IT IS NOT SO MUCH THE THINGS I HAVE TO DO, THE heavy work, or the dust I breathe in while building houses that I would never come close to having. Or the food that they feed us, sent over in a box, old rice and dal tasting nothing like back home. Or even being away from my family and sitting around, waiting and waiting for work. Not even that. Sometimes, in the night when everyone is asleep, I hold my eyes close and imagine that there are not twenty people in the same room, breathing and dreaming and wanting. We all want the same — to earn enough and then go back home. Ismail, who sleeps next to me, kicks and cries out for his ma even though he is nineteen. No one makes fun of him; everyone knows he gets enough from boss. Just that day he threw a hard hat at Ismail and he had to go get his head sewn up at the doctor’s. He was gone for a long time, so long I thought he would not come back. But he did come back and he cried in his sleep that night, like every night.
It is not so much the cages they put us in, but the stares that we get.
On Sundays, we go to Little India, the one place in this country that feels a little bit like back home. It even has a bare field where some people play cricket, with the wrong ball and bat but still it is cricket. It takes forty-five minutes to get there. And all the way from Jurong, to the train station, in the train, to the streets, we get looks. I try to ignore them, some of the others don’t even notice, but I see the people on the streets quietly wishing we weren’t there and occupying the air and space on their island. This wonderful country.
So many pictures I saw of Singapore before I went. All pictures on the wall of the agency. I thought, that’s a place where I could work and bring back something for the family. There, streets are clean, trees are tall like back home, and buildings look so new that they give off their own shine. Then I got here, and I realised there are two different Singapores. For them, one Singapore. For us, another — made up of construction sites and rubbish dumps and backrooms where no one has to look at us, at our dusty hands and our faces.
It is in our other Singapore that they expect us to live. Stay. Don’t go out from there. The rest of the country is not allowed. I can almost hear them saying all that when we come out of the wooded area where we live, where the metal containers we sleep in sink a little more, each day, into the orange mud. They glare at us when we walk on their pavements on their streets. It is almost too much, all the clean brightness. It makes the others loosen up, so they start talking and joking. They don’t see the looks. I am happy for them not to see. I don’t know why I have to see everything. My ma used to say I have too many eyes and I thought there was nothing wrong with that, it was a good thing to have.
Then I saw one day a boy in the train, taking a video. I could tell from the way he held his phone. It was Abul and Mohit he was taking, Abul had fallen asleep during the journey — the cool of the air-conditioning does that to most people — and his head had drooped to the left, onto Mohit’s shoulder. Mohit just let him sleep, as a brother would. But there the boy was with his phone, taking the video, laughing with the girl next to him. I do not understand. Why people laugh and they point and call us Bangla workers like it is a dirty word. A word they have to spit. All we do is help with the jobs they don’t want. And all we get is the spitting looks.
It doesn’t matter. Not if I can go to the hundi wallah with money which he then sends back home to my family. But I can only do this sometimes because we do not get to work always. Seven months I’ve been here and I’ve only worked three. What we do here is wait. We wait and sit around a lot. It is an expensive country to just sit around in. The food and the living all cost money even though the place we stay in, it is not for people. The container that we sleep and eat and wait in is more for the mosquitoes that feed on us, more for rats and snakes. That’s what I said to the boss when we found a dead rat on someone’s sleeping mat. I told him it is not for people and he said, yes it is only for people like you. Then I said more, about the dirty kitchen and toilets and he said, go home if you don’t like it here. I give you back your passport and you go home and bring your problems back to Bangladesh. I wanted to tell him the problems are back home. It is why I left my wife and son behind. Sold the family land, sold it and borrowed money to come here.
Because when people talk about Singapore, their eyes are bright. They tell you, give me 200,000 taka and your family home and land and you will make many times that in a week. You tell them, okay, yes. Anything. You get your wife and your brothers to put all their money on you so you can go away and come back a rich man. With enough to provide for the whole family. Then I was there in the plane, floating over the edge of the island. I saw the beach, the trees, the buildings like in the picture, and I thought, I can do it. I can do anything.
But six weeks later, there is still no work. We sit around in a place that smells like bistha, shit. The smell is everywhere in our dormitory. We get bad food — sometimes we open up our packet and see something that’s not supposed to be inside. A cockroach. Rat droppings. We throw it into the dustbin sometimes but when we get too hungry, there is no choice because we don’t have money on us to buy food from outside. We have no choice and no air. Two hundred people squeezed into a space. So when someone got ill that time, other people got the same. There are no doctors for us. We asked and they said, doctor busy. Busy for a week until Sanjib fainted and I helped him go find boss. I was the oldest so I went.
I told boss that Sanjib was sick and he told me to mind my own business, he will get better by himself. I had to shout a bit, saying, he not waking up for one day, before boss and his worker took us in the van. We were at the hospital waiting for two hours, when Sanjib’s head on my shoulder felt heavier and heavier and I touched him and realised that he wasn’t asleep anymore. He never woke up. Back in the van, I told boss I will tell, go to the big government office and tell. About how people got sick and he didn’t get us the doctor. He got angry but I said I wasn’t scared. There is little a man is scared of if he has nothing to lose. Nothing at all. Then boss’s voice changed and he looked at my eyes for the first time and he said, you want to work? I am ashamed that I didn’t even have to think, it only took me two seconds to say yes.
This is how come I am working now. How I get to have money every month to send back home. This new job is better. There is work every single day, Monday to Sunday, and the money comes every month, on time. Cleaning the building is not too bad, only the smell. Not even a cloth wrapped around my face can stop the smell from getting into my nose, my head. All day the rubbish smell follows me around but the pay is good and there is a proper place I can sleep in, in a flat with five other people. It is small but it’s a proper place, a building that even other Singaporeans live in. I almost couldn’t believe when I saw the beds, with mattresses in them, the two-storey beds which just fit into the space. It was the first time in months and months that I felt clean and comfortable, but I woke up four, five times that night, not knowing where I was until my eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw the curtains, the light from the corridor outside, heard the other men in the room snore, breathe deeply in their sleep. Then I thought about Ismail crying for his mother, and Sanjib, whose mother must know by now. They got someone to call his family, not just to tell them about Sanjib but to ask for money to send his body back. I knew they couldn’t afford it but I left before they decided what to do. I thought about that until the birds started making noise, and in the end I stayed awake until the alarm rang and I had to get up to wash. My sleepiness made it feel even more dreamlike. Just a week ago I was sleeping on a thin mat on the ground, getting up in the morning for nothing, nothing to do but to wait. Now there was proper food in the morning and a T-shirt they gave me just to wear for work. It was all still dreamlike when I went downstairs but the smell soon told me it was real. My job was to collect from the bins — full of rubbish that comes falling down the chute, all the way down from all the floors, and wheel it to the rubbish centre shared with the other buildings. This work was bad at first but then I got used to it. The rest of it was okay. Cleaning and sweeping and washing the ground once a week with water.
That’s what I had to do that day. After the police left and took away the blue and white tapes, the tent, the dead man in it. I tried to clean the floor where the man fell. There was blood and other things and people had put candles and food on the ground. For the dead man, my new boss told me. There were ants all over the food and I asked boss if I should throw everything away but he just scratched his head and waved his hand. Leave it first, just scrub the blood from around the offerings, he said. So I tried hosing the red down from far away. It wouldn’t go. A few days later, boss changed his mind. There are rats in the neighbourhood, he scolded, as if he had forgotten that he was the one who told me to leave it alone. He looked strange as he told me to throw the things away, kept touching a red string that went around his neck and into his shirt, and then pointing to the dark patches where the blood had refused to come off. I began as soon as he left, picking up the offerings and putting them in a trash bag even though the old lady with the cart got mad at me for doing so. I had to wait for her to go upstairs before I threw it into the bin. Then I went on my knees to scrub the floor again and while I did that I wondered how he fell and why. I cleaned it well but the next day, there were more tins and candles and food on the floor. Each time I cleaned up, there it would be again, the next day or the day after that. Singaporeans must be very religious, I think, to treat their dead like this. I hoped they did the same for Sanjib.
That night, I asked the others in the flat — they are cleaners like me, but in different places — and Muthu told me the man just wanted to die. Something wrong in his head. These people, he said, living in nice buildings, with cars and no money problems and still they want to die. And he made a puffing sound with his mouth and bent his head to eat.
I told him that was no way to talk about the dead. You don’t know why he wanted to die, I said. But Muthu had already turned away, was listening to the others talk about going to play cricket on Sunday.
I knew what it would be like, I thought. Just weeks ago, I had to pick up the phone and talk to my wife, hear my son playing in the background and know that I had absolutely nothing. Nothing to give them. I imagined arriving home, my bags lighter, my debts at home waiting for me, the moneylenders shouting and threatening outside the door until one day they burn down the house, the way they have done with other people’s houses. But it was my family’s Welcome Home that terrified me. Going back to smiles and tears and happiness, expectation. Until the moment they realise that I was poorer than before, that they were all poorer than before, which made me think about doing it. Running in front of a car. There are many cars in Singapore and people drive so fast. The only thing more than cars are buildings. Tall buildings which people live in. I knew what it would take, I thought, to make a man do that.