[This story is the 4th in a 4-part series about my epic overland journey from Kathmandu, Nepal to New Delhi, India.]

[continued from Taken for A Ride Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 |]  An hour later, I heard the key turn in the door, and I looked up from the book I had been reading on the bed.  In stepped the man in the polished shoes, with a wide smile on his face.  Latching the door behind him, he reached for something in his back pocket and leaning towards me, he pulled, from underneath the tail of his baggy shirt, a folded piece of paper.

Handing it to me, he said, “Good. Good.”

I unfolded the slip of paper and was greeted by the letterhead of a travel agency.  Reading further I realized it was, in fact, a confirmation for a plane ticket the following morning, a plane ticket to the city of Doha, in the country of Qatar, snug on the shores of the Persian Gulf.

As miraculously as I suddenly realized that I had not in fact been the victim of a a swindle, the man in the polished shoes decided it was time to go to great lengths to try to tell me, in his broken, modified and heavily accented English, his story.

“Doha, Qatar?” I said, “You bought a ticket to Doha, Qatar?”

Over the course of the next two hours, I tried to piece together the story of the man in the polished shoes.  He spoke in a slurred potpourri of Nepali and a thick stew of broken and bent English, as I tried relentlessly to decode his story with questions, gestures and clarifying comments.  The first thing I learned was his name: Binod.

Binod in our room in Nepal. (lower right) He shows off one of his sand hoods
and a photos of his wife (in his wallet).

Binod was born and lived in a small rural village in Nepal, the son of one of Nepal’s most famous tailors.  Binod, having apprenticed with his father for 15 years and now 31 years old, was a young tailor hoping to take over the family business, when just last year his father died of a sudden heart attack.  His father’s death brought bad fortune on the family as the business succeeded mostly on his father’s reputation.  Unable to make ends meet as a tailor and unable to find other work in Nepal, Binod was now forced in search of money to make sure his family could survive.  On a promise from a friend, Binod was told that if he could get to Qatar, the friend would arrange a construction job that would pay $350 USD/month (a small fortune in Nepali terms).   The only catch was, he had to get to Qatar on his own and he had to, after arrival, stay there for two years.

“TWO years!” I said,  “You won’t see your wife or kids for two years!”

He nodded.

Binod had scrapped and saved for many months, and kissing his wife and children goodbye, he had made the seven day journey from his village in Nepal to New Delhi, with the exact amount he was told it would cost him for a ticket to Qatar.  His problem arose when he discovered the plane ticket was $25 USD more than he had planned ($25 is a month’s income for many in Nepal).  $25 short at the final stage of his journey that had been over a year in the making, his only choice (after calling everyone he knew in New Delhi to see if he could borrow $25) was to return to his village and his wife and child, a failure, with few other options.

Binod told me of his grief over his father’s death and his frustration that he could not work as a tailor–a profession he loved–because most people bought cheap close from China nowadays and would not pay prices that would cover his costs.  He told me about life in Nepal, about his struggles to support his family after his father’s death, about his hope that he could be strong enough to care for his family without his father at his side.

“When my children cry, my wife is there to see them cry,” Binod said to me.  “When my wife cries, I am there to watch over her,” he continued. “But when I cry,” Binod asked, “who is there to watch me?”

As Binod told me about working as a tailor, he reached into his bag and pulled out a rain jacket he had made, showing me the stitching in the collar.  Pointing at my fancy rain jacket, he recalled the stitching he had seen earlier on the bus.  I felt like a fool that I’d ever thought he was convetting my rain jacket, when in fact he was just looking at the stitching.

As he continued talking about tailoring, he pulled out a simple hood with velcro straps from his bag.  Handing it to me, he explained it was a protective hood to guard against the stinging sand storms that occur on the high construction sites in Qatar.   He had hand-sewn three of the hoods, one for himself, and two he hoped to sell for extra money upon his arrival in Qatar.

“You like it,” he said.

“Yes, very nice,” I replied.

“For you,” he said, handing the hood to me.

I insisted I could not take it.  “You must keep it because you can sell it and make money.”

He shook his head, “No, for you.”

I waived him off. “No, you need it more than I do,” I said, realizing he wanted to give me something, despite the fact he had, by my standards, nothing.

He then reached into his bag and pulled out a pair of cheap plastic sandals,  “You like these?  You can have.”

“No,” I said, “you must keep them.”  “They look better on you,” I insisted, realizing it’s likely the sarcasm didn’t translate.

He kept insisting that I take something of his, and I, now feeling really guilty that I ever thought this guy was conning me, kept insisting he needn’t give me anything in exchange for my help.

According to the travel agent’s letter, Binod was scheduled to leave for the airport at 3am the following morning, so after hearing out his story, I offered to take him out for dinner.  We dined quietly on a bit of rice and curry in a little Tibetan Cafe and returned to the room.  I realized then that Binod had spent all of his money, except a few dollars, on the plane ticket—and it was unlikely he even had enough money for the taxi to the airport (let alone the room we were presently staying in).

After dinner, while Binod packed his things and calmly polished his shoes, I sat quietly on my bed and put his story into perspective in my head.  This man had traveled for 7 days, 49 hours of which was sitting next to me on a bus, with all the money he had in the world.   The money he had was an amount he thought was just enough to buy a plane ticket to a country thousands of miles from his home, where he’d never been, where he did not speak nor understand the language, all because of the promise for a job that may or may not prove true.  Having spent everything on the plane ticket, he would arrive in the far off land at the airport with only the clothes on his back, a rain coat, a couple of hand-tailored sand hoods, a pair of flip flops, a toothbrush, a bar of soap and the belief that the work could provide for his wife and children, whom he wouldn’t see for the next two years.

Had I not given him $25, his story could have ended very differently, as he would be forced to return to his wife and children in failure.

For $25, I could have bought a decent birthday dinner at a nice restaurant (interestingly enough, it was my birthday), a night at the movies or a half a tank of gas.  But instead, for the $25 that I’d initially thought I was being swindled out of, I bought a friend.

At 3 am, the alarm on my mobile phone went off to wake Binod, so he could catch a taxi to the airport.  I sat up groggy in bed, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.  My friend from the past two days was gathering his things, as I heard the pre-scheduled taxi pull up in the empty street below.  He walked over and tried to hand me money for the room, which I waived off, saying, “You might need that in Qatar.”  And though he insisted, I refused to reach for it and pointed him towards the door.  He nodded politely and quickly shook my hand as I wished him “good luck.”

Brushing some dirt from his shoes and smoothing the wrinkles out of his pants, he picked up his simple bag and headed towards the door.  Just as he was about to leave, he turned and looked me in the eyes.  Placing his palm over his heart he said in English, “Never forget you,” before slipping out the door.

My throat tightened up as I digested his words, as the door to the hallway slid shut, leaving me alone engulfed in the darkness of the room.

* * *
Postscript: Though I did not know it at the time of this story, four-months later I would find myself in Doha, Qatar, on a scheduled stop between Zurich, Switzerland and Nairobi, Kenya.  Walking around the city, I saw truckload upon truckload of Nepali, Pakistani and Bangladeshi men, working as laborers on the dozens and dozens of skyscrapers growing out of the desert.  As I sat before a beautiful desert sunset, under the shadows of the construction cranes, I looked up towards the towering steel girders in the sky, in hopes that my friend Binod was up there, working away in his Velcro hood, a little closer to his father and a little closer to his return trip home.

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Taken for a Ride – Part 4