Leo Tellis, Sushila Tellis, and their daughters Tina and Margaret

By Anand Holla

 

By the look of it, their faces perpetually lit up by the afterglow of lives well lived, Leo Tellis and wife Sushila have mastered the method of dealing with the inherently distressing nature of goodbyes. Their long-drawn reminiscence of their time in Qatar unspools like a love letter that won’t end.

Yet, the couple, of whom Tellis happens to belong to one of the first Indian expat families to have settled and endured in the Middle East, is only hours away from ending a legacy that began nearly a century ago, in 1916.

“It has been such an amazing experience,” says Tellis, who recently retired after putting in almost 41 years of service at Qatar Petroleum (QP), “I am what I am today because of QP and the kindness of my bosses there.”

The singular setting for the Tellis’ story is Dukhan, an industrial township 84kms from Doha where the country’s first oil well was drilled in 1937.

“What we will miss the most is perhaps this spoiled and pampered lifestyle we enjoyed in Dukhan,” says Sushila, “We were really spoilt for choice. It has been luxurious living.”

Their bags packed for a one-way trip to home in India, they have been held back by the QP management to be part of what will be the most fitting occasion to commemorate their innings — QP’s grand 40th anniversary gathering tomorrow.

For Tellis, the 40th anniversary milestone could as well be about celebrating his own momentous journey. Born and raised in Bombay, Tellis worked in Air India as a gas turbine engineer, when the British Petroleum (BP) recruited him for QP in 1973. “That’s when I, as a 23-year-old, joined the Qatar Petroleum Company at Dukhan as the first trained and registered gas turbine personnel.”

The following year, Tellis was tasked to be part of the team that constructed and commissioned the first Natural Gas Liquids (NGL) pilot plant in the world being built by Shell, known as Fahahil Stripping Plant, in Dukhan. The work at the stripping plant was “to take gas from the fields, compress it, chill it and make liquid out of it.”

That liquid would be sent to Mesaieed, the other half of the NGL plant, known as the fractionation plant. Tellis says, “There, the liquid is fractionated into propane, butane, and if anything’s left, it’s sold as condensate. That is Natural Gas Liquids for you.”

When Tellis left India, he remembers his salary to be Rs1,700, and the rupee then was 1.9 to a Qatari Riyal. “At QP, my salary of QR1,952 was thus more than double, apart from the overtime, allowances and perks. Moreover, working abroad was a big deal back then,” the 64-year-old recalls. Although he retired in 2010, his service was extended four times until it finally came to an end this April.

However, Tellis’ family’s presence in the Middle East began during the First World War. His uncle Phillip Tellis was sent on deputation to the office of the Chief Political Officer Basrah, Iraq. Soon after the British troops captured it in March 1917, he was transferred to Baghdad where he worked as the Superintendent of Records Section.

“He was then reporting to Winston Churchill. Years later, my father Harold joined him. My father first went to Abadan in Iran. Though he didn’t stay in the Middle East for long, our descendants kept coming to this part of the world,” Tellis says.

As a pharmacist with QP, Sushila’s father came to Qatar in 1956 and married three years later. For a few months after, Sushila’s mother would fly down to visit him.

“A few months after I was born in 1961, dad got the family down. But since the accommodation wasn’t ready in Dukhan, we had to live in Doha and Mesaieed (then Umm Sa’id). Once he secured permanent stay, the housing was still not ready. We then lived on rented accommodation until one of the bachelors’ accommodations was converted into family places,” she recollects.

With no proper schooling system in place, Sushila studied in a boarding school in Goa, and flew down to Dukhan during summer holidays. Meanwhile, destiny had set the twain up to meet, fall in love and get hitched.

“Leo was a family friend, but he soon became part of our family. After my graduation in 1983, he proposed and we got engaged,” she says. “She was 22, I was 33. Finding my life partner was another high point of being in Dukhan,” he says. She looks at him and concurs with a smile.

After getting married at the Indian Embassy in Doha, a lavish reception was held in Dukhan and a full-fledged wedding took place in a church in Goa. “Since the reception was in Hotel Fidalgo in Panjim city, my whole village was bundled into buses and taken,” Sushila says with a chuckle.

Settling down in Dukhan though wasn’t a breeze to start with. “Initially, we lived in one room and we had to share the kitchen with a bachelor living on another side, because there were just no houses. The majority, in fact, would live outside in makeshift shacks,” Tellis says.

Contrast that with the current Dukhan lifestyle, and one wonders whether they are referring to the same place. However, they loved it then as much as they do it now.

“For us, when you say Qatar, it means Dukhan. We couldn’t ever think of staying outside it. If we had a choice to stay in Dukhan, we wouldn’t ever leave Qatar. Dukhan is home for us,” says Sushila, who completed 25 years as a nursery teacher at Dukhan English School.

When Sushila swears by Dukhan, she speaks of both its meteoric ascent over the past 14 years, and the simpler times — until around 2000 — when several families would get together to celebrate all sorts of occasions and value a genuine sense of community. Though they occasionally zip by to Doha for its many attractions or events, the familiarity and attachment of Dukhan has turned them immune to the charms of the brightest city lights.

“The comforts of living in Dukhan are unimaginable,” Tellis shares, “You live in huge bungalows with central air-conditioning. While you spend a fortune to stay in Doha, everything in Dukhan — from house to food — is free. Car expenses are taken care of, and so are the air tickets and the medicines. You won’t get a decent sandwich in Doha for QR4 but for that money, you get a five-star banquet with an endless spread at the Mess. We also managed to save a decent amount of money which we invested in properties back home.”

With its impressive laundry list of amenities and privileges, it’s understandable why Tellis can talk about the rewards of living in QP’s Dukhan township for an hour on the trot, and still wonder if he has forgotten something. “Your expenses are virtually nil. In fact, you are living off your allowances. Just the amount I saved on taxes here is enough to build a mansion,” he says, with conviction.

An avid sportsman, there’s barely any sport that Tellis didn’t take up during his stay. “Snorkelling, scuba diving, tennis, golf; Dukhan has everything. You even get state-of-the-art sailing clubs where you are given free yachts and catamarans with training. I didn’t dream of being a golfer. But here, I became the first non-white captain of the Golf Club.  Never once did I think I would own a yacht or a catamaran. But today, my whole family has sea-going certificates and licenses. We all take part in Regattas. These are some of the privileges working at QP Dukhan gets you.”

Undoubtedly, the best privileges of their years in Qatar have been their two daughters, Tina and Margaret. Now in their 20s, the girls finished their schooling in Dukhan and then moved to Canada for further studies. “Now they want to sponsor us there,” the parents say proudly.

Both Tina and Margaret imbibed the Qatari culture so thoroughly that for a cultural event called the Global Village, in their universities in Canada, they felt more at ease to represent Qatar instead of India. Dressed in traditional Arabic attire, the girls put up a tent, made gava tea, and even served dates, khubbus, hummus, mutabil and majboos to visitors.

“They didn’t know much of India, and they don’t even speak Hindi. They have learnt to read and write in Arabic, and their Qatar corner was a big hit,” Tellis says.

Of course, when it comes to cultural assimilation, the daughters have merely followed their parents’ footsteps. Sushila says, “We have mingled wonderfully well with Qatari families. They have accepted us as just one of them. We would just walk into each other’s houses, and there was no way to avoid visits during Eid.”

Tellis, too, feels that they have wholesomely adopted the Qatari culture. “We go to all their kharouf (lamb) parties, picnics in the desert, fishing in the dhows, or nights in Khor al Udeid in those dreamy tents. Obviously, our diet now features a lot of Arabic food,” he says.

Even in the face of blinding modernity, Qataris hold onto their culture, feels Sushila. “When any Arab wears that white dress, it makes him no different from the other. He could be rich or poor, but that dress unites them. That’s also what keeps them grounded, I feel. They may have the best cars and the best homes, but by wearing that white dress, they are aware where they come from. That’s worth admiring,” she says.

A powerful metaphor for Qatar and Dukhan’s transition the Tellis’ have witnessed would be their interesting connection with the two airports — the old Dukhan airport that shut down soon after Sushila first came via it as a toddler, and the spanking new Hamad International Airport that the duo will now be flying out of.

“In 1961, I was around three months old when I came to Qatar through the Dukhan airport. It was just a dirt-track where, in a rare, old video, you could see people casually walking in and out of the aircraft. There were just a couple of buildings around it.”

Tellis says some of the first aircraft coming to Qatar from India were partitioned; people would be in the front, while vegetables and livestock were stacked in the back.

“An Indian pilot who used to often land at Dukhan airport once told me that they would stay in Dukhan overnight and go to the open air movie hall. So engrossed in the movie they would be, it seems, that if it rained, they would pick up the chairs and hold it above their heads and continue watching,” Tellis says and laughs. That movie hall was thoroughly done up in the 1980s to make way for the swanky Dukhan Cinema that now stands there.

For Dukhan, the turn of the millennium brought unforeseen winds of change. Tellis mainly credits Ahmad Saif Ahmad al-Sulaiti, Operations Manager of Dukhan Fields, for ushering in this transformation.

He says, “Ever since he took over as Operations Manager, Dukhan just took off to another league of excellence. We call him a wizard, a magician.” Sushila cuts in, “But it’s not an illusion, it’s for real and it’s beautiful. Dukhan is still being transformed and amazingly so.”

And since they can’t live in Dukhan any longer, they find “catching up” with their roots to be just the right thing to do. “We will live in Pune, India, where Leo’s family lives,” Sushila says. “Going to Canada may be good, but India is where our heart is,” Tellis says.

But how do they manage to mask their nostalgia with happy, smiley faces? “Obviously, we feel sad. When you spend your whole lifetime in one place and well, need we say anything more? We are literally being uprooted. But if we live a good life from here on, we owe it all to Qatar and QP, Dukhan,” Tellis says.

“Someone told us the other day,” says Sushila, “that you are on a long journey with no destination. Dukhan was the first half. Now we look forward to the next half.”