This piece was first published on Brown History behind a paywall, and the response was honestly overwhelming — so many kind messages, comments, and people sharing their own stories.
I’m sharing the full text here because it clearly struck a chord. Growing up South Asian in the Gulf isn’t something that gets written about much, but it should be.
If this resonates, feel free to pass it on to others. And if there’s something you think I missed, or a unique angle you’ve lived within this experience, I’d really love to hear it.
Hearing from so many of you already made me realise how many stories still live in memory or passing conversation, but never make it to the page. I’d love to start curating more of them — so if you’re open to sharing, hit reply, email me at nishad@infinityinklings.com, or drop a comment below.
I was six when I first landed in Muscat with my mum in 2001. My dad had already been there for a few months, part of the early waves of engineering talent that the Sultanate brought in to work in its ever-growing oil finds. I remember immediately being taken aback by the city — its low, sand-coloured rows of houses muted in their ambitions; its architecture unshowy, with its wide, empty roads save for the occasional Toyota and a neat row of date palms. It felt still, almost unchanging — and to a child, that kind of constancy was oddly comforting.
What we initially imagined as a brief career detour for my dad stretched into thirteen years of dust-softened sunlight and grey-and-white checked school uniforms, of Indian school assemblies and shopping trips to Lulu Hypermarket, of Friday brunches and Sunday exams. It was a life we could live in full but never truly claim, because in the Gulf you are allowed to stay but never to belong.
The immigration structures in the Gulf are perhaps some of the most stable in their temporariness. You can spend an entire lifetime there: work for decades, raise a family, grow old, and still have no legal path to permanence. There is no birthright citizenship for those born to expat parents, no naturalisation after years of residence, no sentimental clause that allows familiarity to translate into legitimacy. (While some Gulf states have recently introduced highly restrictive pathways — Oman now theoretically allows naturalisation after 15 years of continuous residence, Qatar after 25 — these remain largely theoretical, with implementation yet to be seen.) If your visa expires or your sponsor withdraws support, you are expected to leave.
Migration scholars call this “permanent temporariness” — the “static experience of being temporary” coupled with the “acquired knowledge that such temporariness is permanent.” The demographic reality makes this system possible: in the UAE, non-citizens account for 90% of the population, while in Oman, there are roughly two South Asians to every three Omanis. Citizenship in these oil-rich states comes with significant benefits — access to social services, education, housing — that governments prefer to reserve for the few rather than extend to the many. As scholar Noora Lori claims in Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf, “policy-makers often find it more politically expedient to postpone the larger questions about belonging and address the more immediate issues of identity management by creating short-term, renewable legal statuses.”
And yet, the Indian diaspora in Oman is both vast and deepy rooted, with its presence in the Gulf predating the very concept of modern citizenship. In Oman specifically, Indian traders have been active since at least the 16th century, and during the British Raj, Muscat and other coastal ports in the Gulf were administratively managed through the Bombay Presidency. The Hindu Bhatia and Bohra Muslim merchant communities were prominent in Oman’s commercial networks, and many had established permanent family ties in Muscat by the early 20th century. Oman, for example, houses the oldest still active temple in the Gulf and the patriarch of the Khimji family from Gujarat, the late Kanaksi Khimji, was given the rare honorific of Sheikh, making him the only Hindu Sheikh in the entire Islamic world. Similarly, a 2014 report showed that 90% of the 2.36 million-strong Malayali diaspora resided in the region, to the extent that, as Shahnaz Habib claims in Airplane Mode, “when the Arab Gulf countries catch a cold, Kerala sneezes.”
Despite this long-standing presence, the rules of belonging remain rigid. I remember how this filtered into everyday childhood logic. No one I knew — bar some families like the Khimjis, whose stay in Oman predated the Sultanate in its current form — referred to themselves as Omani. We said we lived in Oman, never that we were from there. Even for those who were born there. Even when we couldn’t remember any other place as clearly. The temporary seeped into our speech.
This “temporal stagnation” creates, as one scholar puts it, peculiar ways of responding to your environment, “creating everyday tactics of active resistance.” This creates an impossible and conflicting paradox for the “perpetual outsiders,” which is captured by Neha Vora in her book on the Indian diaspora in Dubai, showing how “Indians — even those who have established thriving diasporic neighborhoods in the emirate — disavow any interest in formally belonging to Dubai and instead consider India their home.”
For example, we went to Indian schools (there are 21 in Oman alone) where our classroom walls were plastered with laminated A4 charts of Indian freedom fighters and Hindi and Malayalam alphabet. We sang the Indian national anthem in the morning assembly and put on skits about the Dandi March in the auditorium.
Our weekends were filled with cultural events, community dinners, and religious functions that recreated our lives back home with surprising fidelity. Maharashtrians gathered for Ganesh Chaturthi, Malayalis hosted Onam sadyas on banana leaves, Gujaratis hired vast grounds for Navratri garba, and many of us congregated together to break fast at Iftar during the holy month of Ramadan.
And yet, we remained apart. Apart from the Omanis, whom we rarely socialised with, and apart from the Western expats, who lived in gated compounds and sent their children to British or American curriculum schools.
Those few families who had managed to access a route to citizenship kept to themselves, signalling their supreme status in the social order. Culturally Indian, but dressed in the white of the dishdashah, the Omani national dress.
While many of us were middle-class children of engineers, accountants, and doctors, we rarely spoke to (or about) the labourers who built the towers we lived beside. They waited for transport under the harsh midday sun while we sat inside our air-conditioned school buses, humming Bollywood songs.
Looking back, I realise how little we reckoned with their presence. They were visible in every public space, but absent from our stories. Their living conditions were harsher, their pay far less, their futures narrower; their deaths, too, often undocumented. During the 2022 FIFA World Cup, reports revealed that over 6,500 South Asian workers had died during the construction of stadiums in Qatar. And yet, for the most part, their names have never been told, their stories never held in the national memory of either the Gulf or their countries of origin.
We were insulated from their pain because it was easier to be complicit in a system convenient enough not to question. Standing up would mean being kicked out. So we shopped in malls they built, sent our children to schools their labour helped maintain, and rarely thought about them beyond the occasional footnote or charity drive.
Today, when someone asks me, “Where are you from?” my answer unfolds like a map: Mumbai, Pune, Muscat, Abu Dhabi, Goa, Edinburgh, Oxford, London. I have lived in all these places, but belonged entirely to none. In the UK, at least, there is a legal path to citizenship, however flawed, contested, and conditional it may be.
And flawed it is. As Shahnaz Ahsan writes in The Jackfruit Chronicles:
The tightrope that ethnic minority communities across the UK are expected to walk, even today, is impossible: we are to succeed without appearing successful, work without taking anyone else’s jobs, pay taxes but not claim any benefits, we are to be part of society but not be visible.
But that tightrope, however impossible, is still a rope. A line to walk. In the Gulf, there is no rope at all, no line to cross. Only a series of thresholds you could never name, but always felt.
Last month, I met a school friend from Muscat who told me she hadn’t been back in over five years. When I asked why, she said she still had her old residence card and if she returned, she’d have to surrender it. She wasn’t ready to do that. And I understood, because in a world where documents define your right to exist, sometimes a plastic card feels more like home than the country it claims to represent.
I don’t know what’s worse: growing up knowing you don’t belong, or growing up believing you do, only to discover you never did. For many of us, our parents made sure we knew we were Indian. That Oman or the UAE was temporary and that we were simply passing through. For others, the Gulf was the only home they’d ever known, and yet, it will never truly be theirs.
The Gulf’s system of permanent temporariness has created generations of people who exist in the spaces between nations. For millions of us scattered across these oil-rich states, the question of what to pass on to the next generation is urgent. Many are raising children in countries that will never claim them as their own.
Some of us will eventually return to the cities and villages of our parents and grandparents, not always because they feel like home, but because they’re the only place left that will have us. We return to India, or Pakistan, or Bangladesh, not always because the soil calls out to us but because our passports do. Even if we’ve spent our whole lives elsewhere and even if the country we’re returning to feels unfamiliar, or speaks a version of our language we no longer fully understand. It’s often only later in life — when careers are done, when visas run out, when there’s nowhere else to go — that the return happens. By then, it can feel like too much time has passed, and yet, it’s the only place that will take you back without asking why you’re here.
It’s important to recognise, too, that this experience — of dislocation and existing in between — is not the same as being displaced. We had safety, stability, and air-conditioned homes. We were not fleeing war, famine, or political collapse. What we felt was not a crisis, but a constraint; we lacked permanence, not shelter. We had privileges even as we were missing something key.
Still, this generation has come to understand something the rest of the world might need to learn. That belonging doesn’t always come from legality; that communities can flourish without citizenship. In a world increasingly defined by paper borders, we embody another truth: that it’s possible to be from somewhere without being fully of it.
The inheritance, then, isn’t just the passport or an ancestral property in the so-called ‘home’ country. It is the in-between itself. The knowledge that home can be more than one place: That you can hold affection for cities that will never put your name on a deed; that your story, even when absent from national memory, still matters. Meaning isn’t only found in arrival or departure, but sometimes in the transit itself.
Brilliant!
I grew up in Muscat between 1994 and 2002. Made several visits until 2014. Have fond memories of Wadi Kabir, Al Khuwair, Muttrah, Ruwi, Al Hail to name a few. I went to ISM, Darsait too. Happy to connect and share my story.