Esha Gupta feels safe in Dubai, yet fearful today
She shared heartfelt prayers for the stranded, wishing everyone safety first, and quietly hoping she can return home soon.
The news of flight cancellations reached Esha Gupta not through an official announcement, but through the growing silence in her Dubai hotel. The hallway, usually alive with the hum of housekeeping carts and fellow guests, had gone still. The breakfast buffet, once a bustling affair of clattering plates and multilingual conversations, now offered only empty tables and a single attendant who refilled coffee for no one.
She sat on the edge of her bed, phone in hand, watching the messages pile up. Friends from Mumbai. Family from Delhi. Fans whose usernames she recognized, whose concerns touched her more than she expected. They wanted to know if she was okay, if she was safe, if the explosions she must have heard had come close.
She hadn’t heard explosions. That was the strange part. The war was happening, but from her window, Dubai looked almost normal. The Burj Khalifa still pierced the sky. The fountains still danced in the evening. But the airports were closed, the flights were cancelled, and she was stranded in a five-star prison of uncertainty.
She typed her response carefully, aware that thousands would read it, aware that her words might offer comfort to others in the same situation. We are ok, we are safe! Times are scary, very tough. God is there to protect us.”
She paused, deleting and retyping the next line several times. How to express gratitude to a government she didn’t belong to, for protecting her in a country not her own? It felt inadequate, but it was true.
Hope to be home soon.”
She posted it, then lay back on the bed, staring at the ceiling. Home. Such a simple word. Such a complicated distance.
Three thousand miles away, in a temporary shelter in South Mumbai, Sonal Chauhan’s mother pressed her phone to her ear for the hundredth time. The call wouldn’t connect. The networks were overloaded, or perhaps the lines to Dubai were simply too strained.
She had watched her daughter’s plea to the Prime Minister go viral, had seen the screenshot shared thousands of times. “Hon’ble PM Modi ji, I am currently stranded in Dubai due to the ongoing crisis, with flights cancelled and no clear way to return to India.”
The words were formal, respectful, the kind of public appeal that celebrities made when private channels failed. But behind those words was her daughter, alone in a foreign city, watching a war unfold from her hotel window.
The mother remembered teaching Sonal to ride a bicycle, remembered the scraped knees and the tears and the stubborn determination to try again. She remembered dropping her off at acting auditions, waiting in the car for hours, praying for good news. Now she prayed for something simpler: a flight, a message, a sign that her daughter would come home.
In a hotel room not far from Esha Gupta’s, PV Sindhu sat with her racquets packed and nowhere to go. The All England Open beckoned, a tournament she had trained months for, a chance to add another title to her glittering career. But the courts of Birmingham might as well have been on another planet.
Her coach had been on the phone for hours, trying to find alternate routes, connecting flights through countries not affected by the closures. Nothing. Every path led back to the same reality: the Gulf was closed, and she was trapped on the wrong side of it.
She thought of her first trip to England as a junior player, the excitement of competing on the same courts where legends had played. She thought of her parents, who had sacrificed so much for her career, who were probably watching the news with the same helpless anxiety as Sonal’s mother.
A message buzzed on her phone. A fellow athlete, checking in. “Stay strong. This will pass. The tournament will wait.”
Sindhu smiled, a small, sad smile. Would it wait? Would anything wait? The world had stopped, but her dreams hadn’t. They never did.
In a cramped apartment in Dubai’s International City, a housekeeper named Priya from Kerala stared at her phone in despair. She had saved for two years to buy a ticket home, had finally booked one for next week. Now the flights were cancelled, and no one could tell her when they would resume.
Her son, eight years old, waited for her in a village outside Kochi. She had promised to be home for his birthday. She had promised to bring a new cricket bat, the one with Virat Kohli’s signature printed on it.
She tried to call, but the networks were jammed. She tried to message, but the texts wouldn’t send. She sat on her bed, surrounded by the small gifts she had bought for him, and waited for a connection that might never come.
In the Indian Embassy in Dubai, officials worked through the night. The phones rang constantly. The emails piled up. Celebrities and housekeepers, athletes and businessmen, all stranded, all desperate, all asking the same question: How do we get home?
A young diplomat, barely thirty, took a call from an elderly woman whose husband needed medication they couldn’t get in Dubai. He noted the details, promised to help, and moved to the next call. There were hundreds more waiting.
Outside his window, the city gleamed under a false sky of peace. But inside, the war had already arrived, measured not in explosions but in separation, in distance, in the terrible silence between a message sent and a message received.