" asked the second man, a Jordanian,I think.

I said yes, and my papers and passport were passed on to the third man, an American.

He looked at the passport and looked me up and down. He zoomed his chair to the far end and put my papers in a bin marked hired. From the second 'he retrieved a mass of papers and entered my name flipping through the passport "Mr. Pokyratsrat,you are hired, you'll have to go back to India and come back.Fill in the rest,get a police report from your local police station and you have 10 days" and marked the date across the top of the first page.

I had a job and the letter heads proclaimed "Lambertin Logistics" and just below it said ,"defence contractors", followed by several blank spaces and then the fine print.

During the build up and in the aftermath of the war, I worked for Lambertin at dumps in some of the several huge prefabricted sheet metal buiding that dotted the desert roads.Huge containers arrived at the dumps with army supplies marked with symbols, class, sub class and Lambertin managed the logistics.

The lynchpins of the operations were officers of US army 'support command' and headed operations at highest level from where instructions streamed down to an army of civil contractors who coordinated work and organised the redistribution . I was a supervisor for Lambertin working with a sub contractor to whom we off loaded 2 classes of supplies in containers into bays inside the prefabricted buildings in predetermined ramps where sub contractors broke bulk and repacked them as smaller units and then we moved the repacked rations,clothig and personal demand items in containers to marked forward destinations . Within two week , my operations were so slick , that I started having visitors. Adrian, to whom I reported ,liked the egyptian board business, and it worked almost flawlessly both for Lambertin and for the subcontactor,that I was moved up to the main station.

The central logistic station bristled with activity and the huge tower lights made day and night indistinguihable.This was no small operation , Lambertin had two thousand ,sixteen wheeled trucks ,hauling in and out supplies that could have fed and clothed India for a year.I became an expert at the business of redistribution of material to their destinations.The markings ran from one to ten with clear symbols for classes of goods and within that, each class had subclasses, denoted in alphabets. The walls of my station had cement boards behind every table with assignments ,clear intructions ,reminders and daily routine marked on these boards.I was a natural at it more so because I had a manual which was like a text book of army supply corps and was using a computer for planning .Though mix ups happened ,with baluchi drivers understanding instuctions backwards and grenades arrived at food stations and were almost were packed as pineapples, but there were few complaints and turn arounds became more streamlined.

This was the turning point of my life.

One day, a group arrived at my station, led by a well built young and tall army office, neither too black neither white. It was a rare easy afternoon and I was sitting with my leg up on the table, with my back to the door, reading Ayn Rand. The manager, Adrian,to whom I reported , tapped me and I whirled around to see concerned faces at other tables. I wasn't sure myself,hardly anybody came around except Adrian. Generally high level visits where when large screwups happened throwing schedules out of gear. Not that it didn't happen, it was almost the order of the day, but not within our compound.

"So How do you manage this" asked the officer. And I explained that I was using a computer programme on which I worked out assigments and how I disseminated the info and explained the boards. He listened carefully and then he asked me whether I could do something similar for him and explained the job to me. I said yes.

Double break. I had a college degree in geography( "jografy,my dad had asked) and after college, I had worked as a supervisor in a construction company and though I didn't know much, I was technically adequate and could handle plans and could easily draw up quantities of materails for construction.I landed in Kuwait expecting a job in that field , but ended up counting notes. my new assignment was to identify construction material and sent them to planned locations in the desert.

This black officer was no ordinary jerk. Mr.Charles Lambert McNair was a master warrant officer, CWO,level 5, an engineer and later I was to learn that he was one of the first master warrant officers to gain that rank ,coming out from Fort Ruckus and was highly regarded for his management capabilities

Two days later I was coordinating the movement of cement, steel and prefabricated structures ,sitting in his station, though still attached to Lambertin.I have to mention Adrian, when the CWO had asked for a person to handle the job he had in mind,Adrian had brought him me, so that he could see what was being done.I moved up and the salary was close to a four thosand five hundred tax free dollars a month. Sadly,one of the few civilian casualities, Adrian died in a mishap towards the end of desert storm.

Suadi Arabia was sand, the army a shame and except for a grand shack at the entrance of the king's palace, their army facilities were laughable. Men in full regalia with ribbons and medals acted important and did nothing , but hid behind the first American when somebody cried "saddaaaam". So Americans had to build everthing from the scratch, especially for 'operation desert shield' which they were planning to put in place

We struck a friendship both personal and professional that until that brat put his rudder into my spokes, was one ride to heights that I had never imagined I would scale.
.

Permalink Edit Delete no comment

Amman.The Indian Embassy. The guttural sounds rising from beneath the counter were from a wrestling match between two men driven to madness by the embassy staff.. Nobody particularly seemed to bother except a woman in a glitzy saree, who, with one hand on her hip, was trying to prize them apart with a plastic ruler, which broke in half.. In India, real fights rarely reached the ‘filmi dishum-dishum’ levels, but instead protagonists preferred to grapple down each other, the vanquisher being the one who got to sit on the belly of the van-squished . Presently one of them sat on the belly of the other and emerged victorious with a bit of yellow paper held high in the air. A coupon for a free flight home .

The queue may be uniquely brit, but we’ve taken it further and added dimensions to the ‘Q’, like it could start with four abreast and run back and fan out into a pyramid with a base bigger than the one at Giza, or wherever and was inversely proportional to the size of the hole at the counter and once you got your hand in , you had to be a Houdini to get it out and there were plenty of times you had pulled your hand out with something stuffed in it, to realize it was somebody else’s. The second was the token,elaborate punched coins to hastily made cardboard squares, which didn’t promise you anything other than a right to meander about and come back and join the ‘Q” when you got more bored than standing in the queue . When the tokens ran out, you had to come back the next day and stand in line for the token that gave you the right to join the real queue and that’s where fights broke out.

The token was not so sacrosanct that you couldn’t try your luck to get ahead. First you cased the line for somebody who looked malleable and sidled up to him, who would instantly emit angry signals and you had had to use your eyes and face to convey your urgency and if it the facial messaging got through, you slid your palm in between , then inched your shoulder in until your whole body was tightly wedged between two extremely uncomfortable men, but having got so far ,you were in no mood to acknowledge or show gratitude, but stood motionless like thief behind a cupboard. The maneuver worked, but sometimes the counter slammed shut just after you ,leaving the guy behind no option other than grapple you, the interloper, for what was rightfully his. Losing the fight was not bad as you didn’t deserve your gain , but what tore you apart was your wife,her observations about your manhood for giving up the prize and then for losing the fight.This was one such.

Fights were common and occurred often.By now, after more than a month of occupation, the people who thronged the Indian consulate at Amman were poor labourers who had jobs which fetched them money and food and had fled Kuwait when rumors of imminent attack by the fearsome Americans whittled down their resolve to stay and now were running scared. It was going to be world war three, ‘russia and china’ were friends of Iraq and therefore on his side and the final war of worlds was to take place on the sands of Arabia .kurushektra,They ran.

That epic battle took place two months from then,'Umm -al- marik',the promiised mother of all battles,where friends and enemies had joined together and turned around in operation overdo and soundly thrashed the mother, so much so the promised umm-al -marik had turned into Umm- al -fickered, the worst offender being Syria, , saddam’s brother- in -socialist arms reaching for the great pan arabian Islamic- socialist alternative to the sultanates, who had literally ficked him from behind.

Jordan was a thieves’ haven, and my money had almost run out by the time I reached Amman from Tebril . There was one single flight out everyday and I had a coupon for travel a week from that day. One person whom I had been in constant touch during the war was Darren in France and he was link to my home in India. Earlier, once when I called him from Kuwait,I had told him about the stash of cash and I suggested that I would take Ibrahem into confidence and retrieve the money, that he should somehow come to Kuwait and deposit the money in a swiss bank. He had immediately told me to keep away.

“Bastard , shithead ,crazy,fuck off”.. Being a dickhead, his vocabulary was very very limited….“there is always some body else watching and you’re dead meat….. Besides your mother’s been calling me and making my life hell , leave that fucking place now.”

He was a prick and would carry tales from home to me as if my parents and sisters were dying of broken heart. He had badgered me into leaving Kuwait and when I called him from Amman to send me some money , he laughed his huge laugh and mocked me in my native language ….
‘
“hhahahahahah…”Thoti’ poi kakkoosinnu thondra”( scavenger, go fetch your money from that shithouse.)” alluding to the money I had dumped in the septic tank. I had kicked his butt several times before with real vengeance , but the next one was going to be more than that.

The money arrived at the Indian embassy and the bastard had sent me such a measly sum that if I weren’t careful, it could be spent on a cup of coffee.
On the fifth day of my wait, while browsing a local English broadsheet, I saw an ad. “NOW HIRING.American defence contractor, must know English”, with an address and dates for an interview. I found a taxi and got there in time.It was the longest interview of my life, eight and a half hours of waiting and two minutes of interview.

"You know why I didn't shoot you ".
"No. I said no.
"Ah, because I knew you truly believed what you wrote on that banner and was not subterfuge". He was referring to the days when I had knelt with the banner in front of his station.

Jamail Asheri Ibrahem had genuine regard for Indians and India and found us fascinating people for the way we approached life despite all, having found a democracy in it's truest sense, the freedom we enjoyed , the tolerence and acceptance of other religions ,the courage and power to build a nation where poverty stared in it's most visible form. He was no sentimental fool like me, but a volunteer,a battle hardened soldier ,a leader of men who had fought in some of the fiercest battles of the century .When Iraq launched a brutal attack on Iran in late eighties, towards the end of the war to recapture some of the territories they had lost in the initial stages of that war, he had led from the front and some times , when time permitted, over a glass,he recounted some of his heroics and would grab me by my collar and shake me to death and say "you are my friend".

For him,Kuwait was a cinch. He was a commandant in RGFC,the elite republican gaurds, and his motorised infantry division , The Al Faw ,was the first to stream in and establish control over the northern part of Kuwait.Besides war, he loved to listen to Hindi film
music- the soulful pining of lovers seeking solace with unforgetable haunting lines of poetry set to lilting melodies that tugged at his heart strings,he said.

" Ah wah,wah" marne tho, aisa he marna " in hindi,.....he wanted to die listening to them.

I told him that I wanted to go.But he would brush me away
I insisted and one day he said that I could go. Proir to that ,I had one more job to complete, take the money out. I lied to him that I had left my passport at my place on Jahra roard. He put me on an army jeep and Jahra road simply didn't exist. Not in the real sense, the entire area was taken over by the Iraqi army as the highway was strategically positioned. Most of the residents had been driven away and houses converted into army barracks. The gaurd at the entrance to the street , questioned the driver and asked us to fuck off.

Well, I did that and this time I travelled in the comfort of a military vehicle to Baghdad, and then to Amman. I had very little money with me, a few thousand dollars that I had taken on the day we moved it from from the safe for the great trip home with our bags of money. It didn't happen, and I was careful to keep the amount in the belt lining of my jeans. The funniest part of the whole war was the kuwaiti dinar.One of the world's most stable currencies was now worthless and you could use a pile of big notes to wipe your ass and still feel not contented. Good thing was ,it could be exchanged for Iraqi money, which was useless elsewhere, but good enough to pay a taxi driver a ransom to take me to the Jordan border. I reached Amman, but the war had got into my veins and in Amman I found a job as a civilian help at a temporary base in SaudiArabia near Jeddah. The money was four times my previous salary and the assigment was at a army dump, where the Americans were setting up a logistics base for troop supplies coming through Red Sea.

On a January day, at the end of UN mandate to Saddam to disappear, the American forces started their offensive and bombed Iraq to rubble, strafing strategic targets with such precision that somebody joked the last big blast was actually saddam's mighty fart. Then a month later,in February,the combined UN forces moved in from south and routed the Iraqis in the ground war, slaughtering them on Jahra road, 'the highway of death' as it became famously to be known, while the defeated army tried to flee with their loot. Iraq was humbled and made to pay in many ways. Even now ,as I am writing this.

I remember a moment which seems poignant now. When I told Ibrahem to let me go, he asked me.."
"What for,why? this is Iraq, your land, we need you all to run this place and how will we do that if you run away"....."We will make this place just like Bombay with lots of fun and pretty girls" and gave me a sly wink. Kuwait was theirs,forever.

You will be surprised when I say this, the republican gaurds respected women and trangressions weren't tolerated unlike the regular army, who were mainly conscripts and for them civilians were just slick holes to whet their sexual appetites.These guys were different and seasoned fighters and could have taken the battle to the Americans, if only the hadn't hesistated in taking Saudi Arabia. This strategic lapse gave the American and UN forces the time to set up bases in Saudi and that spelt the end of Saddam's Kuwait campaign.The Iraqis were thouroghly routed in the ensuing onslaught,but I am conviced that man to man , these republican gaurds could have put up an even fight, but for the massive fire power of UN forces from air that destroyed their ability to react.I felt sorry for Ibrahem, a warrior, a man and a friend whose duty was to fight and die fighting.

By early morning I reached Sabah, it's southern end, and looked out for people I knew. The day was spent with nothing achieved as the iraqi check points were clogged with a million cars backed up far into every street that progress became impossible and people were caught in gridlocks from which the could not get out,which led to two problems. They could either leave the car behind with their belongings or hit the road with their precious luggage and get robbed. The search was futile except for vague replies from faces which somehow failed to connect.

In fact , nobody was allowed to leave. A permit had to be acquired from the local commandant to get out of Kuwait and he was in no mood to immediately oblige. He had plenty of other things to do. Three days went by and hope was ebbing and food was running short. A few thousand countrymen of mine had found refuge in a school nearby and were desperately trying to get the permit and as usual they tried to bribe the soldiers,which brought on unreasonable demands that most gave up and returned defeated.

The commandant's office was just of the corner where four roads met and the area was cleared off all traffic, the Iraqi army patrolled the main streets and all major arteries were free and clear and military vehicles
traversed the expanse at great speed taking soldiers and supplies towards southern border where the Iraqi army was poised to reach. We didn't have a chance in hell to go anywhere.

After waiting for two days,in the morning,clad in shorts, I knelt down at one corner of the intersection, opposite the commandant's office, holding a banner. I wrote

"PRAISE BE TO ALLAH"
"WE are Indians and we want your permission to leave".

I knelt the whole of first day,the sun mercilessily beating on me,I persevered despite the extreme discomfort and pain. The blistering heat of the day and the cold nights cut into my flesh that next day I looked like a lump of spoilt meat. Violet blisters covered my back and itched , the the sweat crept in between the blisters to burn my raw flesh.The day drew to a close and the second and third day , I was still there. Now and the I would be passed a bottle of water but I refused to eat. A few others , similarly clad, joined me the third day day and late in the evening ,a soldier approached and took me to the commandant.

"You think you are gandhi?" and lifted my chin with a small poiter he was holding and said plainly.. "you are lucky that I didn't kill you"

I was so emotionally drained that I fell and sobbed at his feet. I felt two hands lifting me and sitting me in a chair. An hour passed , somebody brought in a glass of juice which clogged my throught as it tried to slip by the dry lining of my gullet. It send me into a spasm of coughing but I recovered to face him

"What do you want"he asked in English.

'A passage out with your permission"

"You cannot afford my permission" he said

"I'll try"

"Tax.It's two thousand dollars for every permit"

"Will you allow me to ask my people whether they have that kind of money with them now"

He shrugged and let me go. Dismay and pain lined the expectant faces when I went back and announced the deal,as not many had that kind of money and those who had weren't ready to reveal it.I clapped once and stood up .Here was the turning point in my life, people listened to me. I calmly explained to them that we could make a collective offer of money, gold and anything of immediate value which should be sizeable to tempt the commander and I would organise their permit to leave this goddam hell.

I went back and carefullly and clearly explained the circumstances, that most people barely had much , but could offer some cash,gold and jewellry in return for the permit.

He pursed his lips, looked around and put his face close to mine and said "I love Indians". The statement frightened me as it came without a prologue and I thought that he liked to kill Indians.It was not so,we were fortunate as he had spent considerable time in India , as a officer trainee for advanced training in our military academy after passing out from one of the elite military academy in Iraq.

Over the next few days I arranged the evacuation of a thousand relieved countrymen, drawing up teams and planning every detail of the trip across the desert through Irag to Tebril in Jordan and from there to Amman.We had plenty of shopkeepers among us, teams were send to search for food, especially dry fruits and canned water and for cars with enough petrol for the thousand mile journey to Jordan. Children were enlisted to write down tags, phone numbers and names and addresses of relatives in India and the convoys left with clear instructions to run together and not to over speed or try things that were not necessary. The lead car carried an Indian flag ,with banners clearly stating our mission in Arabic.I was to later learn that it was no easy task and the trip took anywhere between four to five days, stopping at refugee camps and sometimes falling victims to armed thieves, but except for two small children, the journey though arduous , all reached India.

Those two weeks I would walk, or ride any where as if some omnipresent power was hovering over me ,guiding me, allowing me to accomplish a mission that I had taken upon myself .It was getting easier and in time, I had my own men writing the permits, another man collecting the "tax", and I had running conversation with the commandant about silly hindi movies , which he loved. Those two weeks flew by and then after a month of less frenetic activity, and I was getting used to the war ,or rather ,the occupation, I left.

I had to get back before evening as the egyptian would arrive with his plan to get the money out of kuwait. This time I rode a small bicycle and covered the distance without much trouble, though I had to get down at a few intersections and roll the cycle. I was in shorts and body bare which led to some curious looks but other than that the journey was un eventful. On the way I looked in one of our places where we kept a line of safes, which had been thoroughly ranscaked.

We ran a niche business ,where our clietiele were uneducated expatriate labourers and service guys, mostly from Egypt, Somalia, Pakistan and Bangla desh besides many Indians,handling and running their money both legally and illegally back to their homes.
Most of these people lived in hovels ,10 to 15 in a single room ,and had no real place to keep money and valuables safely. As a part of our business we had established slew of safes,nondescript rooms with safe lockers, from Jahra to Alhamadi, where lockers could be hired for a small sum. Our business was a circle. We found customers by tapping construction sites, oil establishments, sea ports and domestic helps and we sold them air plane tickets , foriegn exchange,and insurance, and represented them at police stations, typed letters for petitions and offered other small services and also rented out lockers to them .Money transfers were on percentage and never exceeded 3percent, which was our main business.

Most of the lockers elsewhere had suffered the same fate, but here, they were smashed and their innards scoured for anything of value, leaving behind papers, letters and trampled photographs of wives and children, their already emaciated bodies suffering further mutilation and indignation as thieves who arrived late pissed on them to avenge their loss. I remmember one picture, taken somewhere in Pakistan, just before the man set out for the journey to Kuwait.

A striding photograph of scrawny man in huge construction boots and an oversize suit in the background of a bus station, surrounded by a gaggle of happy little faces, while an extremely pregnant women,probably his wife, carrying a child, strode just behind him, her face covered and open enough for a peep , but more than that, the picture was clicked just as she was reaching out for his shoulder, her long fingers blurred in action as if it was a desperate lunge to keep the man home. I always wondered whether he made it back.

I made it back to our place and until night there was no sign of the egyptian. By midnight , on that day the worse of our fears started to unravel,as men and women were hauled over to police stations, storm troopers blasted their way into souks and banks, rich homes were raided and women brutally raped and horrible cries emanted from deep recesses of private residences . I had to leave, go far away from my place before I could be identified and taken to the police station for interrogation. I ran to the basement, retrieved the bags of money behind the generator and dumped them in the septic tank behind our building andsecured it by dumping waste, odd bits and ends on top of the man hole and ran and ran and ran.

He came back triumphant,

'Palestinian shits are busy, playing with Iraqi dicks,
so let's get this out somewhere else."

We were situtated between jahra road and airport road on a street first off the main road which gave us access to both the port and the airport corridor , where people stopped by for exchanging money or for the other financial services . The area was predominantely palestenian with an equal number of north africans as the Jahra road connected as far as Jeddah in Saudi Arabia and Amman in Jordan. The palestenians were crooks,clever thieves and were involved in skullduggery and the road provided them an easy route to escape after pulling off their scams. The egyptian hated and always warned me not to trust them , even if they offered their mother. So, he looked around for palesteians, under the roof, below the window cill and between wall plaster, and when he was sure that we weren't being watched , we started packing the cash.

Five hundred thousand in bills easily fit in ten small yellow canvas bags that we used to ferry cash. We bundled it in plasic wrappers and moved it to the basement, and hid it inside and behind an enclosed power generator.

The deal was I would get four bags , while he would take six as he was entitled to a larger share because he was more greedier than me. I didn't care, Iwas thinking of getting out before saddam ordered for poison gas.

The third day, we went into the streets and surprisingly the Iraqi army seemed to be gentle, waving away people from main thouroughfares, while commandants whisked by in jeeps on important missions.

"Let me see if I can arrange a car, we could go south and then cross into saudi arabia." Little did he know that all exit routes were sealed and the only way out was through Iraq. Any way, he dressed down to his shorts and went to find a contact somewhere in jaber al ali. He said he would be back by night fall and advised me to hang around but not to venture inside the building.

Kuwait is a maze of back streets, and though I was not familiar with them, I knew by moving eastward and a liile south, I could reach Sabah, where my cousins and many other Indians lived. I couldn't trace my cousin as they had left a day earlier to some undisclosed destination. But there were plenty of other faces, faces of resignation waiting for someone, something, that would somehow show them a way out of the terror
and apprehension they felt, being in a land where no one would defend them, in a land where they had no rights other than earn money, a land forsaken by their own people, a hopeless land in the hands of tyrants whose mood swings could easily finish the lives of a few thousand with no questions asked.

I knew I had to do something and I knew I could. Most people just wanted to get out, but nobody knew how. I did.
,

I have to go back a bit. It's been many years after the war and looking back at those days and reflecting on that gives me a sense of elated happiness, of power,a feeling of invincibility like some mythical warrior who cannot be killed as the gods had graced him so. I was one of them, the army and their bullets mere trifles as I set about braving the war and taking charge of confused and desperate people and organising their passage across the dry deserts of arabia into Jordan.

Before all that happened ,on the second night, we decided to take the money out. Problem was ,vultures had already arrived and were poised to pounce on any body with so much as a hand bag with them. This was just a preliminary to the real loot that happened later as the Iraqis dug in. Aided by palestenian informers, and with a pair of clippers to wrench finger nails from it's soft flesh, they had set about their task in earnest, leaving behind memories of hell on whom the pains were inflicted.

However, they were yet to reach us and we planned our heist. First we had to prize the locker open.The locker was actually a room made of brick and cement with a heavy grill gate, something like you would find in a prison . A row of metal cupborads lined the walls, in which we kept the cash , airplane travel tickets , insurance papers and other documents that were important. Fortuntely ,breaking in was easy as we knocked down the toilet wall adjacent to the locker and tried to creep in by pushing away one of the cupboards. That took a huge effort as we were faced with one with a heavy load of papers. The greatest effort the egyptian had ever put in was getting up from his bed and cursed and farted while we held our shouders against the heavy coupboard and applied our might to move it just enough to crawl in between.No way it did not give an inch Meanwhile , every two seconds,the egyptian would crawl upstairs to look out, leaving me to get the fucking cupboard out of the way. I was about to give up ,then I had a brilliant idea. I hauled in a high stool and bracing myself against the toilet wall in a jacknife position , pressed with my legs against the cupboard and dealt a heavy thrust with my two legs. The metal cupborad toppled over with the noise of a thousand bombs, scaring the egyptian so much that he vanished.

Saddam's republican elite, the prong in the thrust into Kuwait, swept in and everyone disappeared.
Chaos and uncertainity descended as hapless families hid, frantic and crazed with fear as they saw thier entire lives crumble before their eyes.

Then as the army spread it's vicious tentacles ,it's vice like grip over Kuwait complete, the expatriates and local families with their children were gathering all they could and were fleeing to nowhere,each street a dead end,each road a road to hell. I walked into the street to see desperate men selling their souls to get out while thieves and opportunists rancaked the city.

The real sheiks, especially those who ruled had escaped in comfort, others drove through in fifth gear towards south for refuge in Saudi Arabia. Those who escaped ,escaped the terror of witnessing the invading army's might and as their menacing footfall revebrated when it crunched into the tarmac,it was a
portend of things to come.

Kuwait was subdued , then the phalanx moved to the saudi border, where they rattled their sabre at the house of sauds who quavered and hollered for American help, which was graciously extended. I have my own theory about the whole war and the strategic intentions of Americans ,and had argued about that with allcomers, which at this point of time looks to have borne true. I had always maintained that oil was not what America was trying to control or take. The powerful transnational oil cartel , led by American oil interests ,were laying the foundation for raising the price of oil as the economics of production and supply was negatively impacting on the margins of processors, while the producers were not in the least affected . Using the army as the enforcers, I knew the extortion would gradually begin and the price of oil would eventually reach the bench mark the oil cartel had set.

I can seriously argue my contention with facts and figures, the subtle fascism of modern day governmemts and the power of cartels, who seemingly respond to market forces , but in reality set the terms where the consumer does not have the final word.

That is digressing from the main story.So.......

The next two days, we hid in the basement. Except for the crunch of boots and the grinding of tanks as they rolled overhead and crashing bombs, no human voice could be heard. Not even a crying child.He was sitting on a concrete wedge a feet away,weighed down by heavy thoughts, his palms supporting his chin and came up to say something

"What if we......."and held back . He seemed in two minds and was constantly fidgeting, often his hands would dig deep into the pockets of his robe as if ensuring his dick was in the right place.The ennui , keeping watch , the constricted place with no one else around to make a real conversation and an erotic genius by my side,thinking deep and profound thoughts by stimulating his balls ,was making the situation unbearable. I was wary of the egyptian as his close proximity to me and the confinement between the narrow walkways and lack of peering eyes would further encourage him , the war being there, and with no arabs around as it were, the basement would serve him as a good place to launch his own assault for my nether regions.

He had something to say"look....." I ummm"....see"

"Look and see what"...... your fucking dick?" I was getting progressively angry and watching him made me even more so. Bastard , here was a real war happening and threatening to blow us to bits and this dickhead was getting sexed. I lost the respect I had for him and hissed,

"Look here asshole, I not ready neither will I ever be, and if you ever show that to me, I'll twist your balls until it comes out of your nose' .
The verbal lashing had the desired effect and he let me in peace for some time. When he started again , he seemed to be in a pensive mood.

".Those saddami shits will bugger us"...."take it from me they'll rape and rob, bastards.... I have seen those republicans, fucking shit in gutters of Iran,shitcuntsbastards..they'll fuck everybody"

I was so tensed by his earlier malicious intent and couldn't hide my sarcasm .
"..I thought you enjoyed that ,so why complain ,spread your coptic arse and they'll make you very happy, imagine the joy of a thousand dicks up your......"

"You have misunderstood my intentions, and I'm sorry "

"Oh shut up"...I said and turned to read by a small light that burned behind a row of control panels and drifted into a fitful sleep where I felt the war, it's sounds piercing through my mind and setting of wild nightmares from which I could not wake up,dreams from which I could not find release even though I knew I was dreaming .I woke up feeling eyes staring at me . The egyptian stood at the head and had the look of a famished beggar who had suddenly seen food.

"Please , you judged me wrong....I'm sorry if I've made a wrong impression,but I've something very important.... which I hope ....." he looked around, searching with his eyes for somebody who wasn't there.Then he went to the head of the stairs, disappeared for a while and came back with his cheeks flushed.
"The bastards are all over the place" he said and sat down on the ledge and sat with his head lolling against the wall.He would slip into his thoughts, while sometimes he would turn and give me a long look and look away if I caught him doing that.The war had extinguished the carnal fires in his groin and he seemed to be contemplating and it looked as if he wanted to confide but felt diffident and hesistant. I was scared, but at the end of two days I asked him what was biting his ass.-

'there is a lot of money in the safe' he said,

"So what? it is not your fucking money to be so bothered, if they want it, they will come and get it"......."Let's try to get out of this place without being killed."

The egyptian gave me an increduluous look and shook his head as if I had something incomprehensible.

"I... I... never seen somebody so naive...... believe me we have two choices, one, we can get out of here in our underwears and hope we will not be shot, or remain here and get tortured by the Iraqi bastards..... They'll soon come around looking for guys like you who are sitting in a pile of cash, take whatever you have and then pull your nails off for more which is not there."

Now it dawned on me.I had always imagined that the skeiks would take their money away but he knew better as had seen war in Iran and knew what war was, the marauding army looked for treasure ,money ,and women and they ransacked and raped their way through conquered territory.

There was almost five hundred thousand in the safe , mostly dollars and pounds, and now it was anybody's money.Who ever got to it first,got to keep it.

WAR.
I ran to the door and looked out. Something furious and fast rammed a tower a few hundred yards away and burst , few bodies arched in the air and flew backwards and slammed into the overhang on the side of a building, splaterring body parts in all directions. Then another monster streaked in with an ear splitting whine and slammed behind a row of buildings nearby . A resounding crash followed, and an instant later,flying debris pierced the air ,a cumulous orange fire ball spread and expanded rapidly and from within huge tongues of flame of yellow blue and green leapt high into the sky . In the distance more flares lit up the night sky and brilliant points of light from crashing bombs flashed against the horizon . Elsewhere, in the wake of dying fires,greyblack smoke spread and descended and soon the sky was black.
Kuwait was being pounded into submission by Saddam Hussein.

AUGUST 2 , 1990, before mid night .I do not have the ability ,nor the language or the prose to describe how I felt in those moments. Dosteovhisky could have, but whatever ,it was beyond any emotion I had ever experienced. It was not just fear, it was a giving up on life,a kind of submission coupled with selfpity and sadness of unfathomable depth. I didn't know whether I was crying , but my throat gripped as images of sorrow of my mother and sisters on my death flashed in the deep reccesses of the mind. Suddenly my mind shut and blackness spread.

I felt something cold on my face and water dripped into my eyes . I looked around and saw the egyptian crawling away from me. He looked back and motioned me like wise. Glass splinters lay strewn on the floor and I cut myself badly as I crawled rapidly towards the back of the room.There we slouched and descended the stairs to the basement at the rear of the builing where the air conditioning plant and power lines lay and hid ourselves.The egyptian smelt of raw shit.

The war took us by surprise though the war itself was not. Saddam had been massing troops on the border and he had serious issues with Kuwait,
especially regarding it's soveriegnity, debts, cross drilling,price of oil and a host of other grievances which Saddam felt was legitimate. Though the reigning Sheik of Kuwait was wary of Iraq, he had counted that American influence in the region would avert war.