Kuwait 2000 #1: Arrival

“Kuwait? Why Kuwait?”

“My parents live there.”

“Oh. Why do they live there?”

“Dad’s a dentist there.”

“Oh.”

“You make a lot more being an orthodontist in Kuwait than in India.”

“Ah!”

Conversations like the one above were very common in the two weeks preceding my trip to Kuwait in December 2000. I was on my way to visit my parents for the holidays. They have been there for two years now, and plan on staying a few more. The trip didn’t start particularly well – the plane sat on the tarmac for three hours in London waiting for a replacement stewardess, and when I finally landed in Kuwait at 2am I learned that my luggage was missing. I had my camera and film on me, but little else.

I hadn’t seen my family in over a year, and it was good to see everyone again.

On the twenty-minute trip from the airport to my parents’ place, I noticed that the roads were as good as or better than most highways in the US. Other than the fact that the signs were in both Arabic and English, in the darkness I didn’t feel like I was in a foreign country. Once we reached the apartment/hospital complex, my dad demonstrated the remotely operated gate with self-mocking pride (an admirable trait which I seem to have inherited).
The tiny door-less elevator in the apartment building was novel to me, with each floor having a single door on hinges. Traveling in it is not too scary, once you get used to the moving wall on one side.

My parents’ apartment is one floor above the hospital, and the walls are concrete, just like in India, rather than plaster as in the US. One of the bathrooms had a bidet, while the other had a handheld shower next to the toilet at knee height. It was, I presumed, “for washin’ your backside” as Dundee triumphantly declares in that crocodile movie. The heat was turned on, though the temperature outside was in the low seventies.

I spent the better part of the first day, a Sunday, at the US embassy waiting for my visa to get back in to the US. Turned out there is a visa fee of $66 on top of the application fee of $45, and I didn’t have enough cash on me. The clerk told me to come back on Saturday to collect my passport, when the embassy will be open for business again. Monday was Christmas, the following two days were holidays because of Eid, and it was the weekend on Thursday and Friday. I was a bit worried walking around Kuwait without my passport, but I was informed that the little piece of paper that said I’d paid $45 to the US embassy would assure me safe passage.

Kuwait is a rich country and the cars on the road reflect it. There is just about every expensive car one can think of, though the only Ferrari I saw wasn’t made in Italy.

The drivers are aggressive, and woe betide anyone driving at 120kmph in the fast lane in a 100kmph zone. You get tailgated, honked at, headlights flashed at and just about every on-road indignity thrown at you. Looks like road rage is a universal language. The women drivers sure surprised me with their aggressive driving, with one woman doing what I thought was the Kuwaiti equivalent of the finger, a clenched wrist punching upward. Either the men are well endowed or she was just shaking her fist. They also seem to have a predisposition towards large, white cars.

As you probably know, Kuwait’s economy is based on oil and there’s lots of it. Because of the resulting wealth, they can afford to hire foreigners to take care of the more mundane aspects of Kuwaiti life. My dad quoted a Tamil (my native tongue) writer’s impression of Kuwaitis and it went something like “the Bangladeshis take care of the kids, the Americans take care of the security, the Indians take care of the industries, while the Kuwaitis take care of their falcons.”

The population of Kuwait is 2.2 million, though there are only 750,000 Kuwaiti citizens. Most of the expatriates come from India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka and they go there to work a few years, save as much as possible and return to their homeland. I met a few people who have lived there for decades. They make anywhere from 5 to 20 times what they would make back home, and the standard of living is much higher to boot.

There are no taxes in Kuwait, and living expenses are few. Gas is half as expensive as in the US. My dad works for a private hospital, and he sends most of the money he makes back to India. He also gets a two-bedroom apartment as part of the package. Only Kuwaitis are allowed to own businesses and property, so it is hard for a foreigner to gain a foothold in the country.

The first couple of days were cloudy and foggy, and I couldn’t see much of the city. We drove to a “jamaiya”, one of the many malls, to pick up some clothes and toilet stuff for me while I waited for my luggage to
finish its extended trip. Kuwait isn’t as conservative as I thought – the lingerie on the mannequins are as kinky as any I’d ogled at in Victoria’s Secret. Most of the women had their heads covered, and a few were veiled completely. I was told that the laws aren’t as strict as in neighboring Saudi Arabia, and women even go out in shorts in the summer.

The first two days my parents’ friends stopped by for lunch or dinner, and I was beginning to get a feel for the expatriates. Unlike me, who left for the US at 22 to attend university and then started leading a comfortable lifestyle before being weighed down by any “worldly” responsibilities, these folks had made a very courageous and difficult decision to move their entire family, including young children, to an alien
country. They also seemed to stick together, and social interaction with non-Indians wasn’t evident, at least from what I saw. I always viewed living in a foreign country sort of an adventure, and wished that my parents would learn more about the culture by mingling with the locals. But this attitude of “us vs. them” seems to exist everywhere, including the US.

My parents’ friends were keen to learn about life in the US, though some of them wanted to know just how much a family could possibly save every month. As far as they were concerned, the only reason anyone would want to leave their homeland would be in search of wealth. It is true that when I first left India my plan was to get an education, spend five years working and save every penny, and then return to India. That outlook has changed considerably.

Interestingly enough, plenty of fellow expatriates in the US tend to disparage the social customs of their adopted country. They seem to want to make it clear that the only reason they suffer through their horrible lives
abroad is for the sake of money, and their own country is the absolute best place on earth in terms of moral values and cultural heritage. Children growing up in India will be free of the distractions of sex and drugs and grow up being obedient and respectful. Yeah, right! They usually change their opinions after a couple of years, just like I did.

Friends of my parents however, inevitably asked what I thought of Kuwait. They probably were just making conversation, but I detected a sense of pride mixed with genuine concern that I like Kuwait. It seemed to mirror my own feelings whenever I met someone in the US who was from elsewhere. Of course, everyone loves the US, right?

We drove to the airport on Monday to pick up my wayward luggage. They made me open it, glanced at everything and told me I could leave. An Indian porter picked up my bag and dropped it off at the curb. I tipped him two Kuwaiti Dinars (KD), about US$6 and it turned out I needn’t have given him more than 1/4 KD. No wonder he had such a huge smile (in gratitude, I’d like to think, though my dad thinks it was mockery).