Deepak Unnikrishnan Temporary People (2017) is renowned for its playful language and use of surrealism and magical realism in depicting Malayalee Indian migrants in the UAE. Focusing on two connected stories, “In Mussafah Grew People” and “Le Musée,” this chapter argues that Unnikrishnan’s writing captures the extent to which the disposability of migrant workers as controllable tools of labour was part and parcel of how the modern Gulf city was envisioned and constructed. Departing from realist aesthetics allows the stories to reimagine the real Dubai construction protests of 2006 in a way that anticipates the crisis of an uncontrollable migrant population and exposes the fragility of the modern Gulf city. The chapter also argues that the crisis which Unnikrishnan imagines in the two stories is as much a critique of the specific migration and labour structures of the Gulf as it is a critical registration of the form which capitalist modernity has taken in the region. I understand “irrealism” in Temporary People as an expression of the surreal reality of migrant lives in the Gulf but also as a means for exploring real and imagined connections between Gulf cities and other global sites of labour control and exploitation.