Feminism in a Labour Camp

The first thing that hit me was the smell of scrambled eggs sizzling on an open tawa, drifting across a stretch of open ground somewhere on the edges of Dubai. I remember feeling a quiet sense of wonder — like I'd stumbled onto a whole world that existed a few kilometers from my apartment, running entirely on its own rhythm, one I'd never bothered to notice before.

A friend of mine had told me, months earlier, that when he first arrived in Dubai he'd lived in a labor camp. He still went back sometimes, just to see people. I'd asked if I could come along one day, more out of curiosity than anything else. Eventually he called and said he was visiting that evening, and I could join.

We got there as the light was fading. He introduced me to a few of his friends, and we walked over to what looked like an open field. People sat in clusters of four or five, like a picnic — most of them gathered around a single shared bottle, laughing about something I'd missed. A couple of small gas stoves had a tawa balanced on top, where someone was frying up scrambled eggs and peanuts to sell for a few dirhams. Other vendors moved between the groups selling snacks and odds and ends. Nobody seemed to be in a hurry to be anywhere else, and there was an ease to the whole scene that was hard not to be drawn into.

One of the men in our group was in his fifties, quiet at first, but he warmed up as the evening went on. At some point he mentioned he was flying to India the next month.

"For a wedding?" I asked.

"My daughter's," he said. He had two — one already a graduate, the other an engineer. This one, the younger, was getting married. He hadn't gone to his older daughter's wedding years ago, he told me — he simply couldn't afford the trip and the wedding both, and he'd chosen to send the money home instead of spending it on himself. He said it plainly, without any self-pity, like it was just a fact of his life.

Then he started talking about his daughters properly, and something in his voice changed. He'd always pushed them to study, to work, to be able to stand on their own. His older daughter had stopped working after marriage, and I could hear that it still bothered him. He was hoping, this time, it would be different.

"I want them to be able to say no to anything," he said. "Not just to their husbands — to anyone. I want them to never need anyone's permission."

He was almost in tears saying it.

I sat there, genuinely shaken. Here was a man with almost no formal education, who'd spent thirty-odd years doing hard labor thousands of miles from home — and he held a vision of independence and dignity for his daughters that plenty of "educated," "modern" people I know would struggle to articulate as clearly. I'd walked in assuming I was the one who understood these ideas, and he was the one who taught me something about them.

You don't need privilege to be forward-thinking. You just need to have thought, honestly, about what you want for the people you love.