After many years of working under a sponsor, I thought I was finally free until I realised my wife would be my new sponsor!
“How cruel a turn of fate is that?” I told myself. My better half will now sponsor me as a dependent as I am no longer working for any company and that will allow me to reside in the country as a family member, according to the local rules and regulations, as they say in the bureaucracy.
(Incidentally, I wonder who coined the term, “better half” to describe one’s spouse. It sure is demeaning for me, the other half, that has no words to be described).
Apparently, there are three women executive expatriates who can sponsor their spouse: A doctor, an engineer and a teacher and only if their salary is above Dh 4,000, excluding accommodation allowance. “What’s your salary?” I asked my wife. All these years, we went by her principle that, what is mine, is hers. And, what is hers is well — hers.
“Where is your passport?” my wife asked me the other day, just as I was getting used to lazing around on the couch and not getting up in the morning and going to work. For the first few weeks it felt weird that I did not have to go anywhere and that there was no boss to boss you and that life was one big happy naptime. Somebody in HR had once asked me for my passport and I had to blurt out excuses that I had to go to Oman for the weekend for an assignment. That went on for some years. Now, I was worried that my wife would take custody of my passport and I would have to seek her permission whenever I wished to travel. “My passport is my personal document, you cannot take it away from me,” I shouted a bit hysterically.
Curious glances
“Don’t be silly,” she said. “I need to scan the pages and make a file as we are going to the immigration department tomorrow,” she said.
Over the years of working and living in the Arab Gulf region, I have run through many booklets of passports. In the early years of my travels from this region, I got curious glances from immigration officers at various airports as my passport had a sticky sticker at the back with the name of the company for whom I worked.
I tried peeling off the sticker once, as my passport looked quite odd, as if I was advertising a company. I peeled it off carefully and when I put it in my pocket, the residual glue on the passport cover got stuck on my shirt pocket. It seemed like one of the ‘Mr Bean moments’ when it was my turn to present my passport at the immigration kiosk, as it just would not come out of my pocket!
It is a strange feeling to be under the sponsorship of one’s wife after all these years of living and working in the Gulf states.
“He he,” said my friend, when he heard the news. “You are now ‘joruh ka gulam’,” he said grinning. ‘Joruh’ is wife in Hindi/Urdu, and ‘Gulam’ means slave. It sounds much manlier in Hindi/Urdu than the demeaning English term, “hen-pecked”, I thought.
“So, how has life changed for you?” the friend asked. “Not much” I said. “I am still at the beck and call of my family whenever they need a driver,” I said. “There are also no paid annual vacations and I have to purchase my own health insurance,” I said.
My wife came up to me as I was lying on the couch the other day and playing video games with my children and said: “You know I can’t be supporting you forever. Shouldn’t you be looking for a job?”
Mahmood Saberi is a freelance journalist based in Dubai.
