Magar was only 22 when he left his home village in eastern Nepal for Qatar, hoping to make some desperately needed money for his family. While still in college, he had eloped with his girlfriend Rozina, whose parents opposed their marriage because she was from a higher caste. They were madly in love, and soon had a son, Arav.
But Magar found that he couldn’t make enough money to support his family. When he found the job in Qatar, it seemed like a godsend. It wasn’t long after arriving that he realised he had instead landed in a nightmare. Stuffed into a room with six others, with one semi-functional fan, he was shuttled back and forth to the stadium with barely any time to eat or sleep. The heat was constant and pounding. Sometimes, his nose would start bleeding and he would vomit. “If there was some shade in the stadium we used to try to hide in there but we’d have to come back, we couldn’t stay in there,” Magar said.
Complaints about conditions to his supervisor brought only threats. “Sometimes I would work until the next morning, and if I said I didn’t want to work, they’d say I would be cut off from my payments,” he said. “The manager used to threaten me if I wouldn’t work long hours, he’d say, ‘I’ll cut your overtime work’, but he never paid me overtime anyway.”
After a year and a half, Magar managed to get home, though he was paid a fraction of the amount written in his contract. But he had lost weight and started vomiting and running fevers regularly. His family took him to hospital. Tests showed irreparable damage to his kidneys. Dhakal, his doctor, told him he would have to go on dialysis three times a week for the rest of his life. At 23, he was the first member of his family known to have had kidney problems.
