Five Lives: One Day in Bahrain

By Rohini Sunderam

Five Lives - One day in Bahrain'Five Lives - One day in Bahrain' is set in the year 2007, but it’s a story that could apply to almost any time. It traces the lives of five very different people, a housemaid from Sri Lanka; a municipal garbage truck driver from India; a Filipina hairdresser and beauty salon manager; a British banker, and a young Bahraini man.

The five prayer times that Muslims observe are used to punctuate the different periods in the day and the story’s action. Through the course of the day, we learn of the individuals’ lives and hopes until a point when they are all brought together and their lives intertwine.

Who connects with whom? Discover unsung heroes. This is an uplifting story that celebrates ordinary people in extraordinary ways.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Rohini Sunderam
• Release date: Aug 30, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370705337

Rohini Sunderam

Rohini Sunderam is a Canadian of Indian origin. After many years as an ex-pat living and working in the Kingdom of Bahrain, she now calls Port Coquitlam near Vancouver, Canada her home. While in Bahrain, for several years Rohini managed The Bahrain Writers' Circle, and Second Circle poetry group, and hosted a large number of poetry events. A semi-retired advertising copywriter, she has published four books: Corpoetry, Desert Flower: Five Lives One Day in Bahrain, (all previously published by Ex-L-Ence Publishing) and Twelve Roses for Love, a collection of short stories. Her poems have appeared in Dilliwali (Publisher Busra Alvi Razzak), Quesadilla & Other Adventures (2019), The Society of Classical Poets’ Journals VII & VIII. A short story was shortlisted in The Atlantis Short Story Contest (2013) published by Expanded Horizons, (2018). A CNF entry and Flash Fiction story were long-listed in separate WOW Women on Writing contests, Winner: Oapschat, U.K 2014. Her latest success is a short story published by The Missouri Review Fall 2022 issue (digital, print and audio).E: [e-mail] Twitter/ X: @Corpoetry Facebook: RohiniSunderamAuthor Instagram: rohinisunderam

Book preview

Five Lives - One Day in Bahrain

by

Rohini Sunderam

© 2016

Published by Ex-L-Ence Publishing at Smashwords.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. All the names characters, incidents, dialogue, events portrayed and opinions expressed in it are either purely the product of the author’s imagination or they are used entirely fictitiously and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. Nothing is intended or should be interpreted as representing or expressing the views and policies of any department or agency of any government or other body.

All trademarks used are the property of their respective owners. All trademarks are recognised.

The right of Rohini Sunderam to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

1 - Fajr - The morning prayer

2 - Dhuhr - The noon prayer

3 - Asr - The afternoon prayer

4 - Maghrib - The sunset prayer

5- ‘Isha’ - The evening prayer

And Now

GLOSSARY

Dedication

To my mother, Joyce Pritilata Singha nee David, who insisted that I would write.

My sister Vinita Shivdasani who suddenly passed away, April 9th, 2008.

But most of all to my husband Kalyan, whose sharp eye and criticism helped to bring this story into shape.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go out to Robin Barratt, Founder of the Bahrain Writers’ Circle (BWC), whose idea to have a Bahrain-based story competition (that didn’t come about) was the impetus for the creation of this story.

The members of the BWC whose encouragement continues to motivate me to write.

My cousin, Dr. Chand Sahay for medical advice.

And special thanks to Kailas Wadke for designing and creating the cover.

1 - Fajr - The morning prayer

Especially across the hush of the desert and the sand-coloured villas and high-rises standing like silent sentinels, you can feel it. That pre-dawn stillness when, for a brief instant, the ‘night life’ senses a shift that is not of the sands or the stones and it starts to turn in to sleep for the day. This is just before the ‘day life’ begins to awaken. The very stillness rings out like a clarion. Unbeknownst to themselves, the creatures of the day respond to it. They stir in their sleep, they mutter. The denouements of dreams culminate and bid farewell to sleeping minds still enwrapped in their tales behind closed eyelids.

An almost gradual warming of the chill night air is counterpointed by the chill of the night air that is not willing yet to surrender its lower temperatures to the balm of day. They are poised mid-step - Night and Day, Light and Dark, Yesterday and Today. The dance of their two winds is halted for a moment, captured in the tapestry of pre-dawn, the warp and woof of life. And they make a brief exchange in silence. The merest kiss of a farewell. And then the deep velvet of the bowl of night is tinged at its very edge with a lighter shade of dark.

It is at this time that the muezzin sitting in the minaret of his mosque can just distinguish between two threads, and his practised eye informs him which one is white and which black; when it is day and no longer night. Then he raises his clear melodic voice to the skies and chants in his pure tones, Allah hu Akbar! Allah hu Akbar! God is great.

The sound reverberates through the as-yet dark streets and alleys, up stairs and down narrow lanes, past shuttered windows, through richly carpeted hallways and equally over mud-smoothed stairways. It floats over sack-covered spices in the souk, caresses the dates and figs in their baskets and stirs the flies. It sends mice scuttling to their warrens and cockroaches to their drains. It wafts past curtained chambers and beaded blinds, closed eyelids and the last cobweb wisps of dreams and nightmares alike; pushing all away, announcing to every ear in this island of Islam, Bahrain; the miracle of the birth of a new day.

Ameeta awakes:

It’s not the call to Morning Prayer that has woken her, nor her alarm; it is the shifting of the light, a change in the temperature that tells her it’s time to head out to her first job of the day as a housemaid in Hoora, Bahrain. She stretches. There is a reluctance of the muscles that refuse to wake up and then there is the nagging need to use the toilet and have a shower before her roommates Shanta and Anita wake up and start squabbling over the bathroom.

She rolls over once more luxuriating in the last clinging warmth of her blanket and then with a forceful movement she is up. She hurries as quietly as she can, her thin towel in her hand, to the bathroom that she shares in this one-room place with her two young friends. They’re all from Sri Lanka, and they’re all freelance, ‘free-visa’ housemaids; Ameeta is the oldest of them all. She’s been in Bahrain for twenty-two years now, and every year for the last five years she’s wondered to herself whether she should make this her last year and finally go home to the rest she so richly deserves. But there’s always that one more request from her family - her children: a computer please ma; her husband - some more stock, he demanded for the shop he had set up the year Ameeta first came to Bahrain in 1985. Since then the drunken sot has done nothing more than lurch his way to the shop where he sleeps away his inebriated stupor while his so-called assistant practically robs them blind. Today, in 2007, that day, when she first decided to leave Sri Lanka seems like a lifetime away for her. It was a lifetime away.

How young she had been then, how beautiful and yet how desperately afraid. Her second child, a son, was barely six months old when her husband, Ramu, lost his job at the packaging factory near the outskirts of Colombo. Five days he’d gone to the day-labour pick up stop and five days he’d come back, his silent saddened dark face, mute as he shook his head indicating that once again he had in his hands a pittance, the money was barely enough to buy milk and rice for the family. In those few days, his once strong, muscular frame had shrunk, his legs had become bowed, and the hair at his temples had turned the same ashen grey as the dust that clung to his face, legs, hands, and had swiftly entered his soul.

Ameeta’s slender frame, still slightly rounded from the recent birth, seemed so vulnerable and youthful that her husband, instead of responding to it, shrank away from her. In the meantime Suneeta, their daughter who had just turned two years old appeared neglected, her hair had become matted, and she had begun to look like a beggar’s child.

That’s when Ameeta decided that she’d have to go out to work and do whatever she could to earn a few rupees to supplement the family income or else her children would end up as beggars, and her heart broke at the thought. Suddenly she had a vision of them rushing from car to car begging for a few coins. Or clambering aboard buses headed for the capital, trying to coax a few cents out of people already so careworn that even if they did throw a couple of coins at the children, it would be with such pitying disgust that they would never be able to climb out of that degradation of spirit. The thought that her babies might face that just to pay for their very lives burst the dams behind her eyes, and she let herself go weeping with a lost desperation that sprang from being utterly at the end of her hope.

The next morning, still blinking back tears, she silently cursed the fact that she hadn’t been able to complete more than class eight at the government school. She picked up her little son and wrapped him in her cotton sari nuzzling against her breast. She then took the few cents she’d saved from Ramu’s housekeeping money hidden from his prying eyes under her mattress. Next, she fortified herself with a strong cup of coffee sweetened with a good spoon of sugar. She took a deep breath and headed out to the nearby bus stop to go to Colombo to get a job as a housemaid in the city.

My sister will help me, she said to herself, she will, she’s been telling me this for the last three years, ever since I married Ramu and moved close to Colombo. The money for a housemaid is good maybe a hundred rupees even. And with this mantra reverberating in her head and heart, she set out on the one-hour bus ride to Colombo watching as the lush green trees and paddy fields disappeared the closer they got to the city.

That was the