My Friend Abdullah

My friend Abdullah

By Prakash Subbarao (info@datadubai.com)

17^th February 2004

This evening I had to meet someone in Sharjah and I parked my car opposite a well known supermarket. As I looked unseeingly at the building, a portion of it suddenly came into focus. I was looking at the office of my old friend Abdullah, whom I had (unintentionally!) forgotten.

Abdullah is a Pakistani. He is also a whiz kid in affairs a la Internet.

The politicians would have you believe that Pakistanis and Indians are naturally hostile to one another. But this is not true. My first experience with a Pakistani in Dubai was, in fact, a delightful one.

We met one day in 1999 (I think it was). A classified in the Gulf News caught my attention. It was something to do with designing and hosting web pages ( a business I was in those days). A few days later the same ad caught my eye. It was still running a month later.

On an impulse I called the advertised number and pretended to be a prospective client. After the preliminary pleasantries, I asked "how is the response to the ad?".

In Dubai one never tells the truth in such matters. "The response is overwhelming" is the usual response. However this person told me gloomily that the response was in fact very poor and he was unable to understand why.

Such (rare) honesty warms my heart and so I too decided to lay my cards on the table and told him that I was a competitor calling to check on his activities.

It turned out that he was also based in Sharjah (as I was in those days) and that his office was about a 5 minute drive away from my place. "Do drop in" he warmly invited me and one fine day, as I was in the neighborhood, I decided to do just that.

We gradually became friends.

I was working, in those days, on the website of a very large outdoor advertising company. They were paying a princely sum for the site and it was very large. A lot of effort had to go in to the making of the site.

Just when site was about on the verge of completion I suffered a stress attack. It sounds very simple and innocuous but when one is hit with a stress attack it feels terrible. The first thought is that one is having a heart attack. There is a tightness in the chest, like a band of steel is coiled around the rib cage and is slowly tightening. Time seems to stand still. A minute can feel like an hour. One feels a terrible restlessness. The mind is unable to concentrate for even a minute. One paces up and down and around the house or office without knowing what he or she is doing.

Anyway, the stress attack was (luckily for me) non-physically damaging. All reports taken the next day at the hospital showed near perfect scores. There was nothing physically wrong, the doctors concluded. It was all in the mind.

I told Abdullah about this. He urged me not to remain at my house all alone during the day. "My office is your office" he told me. "Come whenever you feel like".

I told him that the work on the website of the company had come to a complete halt and in my current mental frame of mind I was unable to work on it. "Let me help you" he said. He swung into action and within a few days he had completed what I had been left unfinished.

The company was satisfied with the work and cleared the balance amount that was due.

"Take money for the services you rendered to me" I appealed to Abdullah (I knew that he was also going through a rough patch) but he flatly refused. "What are friends for?" was his rejoinder.

I soon recovered and got busy with other things and one day realized with a start that I had not heard from Abdullah for quite some time. I thought that I'd drop in to his office to have a cup of tea with him. When I reached his office, I noticed that the layout had been altered and that someone else was sitting where he used to sit.

Upon enquiry, I learned that Abdullah had left for Pakistan for good. There was no forwarding address.

I felt terribly guilty. Abdullah had been a source of strength to me in my hour of need. When he needed help I had been unable to reciprocate.

I was overcome with anguish at his departure.

All these thoughts came flooding back to me this evening, as I sat in my car, because from where I had parked, I could look directly into the office that was once his.

In my minds eye I saw the jovial, ebullient, Abdullah hunched over his PC with his ever present cup of tea in an overlarge tea mug by his side working animatedly on his project.

I really miss him.

Indians and Pakistanis can in fact be friends. Very good friends.

The politicians do not realize that.