Egyptian life
An unorthodox insight
THIS account of life in Cairo is sex and the city with a difference. Young Cairene women are as elegant and as sex-obsessed as their New York counterparts but their every action is monitored by bullying, protective brothers and nosy doormen. A circle of sisters, friends and neighbours meet each evening at Roda's apartment to play tarneeb (a simplified form of bridge) and to chew over their frustrations with love, work and families. When tiresome menfolk call them on their mobiles, the lies come tripping.
Hugh Miles, a British freelance journalist, meets Roda at a party and is smitten by her Nefertiti grace. A doctor and fortunately brotherless, Roda is freer than most of her friends. But she still cannot easily date in public, let alone visit Hugh at his apartment. So he too, a lone male, is drawn into the tarneeb sessions.
Hugh quickly gets to understand the prevailing angst. Yosra, hooked on prescription drugs, is desperate at 33 to find a husband. Amira, secretly married, is frustrated in her marketing career by an Islamist boss. Nadia has an abusive husband. Reem, disfigured by cosmetic surgery gone wrong, is unable to marry her boyfriend because he is a Copt. Hugh himself, if he is to marry his Roda, will have to convert to Islam, a process that is daunting for an Egyptian Copt but which, for a foreign Christian, turns out to be as easy as buying a bus ticket.
Mr Miles opens windows to a little- known side of Cairo in a way that carries a faint whiff of Waguih Ghali's wonderful 1964 book “Beer in the Snooker Club”. His anecdotes are enlightening (the girls exclaim with envy when told of an unmarried friend with an “elastic hymen” that seemingly never breaks) and, along the way, he conveys the sense and smell of Cairo, its hustle and humour, its near permanent state of traffic gridlock. He has a nice turn with words: at a women's gym he observes how “a matron with a face like an aubergine stuffed with rice sat on guard at the door.”
Perhaps for balance, Mr Miles supplies worthy little lectures on the much bleaker side of the city and its regime; these sometimes seem a mite forced. He is better when he sticks to his girls, particularly poor Yosra, battered by hopeless love affairs, the soul-destroying job she sleeps through and the pills she munches. All these misfortunes are made clear when a sheikh explains that a malignant jinn is making love to her at night. She believes him and, to evict the jinn, she lies flat on the floor for hours with the Koran playing into her ears. The reader longs for a happy ending for Yosra but Mr Miles, as he coolly observes his women, is not writing fairy tales.