Off The Cuff: A wry look at life

There are upsides and downsides of working as a journalist in this region. The upside is that you get to hear the juiciest rumours first. The downside is that if you can't corroborate it fast enough, you are considered a hack, a backpack pen pusher who doesn't know Jeddah from Djibouti.

When you have worked long enough in this area, you know that it is usually during troubled times that rumours start circulating . Times of recessionary pressures when people find more pink slips being circulated in their offices than pay cheques.

Most families in Saudi just cannot do without maids, women from the Philippines, Indonesia or Sri Lanka. They are so dependent on them to take care of their children, the food on the table and to keep the households running smoothly, that they even take them along for their holidays abroad.

And in the one case which I had personally followed, a maid had to be taken along by an adamant immigrant couple to Canada.

When jobs are scarce even for nationals, rumours start about how bad these ungrateful women are, even when they are provided a home away from home. Rumours like how a maid jumped off the third-floor window with a baby in her arms.

The more horrific the story, the more credence it is given. Stories about how a maid was slowly poisoning a baby every day to take revenge on the local family. Why she needed to commit such a heinous crime is usually left out of the story.

The rumours by expatriates on the other hand usually centre on assault on women and bodies being found in rubbish bins. Many of these must surely be concocted at mah-jong parties, or at coffee shops at furnishing stores, or like the Saudi ones, which I presume are made up with relish at the card tables.

When I went to take a look at the rubbish bin outside a popular superstore in Jeddah where a Filipina was presumably found dead, the opening of the bin was quite high off the ground. It would require a ladder, a strong shoulder and cloak which turns you invisible to dump the body in.

Walking with a ladder at 3 in the morning would have required a lot of explaining to the very frequent police patrols in that commercial capital.

I was told this by a Pakistani couple in Riyadh about a family which was leaving for home for good. As the story goes a policeman presumably forced her into a room and assaulted her. The later part is told in a more mournful tone.

Apparently the children could hear her cries from behind the locked doors, but it took a long time to break down the door.

If you are an expert storyteller, then you ratchet up the horror one more notch.

Apparently, the woman lost her mind because of this traumatic incident and when her husband told her he was divorcing her, she went berserk and slashed him and her children with a kitchen knife.

I believe this one was taken very seriously by a woman. There's a marriage hall just off the old airport road in Riyadh. There were not many homes or apartment buildings around it, so the area was gloomy and dark.

It was here that the woman found another guest walking to her car. When she looked down at the feet, they were turned backwards and were shaped like hooves.

When Koreans were building the long stretches of roads into the desert, human cadavers were obviously found in the freezers at their labour camps, because as the story goes, they could not get canines, which is their favourite food.

The sad part if that nobody believes my rumours. All I get are incredulous looks as if to say, "Are you loopy for something?"