My Friend Cha Cha

Cha Cha means 'uncle' in Urdu.  It's an honorific that upper class Pakistanis bestow upon the elder members of their household staffs.  Cha Cha's real name is Mohammed - I really couldn't get a second name out of him.  He lives in Dubai and has lived there or in Abu Dhabi for the last 40 years or more.  I reckon that Cha Cha is about 60 years old - tall and strapping for a Pakistani.   Cha Cha is Pashtun, hailing from the high hills and small mountains that separate Islamabad from Peshawar.  Cha Cha comes from farming stock - when there wasn't enough land to support him and his siblings, he chose to become a guest worker in the United Arab Emirates.  Paradoxically, he arrived in the UAE only a few years after I left - although his arrival as steerage in a Dhow - a wooden trading vessel - was rather different than my departure in a jet airliner.

Cha Cha has spent most of the last 40 years working first as a 'tea-boy' - a menial servant to a business, responsible for bringing the tea and cleaning up and then as a licensed driver - taking the 'wives' to the mall and picking and dropping at the airport.  He's the only servant who is trusted implicitly:  he's the Cha Cha.  Cha Cha doesn't always approve of everything his charges do - the younger generation's antics, particularly the women, cause him to furrow his conservative, Islamic brow.  But he handles everything with good natured wit and charm.  Every time I come, he greets me with a great bear hug:  "Ah Mr. Bill" he says in his modest english:  "Welcome, good to see you sir.  Thank you for coming sir."  Cha Cha has taken me out on my share of wild goose chases - gold bracelet for the wife?  "Gold Souk, sir, I drop and wait - you go inside".  Bedouin garb for my son:  "Emirates Mall, sir, here, I show you.  I wait."  Out in the heat, with the other drivers, sharing sardonic opinions on the mass of humanity parading by.

Talking to Cha Cha I get a sense of both his joy and his loss.  Joy in that he has come a long way for a mere Pashtun farm boy - driving the 'big time' American around for goodness sakes - I mean he'll have to tell the folks back home about that one.  And being able to feed and educate his sons so they would not suffer his fate:  unskilled, having to live their entire life away from their families, seeing them at most once a year.  Loss in that his life has been lived for others who lived lives that he was not allowed to share.  He knows his sons, but he does not really know them.  They are his yet not really his.  He knows this and I think at times it must sadden him.  Yet he looks at what he has and he marvels.  He has come so much farther and done and seen so much more than the boys who stayed at home in the village.  He's lucky really, our Cha Cha.  As lucky as a man who has spent his entire adult life sleeping in bunk beds in a dormitory can be.

I sometimes reflect on Cha Cha and what he's sacrificed for his family.  It makes me sick to contemplate my own self centered, self righteous special pleading.  Forgive me Father for I am the foremost among sinners.