Commuter offers to fly Dubai cabbie home in return for forgotten valuables

A grateful passenger has rewarded a Dubai cabbie with a flight home to see his family after the driver returned cash and vital documents that the man had left in his taxi.

Kind-hearted cabbie Ishtiaq Shah took Alex Keya’s wallet, containing Dhs11,500,and passports to Bur Dubai Police Station. He spotted the valuables in his cab after dropping off the British expat, who was returning to Dubai from an overseas business trip.
 
As a way to say thank you, Keya says he will buy a plane ticket for Shah to visit his wife Nargis and six-year-old daughter Javeeria in Karachi, because the taxi driver has already refused a financial reward for his good deed.
 
Shah, 40, said that it never even crossed his mind to do anything but the honest thing. “I’m a Muslim,” he said. “What kind of person would I be if I did anything else? It’s haram.”
 
The driver, who works for Dubai Taxi Corporation, has not seen his family in 18months and said that being able to visit them would mean the world to him.
“I miss them a lot,” he said. “I speak to them every day on the phone.” Shah’s best buddy Nasir Mahmood said that his friend’s gesture in returning Keya’s possessions was even more worthy as he had recently lost one million rupees(Dhs35,000) on a property deal gone wrong back home.

“Most people would have taken the money and thrown the rest in the dustbin,”said Mahmood. “But not him, he knows that honesty is the best policy. One day he will be before Allah - and honesty is more important than money.”

Keya, a Dubai-based consultant with a top accountancy firm, said his gesture was the least he could do. The loss of the passports in particular, which contain vital work-related visas, would have affected him greatly, he said.“It’s the integrity of the man,” Keya said. “We could all learn from him. Not just in day-to-day life, but in business life. You hear all the time about fraud and corruption, and here you have an honest man who found that much money and did the honest thing.”

He added: “We need more people like him.”

Shah said he hoped to be able to go to see his family within the next two or three months. No one at Dubai Taxi Corporation was available for comment on whether Shah would be granted time off to take up Keya’s offer to fly home.

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