Coming up trumps
Martin Davies
PLAYING CARDS IN CAIRO: MINT TEA, TARNEEB AND TALES OF THE CITY by Hugh Miles Abacus, £10.99, pp. 279, ISBN 9780349119793 ✆ £8.79 (plus £2.45 p&p) 0870 429 6655 There is an old Arab saying, ‘among the one-eyed close one eye’ (when in Rome...), a saw which seems particularly appropriate for Hugh Miles’s second book, set in and around the City of a Thousand Minarets. Novel or travelogue? — the reader sometimes wonders which, with a narrative too close-up and personal for the average travel (residence) book. But whatever the ratio of fact to fiction, this book has the feeling of a novel — and a good one at that. Jane Austen’s definition springs to mind: ‘The happiest delineation of the varieties of human nature, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, conveyed in the best-chosen language.’ Like the Arabists of the past — Burckhardt, Ali Bey, Sir Richard Burton, Lady Stanhope — Miles makes it his business to use language to arrive at the heart of the Islamic maze. Cairo’s earthiness provides a perfect backdrop: cosmopolitan, labyrinthine, protean, with no end of surprises. Forget the tourist cliché (neatly dismembered in half a dozen lines); what about the two million Copts, the country’s largest minority, and Christian to boot? Or armies of displaced persons from the war-torn south, shopping malls for Gulf nationals escaping Arabian summers, secret raves for disillusioned Middle Eastern youth? This is a true megalopolis, a complex, dozing giant whose bizarre contours frame the desperate, heartrending stories at its centre.
In the middle of the maze sit the card players, half a dozen young female Cairenes, who meet in a rented flat to elude reality for a few precious hours. Beyond the front door lies Muwazafeen (literally ‘City of Government Employees’), the middle-class suburb that provides a perfect metaphor for Egypt as a whole: modern yet medieval, comfortably off and also desperately poor. Down the road looms an enormous Orthodox basilica, while close by beckons the Unification of God and Light Shopping Mall, a name that encapsulates the commercio-religious mishmash found across Mubarak’s capital. During hot summer nights the boulevards come alive with Saudi and Gulf playboys who have hit town with shipped-in convertibles, ‘an Arab Amsterdam, where everything is available for a price’.
Our English narrator, a cool freelance journalist, knows country and region inside out thanks to past assignments, and has decided to return on a hunch that one of the girls, Roda, is about to change his life for good. He is more like a visitor from outer space, suspending the cast-iron rules that here govern encounters between members of the opposite sex. The card game, tarneeb, is a variety of bridge, and as they bid and finesse their hands, unfolding dramas are relived and analysed at the same time. Roda has two sisters, Noha and Nadia, who work in telesales and at a hospital, the latter suffering from a bullying husband. Pharmajunkie Yosr sells health insurance (or tries to), Reem works as a secretary for a tourist organisation, and Amira is brand manager in a strictly Islamic shopping mall (a deft oxymoron, as all selling techniques are proscribed). Each girl faces dilemmas regarding family, work and marriage partners, or lack thereof. They are all trying to earn a living, and perhaps a modicum of respect, according to the lights of Muhammad Ali’s Brave New Egypt. (The original Statue of Liberty project at the entrance to the Suez Canal portrayed a liberated peasant holding a torch for the women of Asia. It was shelved for financial reasons, then dusted off and shipped to the US for its first centenary.) But at the same time these are the Middle Eastern women we know from documentaries and real life, expected to follow orders from male relations, however much their junior, casting aside career dreams once marriage becomes a possibility.
Thankfully, Hugh Miles is not another right-on journalist giving an alien culture its politically correct slap on the wrist. He knows the score too well — and too intimately. In the first chapter he gives an account of an earlier encounter with Islamic mores, setting the stage for the tales that follow:
Over the weeks I stayed with the family I came to realise that although the boy’s behaviour seemed aggressive and overprotective to me, to everyone else it was perfectly normal or even affectionate. The mother did not discipline her son because she viewed the way he treated his sister as a sign that he loved her ... His duty [was] to play the stern, loving protector, because if she erred the blemish would stain the whole family. Honour is too fragile for a daughter to be left to handle alone.
Playing Cards in Cairo abounds in subtle nuances, and is a book that digs deep into the lives of the ordinary-but-extraordinary women on the front line. Like an earlier writer whose Tales From the Alhambra managed to throw new light on old Andalusia — also weaving fact and fiction together inextricably — Hugh Miles does a similar service for an equally exotic land, postmodern Egypt. In these updated harem tales, one eye might be closed, but the other is wide open.
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