Who is Najeeb Muhammad, the man on whom Blessy, Prithviraj’s Aadujeevitham – The Goat Life is based?

Soon after, Najeeb left for Mumbai and from there, reached Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, on April 4, 1992. While waiting for his recruiters at King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Najeeb fell victim to kidnapping by an Arab posing as his employer. Naive and unfamiliar with international travel or Arabic, Najeeb found himself ensnared by the Arab’s deception, leading to his captivity in a desert goat farm, where he was forced into slavery and tasked with herding hundreds of goats.

“From the airport, it was a two-day journey and it seemed never-ending. From that itself, I realised that it was a trap,” he noted, adding, “The journey was via Mumbai. After reaching the desert, on the second day of travel from the airport, I didn’t see a single human being other than my Arab boss and his brother. I was not paid a single rial as salary.”

Watch Aadujeevitham trailer here:

The hardships Najeeb endured were unimaginable, enduring over three years of sleeping in the open, devoid of bathing facilities, surviving solely on khubus (Arabic flat bread), and facing frequent assaults for even minor errors.

“He had no remorse even when he saw me crying and would beat me. I had to eat stale khubus. I would use goat’s milk to wet the khubus and eat it. The goats were not bathed and the stench would be there in the milk as well. But I had nothing else to eat, the khubus was too dry to eat without the milk,” he stated.

“I thought my life would end there and that an escape won’t be possible. At the time, when I left home, my wife was eight months pregnant with our first child. I was deeply worried without knowing how the delivery had gone and how she and the child, boy or girl, were doing. I hadn’t spoken to anyone for the entire two years I spent there, except to my boss.”

On one night in 1995, when his boss was away from the farm, Najeeb fled finally, after enduring years of abuse. After running for one and a half days, without any food or water, he spotted a road, and another Arab gave him a lift in his car and dropped him in Riyadh, where he met a kind-hearted Malayali who assisted him in surrendering to the authorities, enabling him to apply for a ‘free out pass’ to India.

Upon returning to India, Najeeb resumed work as a daily wage labourer. Two years later, he was given a free visa to Bahrain by his brother-in-law, where he worked for several years. His son Safeer was given a job by the Lulu Group after they came to know about Najeeb’s life.