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.
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