“Beta, have you eaten?”
“Yes, Ammi, I have.”
I have told my mother this lie so many times that I have lost count.
The truth is that I often come back from duty so tired that I fall asleep without eating or drinking anything. The hunger is there, but the exhaustion is stronger.
Then my family asks, “Are you happy?” And I laugh and say, “Very happy. Everything is going well.”
I am not trying to deceive them. I only want one thing: that my worries never steal their sleep. The call ends, silence fills the room, and I am left alone with everything I could never say.
My name is Ghulam Mustafa Janjua. This is not a success story, not yet. It is the story of a journey that is still going on.
A home where even dreams were counted
I grew up in a home where even dreams had to fit inside a budget.
Every need had the same answer: “Next month.” New clothes, next month. Medicine, next month. Even a little happiness, next month. And that next month, as if it had lost its way, never seemed to arrive.
I watched my father come home exhausted and still smile. I watched my mother quietly push her own share of food towards us children. The worry in their eyes never reached their lips.
One day, without telling anyone, I made myself a promise:
“One day, I will lift this weight from their shoulders.”
That promise burned in my chest like a small lamp. For years I carried it from one private job to the next. I gave my time, my youth, every morning and every evening. But my salary always ran out before the month did, and with every month the promise moved a little further away.
The city of dreams, and my first nights
That same promise one day took me away from home, thousands of kilometers away, to Dubai.
When I left, my mother placed her hand on my head, my father patted my shoulder, and my younger brothers and sisters said, “Come back soon.” I smiled and said yes. I had no idea how long that “soon” would become.
The world calls Dubai the city of dreams: tall towers, bright lights, expensive cars. But beneath those lights there is another Dubai, one that never appears in the photos.
At first, I could not find work. The days passed and my pockets emptied. For days at a time, I went hungry. And there were nights when I had no roof over my head. I slept by the roadside. The city whose lights look so beautiful from far away gave me its pavement as my first shelter.
Here, even drinking water has to be bought. When your pocket is empty, even a sip of water has a price.
Finally, I found my first job, as a waiter. I served food at other people’s tables while my own stomach was often still empty. After that, I worked as an all-rounder at a food company. Whatever work I was given, I did, without complaining about the tiredness and without asking what the job was called.
Then I became a bike rider.
When the city slept, I was awake. When people sat in air-conditioned rooms, I was out on burning roads. Fast cars passed inches from me, and at every turn it felt as if this one could be the last. Every morning when I left, I did not know whether I would return safely that evening. But I still went, because back home someone was waiting for the money I would send.
Today I work as a warehouse assistant at a delivery company. But whenever I see a rider waiting at a traffic signal, soaked in sweat, tired, checking his phone for the next order, I see myself in him.
One room, eighteen lives
The shift ends, but the day does not.
The room I return to is shared by 15 to 18 people. One room, and every person has a different temperament, different habits, a different kind of tiredness and a different sorrow. Some come back late, some wake up early. Some want to talk, some only want silence.
Even children of the same mother and father have small quarrels when they live under one roof. Here, we are all strangers, from different cities and different lives. Every day asks for some compromise. You keep your words inside your heart, and you forget what you like.
How I adjust to all of this, I honestly do not have the words.
There is no mother here to place a warm roti in front of you. I cook my own food and wash my own clothes. And when I fall ill, there is no one to put a hand on my forehead. Fever or pain, I manage everything alone.
The bitterest truth is that abroad, you are not even allowed to fall sick. If I miss even one day of work, the rent, the food and the money I send home all fall out of balance. So many times I hide the pain, take a tablet and go back to duty.
On the other side of the screen
The deepest wound of living abroad is not the tiredness. It is not the empty pocket. It is not even the crowded room.
The deepest wound is the moments that never come back.
The little children at home are growing up without me. I have never lifted them into my arms and sung them to sleep. Their tiny hands and tiny feet I have only seen on a screen, never held in my own hands.
On video calls they press their faces against the screen, as if they could climb through it and reach me. Then they ask, so innocently:
“When are you coming home?”
I smile. “Soon.”
And then I look away, because I do not know myself when that “soon” will come.
It is not that I do not want to go. My heart goes home every day. Every night, in my dreams, I walk down the street where my home is. Then I wake up, do the sums, and the price of one ticket turns out bigger than my circumstances once again.
In these years, there have been so many weddings where my chair stayed empty. So many times of grief when I should have been beside my family, and all I could do was cry over the phone. My family celebrated their joys without me, and carried their sorrows without me.
Only because the cost of the journey was beyond my reach.
Living abroad asks you to sacrifice the very moments you went abroad for.
The nights I broke
There were many nights when, in that crowded room, surrounded by people, I was the loneliest of all. I stared at the ceiling until morning came.
I wanted to leave everything. To go somewhere far away, where there was no hope, no weight and no questions. Not once, but many times.
But every time I was close to falling, one thing held my hand:
The people waiting for me back home.
My mother’s prayers. My father’s quiet hope. The trust of my brothers and sisters. They are living on my hope. If I break, their hopes will break too. And I cannot let that happen in front of my own eyes.
So I will live with the hardship myself. I will give up my sleep, my rest and my happiness.
As long as their lives become easier.
A lamp in the dark
I watched people change their lives online, and I wanted that chance too.
I tried vlogging. I put the phone in front of me, pressed record and started to speak. But the small eye of the camera stared back at me, and my confidence melted away. The words got stuck in my throat. I recorded so many videos and deleted them myself.
For about five years, I felt my way through the dark. I tried and failed, then tried and failed again. I did not have the right tools, and there was no one to guide me. Every road brought me back to where I had started.
Then one day, a friend showed me a website he had built with the help of AI.
I stared at that screen for a long time. My heart was beating fast. For the first time in years, it felt as if someone had lit a lamp in a dark room. This was a path that needed no camera, no money and no degree.
Only patience, and a hunger to learn.
Every lesson paid for with sleep
After that day, my nights changed.
After 12 to 16 hours of duty, when my body had given up and my eyes were closing, I splashed cold water on my face and sat down in front of the screen. Fifteen people would be asleep in the room, and I would be in a corner, learning by the faint light of my phone. Many days I stayed awake for 20 hours. Some nights I never saw my bed, and in the morning I put on the same clothes and went back to duty.
I learned to build websites with Claude and ChatGPT. I practiced making animated videos again and again with Kling AI, Higgsfield, Google Flow and OpenArt. When one thing worked, ten more went wrong. I deleted, built again, and deleted again.
And slowly, in that darkness, a path began to appear.
The wall
But there was a wall on that path, and I hit it again and again.
All of these tools have a free limit. Halfway through the work, a message appears on the screen: “You have reached your limit. Upgrade to continue.” And the subscription is priced in dollars.
For someone who is keeping the kitchen fire burning at home in Pakistan, where the rupee grows weaker every day, even a “small” subscription becomes a mountain.
For a long time I simply could not afford it. Even today, the subscriptions I pay for come out of my food money. There were nights when I had to choose: eat today, or save for the tool I need to learn tomorrow. And I chose the tool.
Many times my practice stopped halfway. Not because I gave up, but because the limit ran out, and my pocket would not let me go any further.
A dream born from this pain
FuturMind AI was born from this pain.
My dream is to build tools that are completely free: no subscription, no hidden limit, no being forced to stop halfway. So that a son or daughter from any poor or middle-class home can learn at night, even when they are exhausted, and earn, and become the support their family needs.
And so that no one ever has to choose between eating and learning, the way I had to.
I do not want to earn from your subscriptions. FuturMind AI is meant to run on ads, and whatever it earns will go back into building more free tools and free guides. You can already use our free tools, and my second website, JanjuaPDF, offers 32 free PDF tools with no sign-up and no limits.
To you
If you are reading this after a long shift, in the corner of a crowded room, thousands of kilometers from home, tired, maybe hungry too, quietly wondering whether anything will ever change, then I know you.
Because I am sitting in the same place.
Every guide here is written in simple words and with complete honesty: no false promises and no risky shortcuts. Because I know how much one honest answer can mean when everything feels scattered.
You do not need a camera. You do not need money. You only need a little time each day, the right free tools, and the courage not to give up.
If this website helps even one person become the support of their parents, brothers and sisters, then every night I spent on the roadside, every sleepless night, every evening I fell asleep hungry, and every tear I hid in my pillow will have been worth it.
And maybe one day, when my mother asks again,
“Beta, have you eaten?”
I will not lie.
I will smile and tell her the truth:
“Yes, Ammi, I have.”
Ghulam Mustafa Janjua
Founder, FuturMind AI · Dubai, UAE