WAITING FOR THE SCHOOL BUS IN ABU DHABI one morning, age eleven, I sleepily registered the final moments of a man falling off an eight-story rooftop. His body splattered against the pavement a few dozen feet from where I was standing. The bus was behind schedule, and by the time it arrived some ten minutes later, a sheet had been draped over the man’s corpse, which was then loaded into an ambulance, and the purple puddle he left behind had been hosed into the drains.
He had landed mere steps from the entrance to our greengrocer’s, run by Mr. Kareem, a Keralan migrant in his fifties. Mr. Kareem would later tell me that the suicide was a South Asian construction worker, one of many occupying the apartments above his shop that had been converted into overcrowded dormitories. South Asian guest workers make up over half the population in the United Arab Emirates, more than five million out of nine million residents in 2015.