Deepak Unnikrishnan’s “In Mussafah Grew People” is a short story contemplating the forces driving Gulf migrant labor. To borrow scholar Swaralipi Nandi’s analysis, the story exposes a petroeconomic system that appears to “[replicate] the structures of slavery” (Nandi 138) in its expropriative treatment of the “petro-precariat” (i.e migrant worker) subject working under oil. On its own this description might not distinguish “In Mussafah” from its contemporaries, but what does distinguish this work from a comparable story like Nawal el-Saadawi’s grungy Love in the Kingdom of Oil is the nearly total absence of women from the narrative. The foremost interests of this study lie in this point. Aided by Sheena Wilson and Sharae Deckard’s feminist critiques of gender relations within the petroeconomy, I first propose that a gendering of “In Mussafah” illuminates a site of seeming lack within the narrative. I argue, however, that what at first appears to be an exclusionary, dismissive narrative oversight might be better served if read as an extension of (rather than in competition with) feminist critiques of gender politics in petrofiction. Working cooperatively in this way with feminist petrocriticism, I show that the absence of women from Deepak Unnikrishnan’s narrative is not lack but inauguration of a new constellation of gender relations generated by a coldly technocratic, utilitarianist logic that conceptualizes its human subjects and the gender relations between them not just as dehumanized objects to be expropriated, but as parts of a machine to be upgraded.