“My father and I, In the midst of modern slavery”.

A man, in love, has a dream. The dream to witness every bit of smile of the woman he loves. If he is blessed enough, he would be able to experience them in their days of togetherness. Her smile, her tears and every bit of her emotions would mean so much to her. He can hold his hands in every one of her good days, if they are faithful enough, even in most of her bad days, during pain, stress and so many else.  Might be at times he would want to know how her childhood was. Their bond of love might lead her to share most part of her childhood with him but what if he wants to know those words that she never expressed? What if he would want to witness a real her, her smile and every other tiny thing. As a husband myself, I can imagine how important would those days be. I often say to her, I would be seeing you again through our daughter. Looking at our daughter grow is how she can be revisited again. 

With those above queries answered, in the last few years I have been having another thought. It was about another woman I have loved in my life, my mum of course. My mum keeps narrating some of her childhood moments on which I get mixed feelings. I wonder how were her childhood? Maybe similar to the one my little sister had? Though I never had such questions in my mind during our childhood, I still can remember some part of my childhood with my sister through which I connect it to my mum. 

One more questions about revisiting the past! Not actually about childhood but something that matters most. Something that has been never expressed, something which has been talked and discussed in a family not so often. In my family, my father is the one who expresses very less. I actually do not remember when was the last time I had a fruitful or long talk with him? I don’t remember any of the moment where we might have expressed each other. In fact, I never thought they would matter at any cost, I never realized they should have been an important part of our life. I never wanted to know how were the prodigal days of my father. How were the days of his struggling? How did he stand in the heat of gulf for so long without any support from his family members? 

The first month of January 2016, when I was confirmed that I would be flying to Doha for the purpose of employment, a struggling writer within me had made his mind that I wanted to collect some of the mysterious stories I would encounter in this journey to make a book of the short story collection. I was all set to know the city and people, especially from our Nepalese community, trying to know unexpressed stories in every one of those eyes. But along with the time I spend in Qatar, I came across a very different phase of my life. The life in the industrial area of Al-Sanaiya was enlightening me with a different perspective that no place else in the world would show me. It made me revisit that moment of a parallel world as if I am traveling in some time machine to see that instances of my family which I had to see but had severely missed till date. One of the most important people in my life, my father whom I call as “daddy”, it was like I could see him in each one of those workers working there. I could see what he might have gone through in the midst of burning sand. Being helpless and speechless son who was not able to understand the struggle of his father for so long and being sorry for the pain he had to face just because of me, at that particular moment thinking the other person as the one I deeply cared, I tried my best not to make things worse. Along with time, I realized I was not just visiting disconnected stories, a son was there visiting his father.

More than the love story between a husband and wife, The story I am writing here is a story of a son from a remittance land, with a rarely spoken topic of how painfully he found his father in the midst of land filled up with modern-day slaves. 

This story is a representative story that this generation needed to feel, the story that its politicians needed to know and a story that every family need to keep in their heart for ages to come, this is a representative story of a soul who kept wandering in the middle east with the search of happiness for his family.

More specifically, The is a story of “My father and I, In the midst of modern slavery”. 

The Next Topic:- The Blocked road to Mecca, His Holy Land.