San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Guest worker navigates Dubai as war looms
As her family’s main source of income, the 25-year-old narrator of Tania Malik’s new novel, “Hope You Are Satisfied,” works long hours for a tourism company 1,400 miles from her home in India.
Riya is never without a state-of-the-art communications tool — a beeper clipped to the waist of her jeans — but with warships massing in local waters, missing a call isn’t her chief concern. “I wondered if 1991 was the year we were all going to die,” she muses.
“Hope You Are Satisfied” revisits an extraordinarily tense period from the recent past. The Tiburon writer’s second novel is set in Dubai, the wealthy Persian Gulf city in the United Arab Emirates, amid the run-up to the Gulf War of 1990-91. It’s a wise and irreverent book that highlights the challenges facing so-called guest workers in cities marketed as glitzy adult playgrounds.
With thousands of American troops arriving in the gulf, Riya fears the conflict between the United States and Iraq will ignite a regional conflagration. Meanwhile, she tumbles into a perilous personal quagmire.
Typically, Riya’s duties are dull and somewhat demeaning. One of the book’s fertile story lines concerns the exploitation of foreign laborers like Riya and her colleagues, South Asians and Africans who come for service industry jobs in Dubai and other United Arab Emirates cities.
As Malik writes, guest workers can earn three times more than they’d make back home — this is what lured Riya, who’s had to support her younger sister and their mother since her father left for an
other woman. But to secure their jobs, workers often surrender basic freedoms. Riya’s passport is locked in the company safe, preventing her from going home until her work visa expires.
A sense of wry detachment helps Riya weather the job’s humiliations. When a snooty vacationer says her dealings with Riya’s employer, Discover Arabia Tours, have been the worst customer service experience she’s ever endured, Riya helps placate the client — and then delivers a droll aside: “It was rare to find oneself sharing a seminal moment of another human’s life.”
Riya’s efficient manner impresses
a shady import-export tycoon named César. When he needs a low-profile courier to shepherd a package containing unspecified contraband from one airport to another, he
picks Riya. The power imbalance prevents her from saying no, but she musters the courage to request a cash bonus.
If César agrees to pay her a fair sum, Riya might get her closer to her ultimate goal — immigrating to America, land of “maximum opportunity.” But her mission is extraordinarily risky. A convicted smuggler, Malik writes, can face “execution by firing squad.”
Riya’s is a vividly depicted social circle. For fellow guest workers like Grace, Riya’s roommate and fellow Indian, and Freddy, a sage Zimbabwean, harmless pursuits — drinking a beer, say, or having a premarital fling — are forbidden (prohibitions they sometimes flout).
Malik’s Dubai is at a key moment in its remarkable oil-money-funded transformation. Once “a few mud huts and date palms” surrounding an old fortress, the city in the 1990s is becoming a “glossy” metropolis. Its new golf course suggests “that enough money could subvert even Mother Nature’s best intentions.”
At times, Malik’s dialogue is stiff, especially when her characters impart specifics about the war. Iraq “now controls … almost 20 percent of the world’s oil,” one character says; it “has the fifth-largest army in the world,” another says.
But if a handful of these conversations feel inauthentic, Malik’s novel is built on a solid core, with gutsy characters whose existential worries remind American readers that the Gulf War wasn’t just a TV spectacle.
According to a rumor Riya hears, “we should jump into a bathtub filled with charcoal and water” if a chemical weapon is deployed. To which Riya has the perfect deadpan reply: “For Grace and me, it was a moot point from the start. We didn’t have a bathtub.”