Dipu Paruchal tilted his head back and surveyed the massive concrete structure resting on a pillar. This stretch of concrete pillars along the road leading up to Kota Damansara would soon be supporting an elevated MRT guideway. Sweat trickled down Dipu’s forehead into his eyes. It stung. He blinked back the sweat and reached into the back pocket of his brown pants for a towel. As he took the towel out, a piece of paper fell out on the ground.

It was a photograph of his family, crumpled with dog-eared corners, which Dipu carried to work everyday. The photograph was taken the last time he was home in Dhaka, about five years ago. It was the last day of the one week he was allowed to take off work to return home. He had brought his family out to the nearest KFC, a long bus ride from home. They were sharing a set meal of two fried chicken and a glass of Coca-Cola (a luxury) when a KFC staff asked if he could take photographs of them for the fast food chain’s upcoming marketing campaign: Finger lickin’ good, heart-warming moments.

The photograph showed a dark-skinned man, lean and well-built with an especially square jaw which accentuated his grim smile. His arm was wrapped around a lady, fair in complexion, who was at that moment caught glancing at their two boys, five and seven, with tomato sauce-speckled faces. Every night, the image of the boys, one of them proudly displaying a missing incisor, beamed at Dipu as he dropped onto his bed after work, still in the same shirt and pants that were crusted with dirt and sweat, in the room he shared with seven other men.

“Dipu! Farooq!” Mr. Hong called. “Angkat ini batu sana!” He pointed to where another group of workers were already laying the foundation for a new structure.

In the dormitory, Dipu shared a bunk bed with Farooq. Farooq had come to Malaysia on his parents’ savings about five years ago and had sent home enough money for his parents to build a small house. The house would have four small bedrooms, one for his parents, himself and each of his two younger siblings.

Farooq currently carried in his pocket a brochure that someone had thrust into his hand on his way to the construction site from the bus stop. On the brochure was printed an image of a tastefully-designed living room, with sheer linen curtains framing the entrance to a balcony overlooking the Petronas Twin Towers, and in huge bold letters beneath, “Experience living in the sky”. Now that he too had a new home, albeit one with neither a living room nor a view, he could perhaps visit the showroom to get some ideas on how to furnish his new house in Dhaka. He could go on Sunday, his only day off for the month. He could take the RapidKL bus T607 to the Kelana Jaya LRT, get on the LRT to KL Sentral and switch to the train that would take him to PWTC where the condominium was.

He wondered what it would be like to live so high up in the sky, to wake up every morning to the view of the city beneath and the golden-lined horizon ahead. No, such luxury was not for him, he reminded himself. Back in Dhaka, he would wake up to the cries of the peddler selling bread and run around barefoot on the streets to the angry yells of the old woman next door. He belonged on the ground; the clouds were beyond his grasp. But as he helped Dipu, he could not get his mind off the cream-colored walls of the condominium unit in the brochure, how soft the curtains looked and how perfect the apartment would be if it was filled with the aroma of curry. They carried the stones and piled it up next to a pillar. Tashfi, who had just arrived in Malaysia a month ago and now slept on the bunk bed next to theirs, waved them over to a corner.

“I sent money to my parents yesterday,” he pulled out a RM50 note from his pocket and smiled at it with pride. “And see, I have money now."

“Come brother, we celebrate tonight!” Farooq patted him on his back.

“Now I can buy a sim card,” Tashfi said. “I can call my Nutha.”

“She waiting for you,” Dipu assured him. He lit a cigarette, took a puff and passed it to Farooq.

“Yes, she waiting,” Tashfi nodded. They fell quiet and stood in a small circle, passing and smoking the cigarette in turn, as if playing a game of pass the ball.

Tashfi carried the RM50 note in a zipped purse with him all day, cautiously patting his left back pocket every few minutes to make sure that the money, his lifeline to Nutha, was still there.

Later that night, he bought a RM20 sim card from the grocery store in the dormitory. He borrowed Dipu’s Nokia phone to make the phone call back to Bangladesh.

Tashfi keyed in the phone number and was greeted by a monotonous dial tone repeatedly ringing in his ear, as if mocking his excitement and the passion he felt for Nutha. His heart was ready to burst at the sound of that familiar sweet voice that used to read him stories and…

“Hello?”

His heart dropped. It was her mother.

“Slamalikum, I’m Tashfi,” he said, “Ca-can I speak to Nutha?”

“Hold on a minute.” As he waited, he could hear her inaudible mumble to someone he imagined was standing close by.

“Nutha not here,” she said.

“When she will come back?” he asked hopefully. “I can call again.”

“Don’t call. She is very busy, needs to go to school and study.” Nutha’s mother hung up on him.

He returned the phone to Dipu, turned down Farooq’s invitation to the gambling den located three doors down the road, and climbed into bed. That night, long after everyone had gone to bed, he remained wide awake, revisiting his memories with Nutha and convincing himself that she was doing the same.

The things they carried often kept them living during the day and awake at night.

The things they carried were driven by necessity. All of them carried an immigration card, a piece of paper which gave each of them an identity in this confusing city. Even with the card in hand, they would often get stopped by policemen while casually walking on the streets.

Farooq, who kept his card under his sock in his right shoe in the dormitory at night, liked to think that it was the headshot on his card, and not the color of his skin, that often courted trouble for him.

“This not me,” he complained, to anyone who would listen. “This man so dark and serious.”

“You are dark,” Dipu responded.

“Look at that nose,” he brought the card closer to his face and examined it. The card smelled like a mixture of a strange concoction of herbal drink and dried salted fish.

“This face looks like a killer,” he continued. “Like I cut people and keep them in the fridge.”

“Face like that, easy for the police to ask for coffee money,” Dipu said. “When I walking home yesterday, the police asked me again where I come from and where I going.”

“How much do you give?” Farooq asked.

“Ten ringgit. I said all I have,” Dipu answered. “Sometimes you just keep money in your shoes, they don’t know.”

Farooq nodded and turned the card around in his hands. This card has sealed his identity as a migrant worker and marked him as an outsider in this country. It branded him as a Bangla, another one of many cheap construction workers whose presence made the locals feel unsafe and who often hung out where they were most unwelcome, like on the streets around Bukit Bintang. Farooq liked to think that it was perhaps his seventies sense of fashion—plaid shirt and baggy bell-bottom jeans—which drew him glares whenever he entered shops in KLCC.

Whatever it was, Farooq concluded that he deserved a better headshot on the card.

Every day, each worker carried to work a clear plastic container of rice with leftover dishes from their dinner at the canteen and a litre of water. In Dipu’s red plastic bag were always at least five loose cigarettes, which he procured from an Indian vendor in the liquor store not far from their dorm at only sixteen cents a stick, and one packet of M&M. Tashfi, who was new and cautious, carried in his backpack a few band-aids and a roll of gauze.

The construction site where they worked was located right beside a main road and about a five minute walk from the bus stop. They would start working while the city was still asleep and return to their quarters after the sun set. At times, when construction plans fell behind schedule, they were asked to work night shifts, toiling while the moon shone its spotlight upon these workers who labored and sculpted the landscape of a city which did not belong to them.

For safety, they wore yellow hard hats on their heads and matching vests over their chests at work. During the day, they wrapped a towel around their faces and neck to shade themselves from the unforgiving heat of the sun. They wore heavy rubber boots on their feet and cotton gloves on their hands for protection.

They carried spools of wires, measuring tapes and rulers in their pockets for work. They carried brooms, shovels, concrete saws and drills. Occasionally, they had to carry sacks of cement mix or stones to the site. Dipu also always carried a piece of paper and a pen, which served as amusement on the thirty-minute bus ride to their workplace and proved useful on several occasions when Mr. Hong needed to sketch diagrams to clarify his instructions to them.

Sometimes, they carried with them things they picked up along the way to work. Many times, Tashfi had kept with him pages of old newspapers he found lying on the sidewalk. Together with Dipu, they would sit on the pavement during lunchtime and pour over the words on the front page trying to pick out ones they understood and learn the ones they did not. By the time Mr. Hong marched towards them and threw them his infamous glare which had “Get back to work!” written all over, they would usually have barely gotten through the bylines.

Farooq, who was not religious but very superstitious, carried wooden prayer beads around his neck. He claimed that a friend had gotten them blessed by the Dalai Lama himself when he visited Dharamsala a few years ago.

“I feel more good energy when I wear this,” he said. “It is like Dalai Lama gives me his blessing.”

“Your friend has one more?” Tashfi’s eyes lit up with interest. “Nutha told me before she wants to visit Dalai Lama. I think she will like this. When I go back, she will wait for me at the airport and I will give her this as present.”

“I have to ask my friend. But this thing is powerful. It will keep all of us alive and away from danger.”

He smiled at Tashfi reassuringly.

Farooq had actually bought the prayer beads for RM5 from a monk on Petaling Street. The monk had lied to him about having met the Dalai Lama. In fact, he was not a monk at all, but a bald and shrewd Chinese man dressed in an orange robe. The prayer beads possessed no power or blessing; it merely created an illusion of protection and safety.

The construction site was a little like a minefield to the unwary. It was fickle and unpredictable, especially at night when the shadows cloud and obscure one’s view of things around them. The moonlight casts shadows which crept onto the contractor’s construction plan, on the elaborate illustrations of barricades and scaffoldings, and filled every hole the workers dug with darkness so they could not see the bottom, making it difficult to know whether they have dug deep enough. The shadows played tricks on the worker’s visions, hiding the things around the site from view, like the cigarette butts sticking out from the sand and the bottle of “Kapak” whisky behind the pillar.

It was because of the shadows at night that none of them noticed the threatening crack that had formed along the side of one of the piers.

That fateful morning, Dipu received a letter from his wife. It had been three months since his wife last wrote to him. In the letter was a report of the weekly activities of his wife and two sons.

Rajhi and Bilal helped me make some narkel naru, your favorite dessert, last Wednesday, she wrote. We went to the park on Thursday to fly the kites they had both made at school. We waited in the rain outside a restaurant yesterday. It was worth it because we were one of their first 100 customers so the kids ate for free. It will be Rajhi’s birthday next Thursday.

His wife did not ask how he was doing, she just wrote, you take care of yourself over there. She never mentioned money, except to say, Mr. Deepak called again about rent, and at the end of the letter, she signed “Love”.

It was love that had carried Dipu and the other workers through the many years they had to spend away from home and their families. The love for a wife struggling to cope without a husband and the love for two boys, one with missing front teeth, the love for a new house with an airy ceiling and soft couches and the love for a certain girl whom one could imagine looking out the window into the ocean every night, awaiting the return of her sweetheart.

“It is my son’s birthday next week,” Dipu announced to the group that day as they squatted under a tree during a break from work. “I want to send him a present.”

“What will you buy?” Farooq asked.

“Just buy a Batman toy from Tesco,” someone quipped. “Cheap, and boys like it.” “No, no, buy a book,” Tashfi said. “I wish my parents bought me books when I was young.”

“I want to buy a laptop for him,” Dipu said. “I saw an old one, seven hundred ringgit in Lowyat.”

“A laptop!” their eyes widened. They had not dreamed of owning laptops in their childhood.

“Yes, but I have to wait for boss to pay first,” Dipu sighed. “I hope Rajhi is okay waiting two more weeks.”

“Of course he will be OK!” Tashfi assured him. “But you have enough money to live next month?”

“I will have extra two hundred ringgit. But I keep some money from before. I won’t smoke or drink and I will eat food from canteen… Don’t worry, I will be OK.”

Someone spotted Mr. Hong marching towards them, and the group rapidly dispersed. Each person resumed his individual task, amazed by the sacrificial love of a father for his son (they could not bear the thought of giving up cigarettes, to be denied the one pleasure that they could afford!) and silently glad that this was not their burden to carry.

It had happened at exactly half past ten.

Farooq knew this because he was standing about a hundred meters away from the spot, showing off to Tashfi the leather wristwatch he had bought in a pasar malam.

“Cow leather,” he had explained. “You touch. Very good–”

He was interrupted by a deafening Boom! A huge cloud of dust rose from the ground and blinded his view for a few minutes. It was like standing in the middle of a sandstorm. Workers ran amok, tripping over bricks and shovels that were hastily thrown on the ground, and knocking into each other in the mad rush to move as far away as possible from whatever it was that had been the source of the loud sound.

“Ya Allah!” Tashfi exclaimed. “Judgment Day is upon us!” He turned round and round repeating himself and would not stop until Farooq threw a punch to his face.

“Everyone kumpul kat sini sekarang!” they could hear Mr. Hong’s voice over the din.

When the dust had settled, they saw a huge concrete slab lying in a corner of the parapet on which construction work was carried out that morning. A 300-tonne concrete span had dislodged from its pier and fell off the pillar onto the ground. There was now a huge gap between the two sides of the elevated MRT guideway, as if someone had suddenly decided to erase the middle part of the track.

All the workers were shepherded into a group standing some distance away from the scene. They were trying to make sense of what they had just heard and saw happened.

“I thought it was a bomb,” Farooq said. “I thought I was going to die. I thought someone was trying to…”

“Where’s Dipu?”

The question spread around the group like wildfire and finally reached the ears of their supervisor.

“Dipu!” Mr. Hong shouted, a tinge of urgency ringing in his voice. Everyone stopped talking. His voice was met with silence punctuated with the sound of cars whooshing by, oblivious to the chaos in this world separate from theirs.

“Di-Dipu!” he shouted again. “Anyone knows Dipu kat mana?” They felt their hearts sink, as if dragged down by the weight of a stone. He’s stuck there, someone in the back of the group kept saying. Ya Allah, he’s still under that thing.

Mere minutes before it happened, Dipu was digging a trench with the rest of the group. He had been working both day and night shifts for three days in a row, hoping to earn more money through working overtime. His body was exhausted, but his arms mechanically moved up and down, shoveling pile after pile of dirt out of the ground. His mind was far away with his family in the park where his two sons were running around trying to pull the kite in and the sound of his sons’ laughter resounded in his ears.

He tried to picture the faces of his two boys. He could see the faint outlines of the features on their jovial round faces and the dimples on their cheeks. This image of them beaming at him was one already etched in his mind and yet sometimes, he doubted his memory. Had he remembered the slender neck of his wife wrongly? Maybe she had cut her hair short now. How tall were his boys now? Do they have pimples now, he wondered.

As he worked, out of the corner of his eye, he thought he saw a small boy peering at him behind the pillar. The boy looked thin and was topless. He thought it was strange, children were not allowed on site. Curious, he lay down his shovel and walked towards the spot where he thought he had seen the child, about a hundred metres away from the rest of the group. It was dark and he had left his headlight with the shovel but he could make out that this place was empty. There was no boy, just a few plastic bags and pieces of paper scattered on the ground. Just as he was about to return to where the group was, he heard a soft pleading sob from somewhere ahead of him. He squinted and thought he saw the boy squatting in the far end directly under a pier, playing with a measuring tape that was left lying around forgotten after all construction work was completed in this area. Slowly, he walked towards the boy.

It was not till the giant structure was dislodged and started falling to the ground that he became aware of what was happening. In the last few seconds of his life, he reached out his hands and tried to push the boy away from danger but his hands merely grasped thin air.

That night, for the first time in his life, Farooq opened the small Bible that someone had once given him on the street. He did not understand a word of it, but he thought it looked holy and solemn and he liked the smell of the pages in it. In a strange way, the smell gave him solace and comfort from the things, the burdens, he and the other workers had to carry in life.

Each day, they bore the weight of bricks and buckets of cement mix. Their bodies and limbs moved like an automaton programmed to perform with mechanical accuracy, digging dirt out from the hole in the ground or drilling a blast hole with the jackhammer. They are loaded with responsibilities, despair, regret, and longing—these were intangibles, but even intangibles carried with them a certain weight. They slowly wore the bearer out by constantly taunting their hearts, clawing at the clutches of hope that still remained. With each day, the same sad slouch became noticeable in the way they stood waiting for the bus to take them back to their rooms.

Farooq dreamt of being free, of flying off into the darkness or getting carried away by the waves that would gently caress his skin and take him off somewhere, to an isolated island perhaps where he could live on his own terms. He dreamt of giving it all in and victoriously proclaiming to the Creator, “You can have it back!”

And then he thought of Dipu crushed under the weight of the concrete slab, and his heart felt like it was plunged into a bucket of crushed ice. The bed below his now lay empty. Dipu’s belongings were all packed up in a cardboard box and someone new was arriving to take his place the next morning.

Tashfi stood at the door, clutching the photograph of his lovely Nutha.

“Farooq, how much you paid to come to Malaysia?”

“Seventy thousand taka. You?”

“Eighty thousand taka,” Tashfi paused and stared at the photo in his hands. “But maybe it had cost more.”

“It cost Dipu his life.” They both fell silent.

Tashfi pulled out a bottle of Kapak whisky and drank some. Dipu was now gone, finally free from the shackles of life, from all the things he had to carry.

Lucky bastard, he thought and took another swig.