"Both of them in skinny jeans and American-branded T-shirts, purchased at a greater cost than either would have admitted to his family. Samar's T-shirt read " GUESS?," and Yogan's "American Eagle." The meaning of these inscriptions did not matter to them, though Yogan suspected that his had something to do with the American postal service, and this excited him. Samar's T-shirt was tight around his chest in a film-hero kind of way,"
"It was the T-shirts that had sparked their first conversation, each asking the other, "Do you speak English?" English was necessary in order to navigate the airport, and, they expected, life in this new city called Dubai, which was in so many ways an imitation of a major Western city. But English had come to both men only piecemeal, from the dazzling, incongruous lines in Bollywood films."
"The plots of those movies and their many twists had vanished; what Yogan and Samar recalled was Shah Rukh Khan, with his signature wide-eyed look, ordering Kajol to "take a chill pill!" And Kajol, mocking her hoity-to-toity London neighbors with "Would you like some tea?" Thanks to a joint effort drawing on both men's vocabularies, they made it through immigration and baggage claim and out to the arrivals hall, where a red-haired woman"
Two young men meet in Dubai wearing Western-branded T-shirts and bond over limited English learned from Bollywood. The T-shirts prompt their first conversation and help them navigate airport formalities. They rely on fragmentary phrases from films to pass immigration and reach shared accommodations via a shuttle. One man's wife, Roshni, is unexpectedly pregnant, which prompts the search for longer-term work after a recent contract ended. The men combine vocabularies to communicate practical needs and adapt to an imitative, Western-style urban environment while confronting economic uncertainty and impending family responsibilities.
Read at The New Yorker
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]