# Pioneer House and after > Five years of Dubai. The friendships that shaped me. A marriage. A job offer that became a visa ban. The long way back to Pakistan. Source: https://waqaspitafi.com/journey/pioneer-house-and-after/ --- Five years of Dubai. The friendships that shaped me. A marriage. A job offer that became a visa ban. The long way back to Pakistan. June 30, 2026 14 min Chapter 7 of 10 Pioneer House was the first office I worked at where I made friends. The office was run by Raza Jafri. The team I worked with included a man named Mujeeb and a man named Mustafa Arsiwala. These were the friendships that took the rest of the work seriously. The work was real. The friendships were the part that made me want to come back the next day. Outside the office, I had two more friends. Their names were not Pakistani. They were originally from Lucknow in India. I had met one of them while I was still living at Saud’s house in Ajman, and the other was his cousin. Their families were not Pakistani families. The friendships did not care. I lived with one of them for a stretch. Then he introduced me to another man, also from outside Pakistan, and that other man and I became roommates. We lived together for the next several years until I got married and moved to my own apartment. This is a small thing to put in a memoir but I want to put it in. The first community I belonged to in Dubai was a community of men who were not from where I was from. The boys at Razi Public School had bullied me for being from Diwan Da Bagh. The boys at Multan Public School had decided I did not belong because I was not from a posh part of the city. The men in Dubai did not know about Diwan Da Bagh. They did not know about Multan Public School. They saw me as I was in 2000, and they made room for me as I was. I owe most of my early adult character to those friendships. The men in question are still my friends today. The version of me that knows how to make friends across communities was first taught how to do that in a shared apartment in Dubai, at the age of twenty-four. After about a year at Pioneer House, I joined a software services company called GTFS. The salary jumped to 5,000 dirhams. The work expanded. I worked on various software products there. The years from 2001 to 2004 were the slow build of a career. In 2003, I got married. I am going to write about my marriage with as much honesty as the privacy rules of this site allow, because the marriage is the part of the memoir most personal-CEO sites either over-display or completely hide. I want to do neither. I will not name my wife. I will not describe her face or her work. I will say that she is from my extended family, and that I had known her in some form for years before the marriage. I will say that the decision to marry her was the most important decision of my life, and that, as I have written elsewhere on this site, the formula I used to make the decision was a spreadsheet first and then the gut. I built the spreadsheet, and then I put it aside, and I made the decision on intuition. The most beautiful decision of my life. She came with me to the UAE shortly after the marriage. We started our shared life together in a city neither of us was from. I tell you this much because she is part of the rest of the memoir. She does not appear by name again. But she appears in every decision after this point. The Qatar move was a decision we made together. The Emirates move was a decision we made together. The return to Pakistan was a decision we made together. Sixteen years of DevBatch is a decision we have continued to make together, every year. The personal site is mine. The life is shared. By 2003, with a wife and rising costs, I was ready to look for a better-paying job. I had two prominent offers. One was from ADIB, Abu Dhabi Islamic Bank. The other was from HMC, Hamad Medical Corporation in Qatar. HMC selected me but went silent. I did not hear from them for months. ADIB came in with a concrete offer. I accepted. I resigned at GTFS. GTFS refused to give me the No Objection Certificate. The NOC was, at the time, the document that allowed an employee to switch jobs in the UAE without being banned from the country. Without it, I could not accept the new job. I could not change my visa. I begged. I argued. I pulled in everyone I could pull in. Nothing worked. The ban came down. My wife was pregnant with our first child. We went back to Pakistan. I want to put a line of context here for anyone reading who has not lived through a Gulf-country labor system. The NOC and the visa ban are not about contract law. They are about power. The employer in the UAE in 2003 had the right to hold an employee in place by refusing to release them. The right was almost always exercised against the employee. The fact that I had taken a better offer at a competitor was, in the eyes of my GTFS boss, a kind of betrayal. The ban was the punishment. I have employed several hundred people since then, mostly in Pakistan. I have never once held an employee in place by refusing a release. The boss at GTFS does not know it, but he is the model for the kind of employer I have spent twenty-three years not being. The return to Pakistan was the lowest professional point of my life since the FSC years. I was twenty-seven. I had a wife. I had a baby on the way. I had no job. I had a degree from a college that, when I had attended it, had not yet been chartered, so the degree itself was not officially recognized by other institutions. I did two things in that period. I found out the college was now chartered, and I could complete a few additional credit hours to convert my BCS into a recognized degree. I started the credits. I also started looking for jobs in Lahore. I went to one interview at CureMD. The project manager presented me to a man named Bilal Hashmat. Bilal told me my test results were not strong, but he was willing to hire me on domain knowledge from my GTFS work. I was close to the mid-terms in my BCS conversion course. I did not join. Bilal Hashmat is a friend of mine today. He is one of the people who knew me at the lowest point and who has stayed in my life through it all. Then an email arrived from Qatar. The email said only: please find attached, your ticket and visa. The signature was from HMC, the Qatar hospital that had selected me eight months earlier and then disappeared. I thought it was a scam. I called them. They confirmed it was real. I froze the BCS course. I took the flight. I landed in Doha on a day so hot the temperature was nearly 50 degrees Celsius. The wind was howling. The HMC put me in a rest house where they kept new employees for the first few days. I sat in the rest house, alone, looking out the window at Doha in the heat, wondering what kind of life I had agreed to. The wife and the first child joined me a few weeks later. The next chapter is about Qatar. [← Previous chapter: Two weeks in Dubai](https://waqaspitafi.com/journey/two-weeks-in-dubai) [Next chapter: Qatar and the health cards →](https://waqaspitafi.com/journey/qatar-and-the-health-cards) Next step ## If this was worth your time, there is more of it I read every message that comes through the form. Specific asks get faster replies than open-ended ones. [Start a conversation](https://waqaspitafi.com/connect) [Read more writing](https://waqaspitafi.com/writings)