lives and problems 115
Regardless of the degree of one’s attachment to place, the life of the Gulf
worker is challenging. In the past two decades, many have come from India to
work in the Persian Gulf countries. Migrants from India usually head to the
wealthy city-states of the United Arab Emirates, such as Dubai and Abu Dhabi,
or to Saudi Arabia, Kuwait or Bahrain, where they are able to earn far more than
they can at home. Although fi gures are inconsistent, Kerala has the highest rate
of Gulf migration of any Indian state, and a sizable portion of Kerala’s economy
comes from remittances from Gulf workers.^12 While many have reaped fi nan-
cial rewards from working in the Gulf, Indian workers are often exploited. Th ey
have to pay usurious fees to middlemen who help them get employment and
work permits, and as Abdul-Rahman learned, they do not always get the work
they are promised. Additionally, migrants are sometimes not paid for their work,
and they have little recourse for fi ghting such injustices. Still, many successful
migrants return to Kerala with signifi cant savings, which they use to raise their
level of prestige in the community and to marry into a more successful family
(Osella and Osella 2000a, 2000b). It must have weighed on Abdul-Rahman that
he did not return from the Gulf a fi nancial success as he had certainly seen other
young men do and as has been depicted in Malayali fi lms.^13
On returning to Kerala from the Gulf, Abdul-Rahman’s problems sub-
sided, but after going back to his old job of delivering newspapers and trying
to open a shop, his vishamam (sadness/depression) returned:
To tell you the reason I am coming here now [to see an allopathic psychiatrist],
later when I was working in the paper agency, there was a weight like this in the
mind. I was crying, complete vishamam in the mind. Just like when I was in the
Gulf, I will cry.Abdul-Rahman then explained he was upset that he did not get the job
he expected in the Gulf, and his employers there were not paying his and
other workers’ salaries. So they organized a strike “like we do in our place,”
he said, referring to Kerala’s tradition of assertive labor organizing. Kerala’s
labor unions have signifi cant power, and strikes frequently occur throughout
the state. Kerala workers are well paid compared to other Indian laborers,
and Kerala’s Communist government has generally been supportive of work-
ers’ movements. However, Kerala workers’ demands for living wages have led
industries to move to other states in search of more exploitable labor, and the
state now has a high rate of unemployment, which fuels the out-migration of
workers to the Gulf and elsewhere.
After discussing his return from the Gulf, Biju and I asked if Abdul-Rahman
had tried other types of therapy. He said that during the previous week he
took a homeopathic medication, but he did not continue with that therapy