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.
