Three Amigos...Minus One

View the pictures and read the entry that follows.

The Netway Boys: Nahas, Shaheed, and Mustapha.

The farewell party.

At dinner: Mustapha, the 'man of the night', is in the foreground.

Nahas ordered grape juice, which had us puckering our lips it was so sweet. Peeled white grapes floated in the syrupy mixture.













The boys chowing down.






No dining experience in India would be complete without a misspelling in the menu. Though this one is rather memorable.




Mustpaha, Nahas, and Shaheed grew up together in Tirur. They went to primary school together, played football and badminton together. They all attended Calicut University and all got Bachelor’s of Commerce degrees. (“Be-Comms”, they say with delight.) Last May, they went into business together, starting a small Internet café and computer repair shop at the Payannangadi junction in Tirur.

The three have been inseparable. Until now.

This weekend, Mustapha is leaving for Kuwait. He will be gone two years. It is a common enough story here in Kerala but one that has a little more resonance now, at least for Jenna and me.

On Friday, Jenna and I along with our roommate Jaime attended a ‘farewell dinner’ for Mustapha at a Tirur restaurant. Nahas and Shaheed were there, of course, along with several of their friends from Calicut University, all of whom had gone into business around Tirur and spoke with the confident, avuncular manner of businessmen.

The mood was light and Nahas ordered several rounds of food—beef and chicken shawarma, chicken 65 (Indian fried chicken), pickled cucumbers and carrots, roti bread. He looked pleased to play the role of dinner host.

Mustapha arrived last and the long table of guests erupted into spontaneous cheering when he walked up, a broad smile on his face. The other diners in the outdoor patio area where we were sitting looked over curiously for a second then went back to their own meals.

Conversation was sparse and mostly in Malayalam. The men spent most of their energy grabbing bits of chicken or dipping roti into one of several sauces that had been laid out. Though Mustapha would leave to go halfway around the world the following day, there appeared to be no sadness or reflective melancholy in the group. The men all laughed, joked, and took dozens and dozens of pictures. The flash from various cameras punctuated the shadowy dimness of the patio every few seconds.

I had asked Nahas a few days earlier whether he was sad Mustapha—his best friend—was leaving for a country so far away.

“No, no, no,” he said earnestly. “I am used to this. My father goes to Gulf for many years now. My brother goes to Gulf. Other friends go. Mustapha goes now. Not sad. Happy for him.”
"But you really must be kind of sad?" I pressed.

"No, it is common. Very common," Nahas replied, grinning broadly.

Nahas was not being coy. He was simply stating facts of life in central Kerala. Nearly every family in Tirur seems to have at least one male working in the Gulf. They go to be construction workers and drivers in the UAE, accountants and office help in Kuwait, computer technicians in Oman. They make more money than they would in Kerala and send remittances back to their families. You can see signs of their success very visibly in the houses their families build—two and three-story estates made of concrete, marble, and burnished teak, opulent by Kerala standards.

Nahas’s family lives more modestly in a one-story bungalow at the end of a winding jungle path just outside Tirur. But the money his father earned working more than 20 years in the Gulf helped put Nahas through private primary school and a well-respected university.

Many of the students at JM have a father or an older brother, an uncle or a brother-in-law working in the Gulf. A teacher, who is the mother of two children under 10 years old, has a husband who is in the Gulf. Young men, in fact, come into Nahas's internet cafe (Netway Computers) all the time brandishing resumes and applications for positions in the Gulf that they need copied. (One of the first questions on these applications usually asks what languages the applicant speaks.)

Mustapha, then, is just the latest in a very long line of men from this area who have left to find wealth (modest or otherwise) in the Middle East. His brother-in-law is working in Kuwait now as a driver and will put Mustapha up in his apartment there. Mustapha has yet to secure a job but seems confident he will find one.

“Why?” I had asked Mustapha a few days prior to this night. “I mean, your business here seems to be going pretty well. The Internet café is good now. Why move so far?”

Mustapha had smiled and, honestly, he may not have understood my question completely. But he responded, “More money.” And he pointed to a vague far-off point in the distance, meaning the Gulf.

The dinner broke up quickly and the men started to go their separate ways. A few more pictures were taken and Mustapha started to receive hugs from his college friends. Shaheed and Nahas lingered on the edge of the group.

One of their friends volunteered to drive Jenna, Jamie and I back to our flat in his car. As the car pulled up to the curb, Mustapha said goodbye to each of us. He shook my hand and then brought me into his embrace for a hug. A long, formal hug where you quickly peck each cheek of the other man with a light kiss. It was the first time all night where I got a little sad.

“Good luck,” I said. “Be careful.”

“Of course,” he said, smiling, his arm still draped over my shoulder.

At that moment, I could only imagine if Mustapha had been my best friend or my brother or my father, and I was saying goodbye to him for two years. I glanced at Nahas and Shaheed and tried to guess what was going on inside their heads.