Listen to the latest songs, only on JioSaavn.com When the brothers were small, they lived in a home with mud walls and a roof of Advertis thatched leaves, with every month an anxious wait for the arrival of the money from abroad that sustained 10 people in the extended family. Unnikrishnan said he couldn't stand seeing his father bear the burden alone. He dropped out of school after the 10th grade. In 1998, he became the rst of the brothers to go to the gulf. He took up a job as an assistant at the same company where his father worked, Ghantoot General Mechanical Engineering, in an industrial zone of Dubai. Years before, his father had planted a mango seed from Kerala behind the warehouse. By the time Unnikrishnan arrived, the tree was bearing fruit. One by one, the four other brothers - Ramakrishnan, Sethu, Rajesh and Pradeesh all followed. "I told everyone to stay here," said their mother, Lakshmikutty, a slight woman in a red-and-white printed sari, sitting on her terrace on a recent afternoon. "But everyone wanted to go." Ramakrishnan was the most enthusiastic, having made up his mind early that he, too, would migrate to the gulf. "To make money, what else would it be?" he said with a laugh. His rst job in Dubai was working the overnight shift at a newspaper printing plant, earning $136 a month in today's dollars. Over the years, Ramakrishnan moved from the printing press to delivering newspapers to collecting revenue for an English-language paper in the UAE. His salary increased to $1,600 a month. By earlier this year, however, it was obvious that business was soft as oil prices plunged and the UAE's non-oil private sector contracted for the rst time in over a decade. Then he began to read in the news about a strange new illness coming from China. When the pandemic hit, its impact fell hardest on migrant workers. In Qatar and Saudi Arabia, the virus swept through labor camps and cramped apartments where foreign workers lived, trapped by poverty and lockdowns. Job losses exploded. In the UAE, for the rst time in recent memory, residents saw desperate migrants begging for food or money in the streets. Others began bartering their possessions for groceries and other necessities on Facebook groups, or waiting in long lines for provisions offered by charities. Some say they are unable to pay for ights home or cannot bear the thought of leaving with little or nothing to give to their families. Sethu, 43, the third of the Athekkatil brothers, works as a metal fabricator in Sharjah, one of the seven emirates that make up the UAE. He said he spent several months this spring con ned to his shared room in a dormitory with other workers. There was no work and nowhere to go. Pradeesh and his colleagues struggled to make ends meet after their company abruptly stopped paying them. CASES IN INDIA Rejimon Kuttappan, a labor activist in Kerala who works with migrants in 68,35,655 the gulf, said that starting in March he began to receive call after call from workers 78,524