Shoukat Hussein was an Indian Muslim who joined a rather prestigious trading house in Dubai, at about the same time I did. He, as Marketing Executive and me as HR Officer. The fraternity of Marketing and Human Resources was perhaps an incongruous one, but the company was undergoing rapid expansion and we were thrown together in a pokey office where we developed a bond that outlived our tenure with the Company. In the diaspora, one forms friendships across religion and ethnicity.
He was a most affable person, with an infectious laugh that would sometimes be heard down the corridor all the way to the photocopying room. His ability to pun in the Queen’s English could possibly have given Bernard Shaw a run for his money. He was creative, eloquent, gracious and always polite to a fault. He was also ordinary. Together, we obsessed an laughed over the most mundane of things, his children, the rent of my studio flat, the CEO’s green coat and how to survive the ennui of corporate servitude. Whatever we may want to think of India’s Muslim, that they are ghetto-dwellers, pro-Pakistani sympathizers, militant extremist, religious fundamentalist, wife-beaters, indiscriminate breeding machines, there is a Shoukat Hussein that dwells amongst them. And I have to believe that there is a Shoukat Hussein who dwells within the most disenfranchised and alienated of them. Our obligation as Indian citizens is to help him emerge. India’s history will not be told in statistics and stereotypes. It will be the collective stories of individual beings who surmounted the odds of inequality. To the world we are doctors, call-center staff, IT technicians, construction workers, waiters, desi, paki, al ‘hindi, dot-heads. Over the course of the years I’ve heard all of these labels. Whatever stereotypes or pejoratives the world wishes to foist onto us, aleast we are all Indian to them. Isn’t it time, we were all Indian unto ourselves? selma
