Playing Cards in Cairo: Mint Tea, Tarneeb and Tales of the City
Hugh Miles Abacus, 288pp, £10.99
"This incorporate World of Grand Cairo is the most admirable and greatest City seene upon the earth!" exclaimed the traveller William Lithgow as he struggled out of the Suez Desert in 1612. Ever since, as explorers, Egyptologists, Arabic scholars, painters, administrators, occupiers, spies, diplomats, businessmen or holidaymakers, the British have had a pretty good time in the city known to its inhabitants as Umm el-Dunya, the Mother of the World. Even at the height of the North Africa campaign, exhausted Desert Rats could take refuge in a city that blossomed with cabarets, bars and houseboat brothels to accommodate them.
For 21st-century expats, observes the journalist Hugh Miles in his memoir Playing Cards in Cairo, job titles may have changed - they are now oil executives, NGO workers, backpackers or reporters - but the living is still easy. "In Cairo it felt as if you could live on lotuses, but get by on pennies," he writes, in the mode of a good 19th-century orientalist. "Stories in Cairo ripened slowly like fat Nile dates." Playing Cards opens with unlovable confessions of expat self-indulgence. Sustained by his lotuses and dates, and house-sitting for a banker friend in an exclusive apartment building, Miles is free to spend his days dozing in a teahouse, evenings in expensive bars with Jerome, an American lawyer with an eye for "lonely NGO women", and weekends "checking in at Cairo's fledgling rave scene". The partying is interspersed with a few leisurely meditations on Egypt's economic ills (worsening), its African refugee crisis (ditto) and its drinkable varieties of wine (none). The structure is as meandering as his lifestyle and the writing frequently as lazy. The message is clear: "For foreigners Cairo is a party town, where everything is available for a price."
The real price, of course, is paid by the majority of Egyptians. Two-fifths of the 80 million-strong population live on or below the poverty line, unemployment estimates are running at up to 25 per cent, and recent inflation has pushed even the staple rough bread loaves beyond the reach of many. Caught between a brutal government, corrupt officials, pollution, overcrowding and poverty, most of Cairo's 16 million inhabitants lead lives that are miserable, even desperate - the obverse of the luxury enjoyed by wealthy foreigners and the tiny Egyptian elite. Miles, an Arabic speaker and author of a smart, timely history of al-Jazeera, is eventually unable to avoid these realities. He falls in love with a beautiful Egyptian doctor, Roda, weans himself off the "rave scene", and immerses himself in the everyday travails of Cairo's people. Suddenly, Playing Cards wakes up.
Invited to play tarneeb - a bridge-like Middle Eastern card game - with Roda, her sisters Noha and Nadia and their friends Yosra and Reem, Miles is drawn into the world of the twenty- and thirtysomething women of Muwazafeen, a sprawling, concrete middle-class suburb. Over glasses of tea and endless illicit cigarettes, he discovers their stories. Though the girls are far wealthier than most Egyptians, their lives are far from easy. Jobs are almost impossible to find, salaries are absurdly tiny, fathers and brothers tyrannise them, Islamically minded neighbours spy on them, taxi drivers berate them, men in the street grope or flash at them. The games of cards in Roda's blissfully unsupervised house - her father works in the Gulf - are their only respite, though even these are subject to a strict family-imposed curfew: "I am not having the neighbours think I am a pimp!" screams an irate father.
Besides the generic challenges of being a young woman in Cairo, each has her own problems. Botched, cut-price plastic surgery has left Reem with skinny legs and a misshapen upper body; Yosra is depressed, addicted to prescription drugs and bullied by her violent policeman brother; Nadia's husband beats her, but the divorce laws are disastrously weighted against women.
The unmarried girls struggle to compete in Muwazafeen's "bloodthirsty marriage market", in which all brides must be virgins, and where abortions and hymen reconstruction surgery - with "deluxe variations" involving blood-filled gel capsules - are commonplace. The only prospect of escape is an unlikely marriage to a kind, "open-minded" man . . . or the cripplingly expensive flight to Dubai, which hovers in young Cairenes' minds like a luscious mirage.
Miles's account of the girls' misadventures is vivid with sympathy and amusement (a religious quack diagnoses Yosra's lack of success at dating as the fault of a small black jinn that has been molesting her while she sleeps), but he does not remain a comfortably detached observer for long. Playing Cards closes as, in order to marry Roda, he converts to Islam in the ancient al-Azhar Mosque and becomes "Sami Hussein". By this point, he has seen enough of the flipside of his former life to realise that Umm el-Dunya "has become a cruel and neglectful mother . . . a monster to her people and a slave to foreign powers". The barfly, finally, is redeemed.
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