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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 May 2000 Issue No. 483 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 25 - 31 May 2000 Issue No. 483
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Automotive by-pass
Tarek Atia and photographer Randa Shaath take a journey into the art of rebuilding cars in Madinet Al-Hirafiyyin |
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This is the story of Mursi, Farid and Mahmoud, three men who perform miracles on cars. They work within just a few blocks of each other in an amazing village on the outskirts of Cairo. There are dozens, maybe hundreds of others like them. They can fix anything here. Cars by the thousands -- including some that have flipped over eight times and whose brand names are unrecognisable -- can be carefully re-crafted until they look brand new again. Sheet metal is hammered, plied, heated and sculpted into the sleek lines that auto makers have gravitated to in recent years. The mangled and destroyed is irrevocably made right. That's the essence of "al-hirafiyyin" (the artisans). They ply their trade in an enclave just beyond the Hikestep bridge on the Cairo-Ismailiya highway. It's a not-so-quiet village of apartment blocks surrounding courtyards where hundreds of mechanics, body work specialists, and painters help keep Egypt's cars on the road through thick and thin. There are several such conglomerations of hirafiyyin on the outskirts of town. At various points in time, residents of downtown and other areas found their car-fixing neighbours being moved to Al-Duweiqa and Al-Hirafiyyin. The hirafiyyin put up a fight, but many were forced out of their longtime locations and packed together in that way.
But the story of the government-created hirafiyyin zone is more about the people who live and work there than the ramifications of this socio-economic experiment to create an appropriate working-living arrangement. In any case, it's a story that reflects whether or not such projects succeed on all their intended levels. Many of the workshop owners and labourers live or have lived near or above their shops at one point in time. But most of them make it clear that as soon as they get the chance, they choose to live outside the town. The disadvantages stand out, especially if you have a family: ridiculous amounts of noise, not many services, the trash piled up on the sides of the streets. There are very few, if any, grocers. Most of the labourers only have time for quick meals, so fuul, ta'miya and koshari outlets are more readily available around town. The two-, three- and four-storey buildings are in drab groups, some overlooking the large wikalas which are beehives of activity day and night. The shops are at the ground level, the apartments up above. Work starts late -- by 10.00am the town hasn't fully woken up -- but it goes on till late, sometimes to the wee hours of the night.
MAHMOUD: THE FINAL POLISH: "This car's been re-painted." Mahmoud says this with a scowl. He's not asking, he's telling. He circles the shiny Beemer like a hawk. He steps back for a second, examining the car from about a metre away, with a practiced sidelong glance. His head is cocked to the side, as if he can hear the paint job. "See these little bubbles? You can't see them but I can." He goes back to his quick hover, gliding his hands over the car's sleek curves. "Painted, painted, painted..." he keeps muttering. "But the car is brand new," challenges the owner, a young man who is starting to bristle with indignant pride. "It's been painted. I'm telling you, I know," insists Mahmoud. He's about 40, wears glasses, looks tough. "See this bumper. It's been painted." Mahmoud stops for a second at the back of car. He steps back, crosses his arms across his chest, and leans his body back, as if reclining on the air.
"Ahmed, get me a cigarette!" he yells out to one of his assistants, who is busy polishing a car in the warsha. Mahmoud is an urban scientist. The warsha's high-tech cabina, enclosed in glass and metal, takes up the back half of the place, which is smack in the middle of a busy street in Madinet Al-Hirafiyyin. Inside, Mahmoud sprays cars straight back to their showroom glow. His is the final, and most telling, link in the chain of rejuvenation for an injured automobile. These are the rites of the hirafiyyin, the bearers of that most ancient of Egyptian trades: sculpting. Mahmoud is the painter, the sorcerer of colours and shades, the magician who can paint a formerly gnarled hood the lapis lazuli blue of Tutankhamun, giving it a metallic hue to perfectly match the rest of the untouched car.
The street in front of Mahmoud's place is wide, lined on both sides with mechanics and painters, its casual lack of pavement complemented by moon-crater-sized open sewers. It's not as bustling as the "blokkat" (blocks) part of town, where Farid, the samkari (body repairman) who has been doing the prep work for Mahmoud for years, has his warsha, in a scenic corner of one of those giant souqs where men huddle over carcasses of every make, hammering and unscrewing everywhere you look. Mahmoud's street has a more suburban feel. At the end of the small street, behind the paint-prep warsha that is the link between the samkara (Farid) stage and the Duco (Mahmoud) stage, there is a garden of flowers, bushes and trees, and just to the right the Ministry of Agriculture runs a large chicken farm. The rows of greenhouse incubators may seem incongruous with the activity going on, but actually, a new life is being hatched on both sides. "I've seen it all," Mahmoud says. "Let me tell you something. Just last week, there was a Land Rover in here that, I swear to God, had flipped eight times. You couldn't even tell what kind of car it was when it came in here. We re-built that thing from scratch. It took three weeks. I've got pictures of it in the drawer. The guy who brought it in sold it to a guy for 185 grand, and there was no way you could tell it had ever crashed. Can you believe that?"
It's not unusual in Al-Hirafiyyin to see an incomplete skeleton of a building with seven or so cars parked on the second floor. Or another building, nearby, with the backs of 20 models of cars sticking off the outside walls on the upper floor balconies like some kind of avant-garde modern design
For Mahmoud, the warsha is a home away from home. In the daytime he heads the paint division at a major automotive service centre on the Cairo-Ismailiya highway. "I wanted to quit, dedicate myself to the warsha, but they dragged me back, gave me an offer I couldn't refuse."
He lives nearby, goes home for lunch after work, then spends the rest of the afternoon and nights at the warsha, a joint venture with his friend Ahmed, who also works at an agency. He doesn't see his family much. It's the cost of working hard, being your own boss. He's doing it for them; after all, the language schools are expensive, and he's paying installments on the chalet in Ras Sidr. But he wants his son, who is here with him today, to see his father plying the trade, to get used to the cabina and cars and the whole business, so that he'll take it over after Mahmoud. His services are in demand. The hirafiyyin, in general, are doing well -- the good ones and the bad ones, the one that leave bubbles and don't quite completely iron out the dents, and the perfectionists like Mahmoud and Farid. They've all got enough business, thank God (Mahmoud prays at the nearby mosque five times a day), but still, things are expensive, rent is high, taxes, salaries, tools, all that. In general, it's a daily grind. Things could potentially be much better. If there was more capital, maybe they could actually buy the mangled cars, fix them, and make the big profits that the dealers make. Instead, they are just the executors, links in the master sorcerer's plan. Like the Mercedes that was compacted into a sardine can that Mahmoud's former boss bought for LE17,000. After Mahmoud and Farid were through, the boss sold the car for LE220,000.
FARID: A DAILY TEST: Do you know when a magician is about to, say, saw a woman in half? Watching Farid hammer a hood is something like that. He is not scared of the metal, as you or I might be. He goes at it with the tools, expanding and flattening, wielding the hammer with a certainty born of the knowledge that he is creating an illusion -- this car did not crash. Anywhere else in the world, such a damaged hood would be thrown into the trash-heap faster than you can say sheet metal, and replaced with a shiny new factory-made hood, exactly like the original. But here, a mirror image of the original rises from the ruins. The mangled metal is made beautiful again.
With complete nonchalance, Farid takes the hammer to the hood of a car that looks perfectly fine. The owner stands nearby with a shocked expression on his face. Farid's hand glides expertly across the edge of the hood. Something isn't right; it may not be obvious to the naked eye, but the hood isn't perfectly straight. One of the assistants is called over. "Quick, get me the sanda," Farid says, and before the sentence is finished, a palm-sized cube of metal is in his hand, then underneath the hood, providing the counter balance to his practiced hammering. This process is called "daqq alal-barid," or cold hammering, and it is one of the toughest things a samkari can do. If done successfully, a dent can be cured without need of a paint job. A quick polish will do, and the car looks "like a new bride," as Farid puts it.
On really tough jobs, Farid has to use hamwat, tiny bursts of flame that make the metal more malleable, so that he can carefully mold the curves that once were, much like a plastic surgeon would on a face. "You want your car to smile," Farid says to the customer who's picking up his wife's car. The man has come in his own car, a fairly new model with just a few minor dents, the kinds nearly every Cairene has: a knuckle-size one on the front fender, some long scratches on the lower side-board, a nudge on the door, maybe a slight crook on the hood from too many people resting on it.
"If you leave those things too long," Farid says, "they pile up, and soon enough your car's a trash-heap." Farid pauses. "One of these days, when you're feeling relaxed, just bring it by for a few hours. I'll make the car smile again." The man considers this, seems to think it's a good idea. "I'll definitely do that," he tells Farid. "Now tell me, you devil, how'd you do that door?" "That door was a pigsty," Farid says, with a weary chuckle. "Just look inside. Check out how many humwat I had to do on that one." "Wow," the man says, looking at the 45 or so brown circles on the back of the lower part of the door. He knows Farid's job was made harder because of the incompetent samkari who fixed it first. Trying to perform that most skill-intensive of jobs, alal-barid, the sloppy samkari had made things worse for someone who wants to do the job right, like Farid, by just superficially straightening the dents, without bothering to do the detail work. The door had the texture of agricultural land after heavy plowing, and Farid had turned it into a smooth field again, as sleek as can be. "But if it's hit again, say good-bye to that door. You'll have to get a new one," Farid says, with a hint of resignation. "I took it to the limit. It can't be fixed again. The metal's at its very last." It was like a man who'd had two heart by-passes, the first botched, then the next one successful. Trouble was, he now had to be extra-careful because the doctor warned that he could only have two.
Today, there are programmes for the children who work at Al-Hirafiyyin, the occasional government or NGO-sponsored local literacy workshop, and health check-ups. With the increased opportunity, will there be fewer people like Farid, who had no other choice but to grow up apprentices to perfecting the art?
That's Farid's story as well. He had a by-pass recently, and sports a spring in his step that must stem from being given a new lease on life. He still smokes, but is more careful with his food. He tries not to exhaust himself like in the old days. He settled in to his new warsha only recently, and has gathered three guys to assist him. They're men, not boys, and this way Farid can count on them. He lets himself revel in the occasional dream, like the crazy one about re-constructing a Volkswagen Beetle to make it look like a spool of thread, but mostly he is a family man who brings dinner to the table -- sensible, hard-working, stable.
Farid, like Mahmoud, worked in Germany for a couple of years. The Germans learned from us, he says, and now they fix parts instead of replacing them. But there, when there's an accident, photos are taken as proof so that if the car is sold the buyer knows that it's been in an accident. "Here we cheat each other." He proves his point by pulling out the pictures of the Land Rover that flipped eight times, one before he got his hands on it, and the other an image of the pristine after.
Farid is wearing a baseball cap and professorial glasses. His salt-and-pepper mustache gives him a humble and intelligent air. He says he learned his trade by watching and using his brain. He used to be one of the small boys at a famous warsha downtown, in Abdin. He lives in Madinet Nasr and has only been in Al-Hirafiyyin for three years. Only now has he settled into a warsha that he can call home. Farid shows off his workshop with the pride of a child showing off his neat room to a guest. "Here's the storage area, here's the bathroom, here's where I keep my tools." He opens up a drawer and the tool kit, a stunning array of hammers and sandas, is revealed in all its glory. He is not a young man anymore; nearly 60, Farid is a veteran. Metal is metal to him after all these years. "Can I complain to the metal?" he asks. "If it's bad, can I blame it for being bad?" Farid chuckles. "But as I said, if it gets hit again, it's over. You'll need a new door." Meaning that this particular piece of metal may have reached its samkara threshold.
The same may be true in a more general way for this community of automotive recyclers, an essential component of Egypt's automotive economy. That component's staying power has been under scrutiny recently. Should we continue to fix or go for the new? The delicate balance necessary to answer that question has been fluctuating in both directions, and Al-Hirafiyyin's future is intertwined with a dozen factors or more. The import customs tax is one. International agreements and environmental concerns play a role. Egypt's traffic planners have been tilting the ratio from older to late model cars. At the same time, more people are getting their cars insured. Smart warsha owners have hooked up with the insurance companies, and increased their business through discounted volume work. The General Traffic Authority's stricter standards on inspections during licence renewals and increased ticketing for cars missing a headlight and with a dented fender are bringing customers to the hirafiyyin in bulk, and in a rush. Meanwhile, the proposed ban on the import of older spare parts may eventually dry up a large chunk of the market. With demand high and supply low, the prices of parts will inevitably rise. People will be more willing to abandon their older models for newer, more reliable cars. Independent mechanics like those who swamp Al-Hirafiyyin may see much of their business moving to the certified service centres, as car maintenance becomes more computerised. The samkara and Duco wings, however, will probably still thrive.
A former Volkswagen Beetle owner recounts his love for the engine parts stores in Al-Hirafiyyin. He used to be one of the regulars. They're the ones who are here every weekend, making sure the car is in tip-top shape. They know who to take the car to if the power window is a little slow, or the power steering is a little sluggish, or if it needs a quick touch-up on the bumper. "I didn't just go there. I lived there," he says, remembering those days of youthful abandon, crazy accidents that brought him to the body repair shops three and four times a year to patch things up. Like many, he has driven out of the place with a brand new paint job, and a smile on his face. Maybe his car's a new colour, shinier, more fluorescent.
He may be one of the many who have depended on the hirafiyyin to do amras, re-building the engine, preferably with a new paint job too so that the car, having given 100,000km of loyal service or more, is theoretically brand new again. Same metal, same look, reconstructed engine. A lot of cars have gone through more than one amra and are tooling around Cairo's streets inconspicuously, bought, sold and traded. But can this home-grown cycle last in light of changes in the system?
MURSI: 'PATIENCE IS FROM GOD': Mursi, the door, trunk and hood expert, is another important link in the automotive rejuvenation chain. His warsha is closer to Mahmoud's, right in front of the chicken farm. Mursi has two young boys as assistants, but his workshop has none of the harsh undertones that usually accompany child labour. These two boys seem more like apprentices, and Mursi works with the steadied grace of a teacher. He asks the boys to take apart a door, which they do, as he works on another car. When they are done, the boys place all the components on the crowded work-bench for Mursi to examine. He touches and pushes around the tiny pieces, the screws and gears of an automatic window machine, and zeroes in on the offending piece. A complex piece of white plastic, one of whose panels is torn from the base. "Here's the problem," he says. "This is broken." "Can you fix it?" the customer says, hoping against all hope that he won't have to buy an entire replacement mechanism, which would set him back half a grand or more. "No, it can't be fixed, " Mursi says, looking seriously at the piece of plastic. "But I can make one exactly like it." He raises his head, and a smile plays on his lips and eyes. His dark face exudes light in the dim garage, and this particular piece of magic fills the atmosphere with joy.
Mursi remains optimistic in spite of everything he's seen. He has been here since '90, when the place was first conceived. Today, he is a bit perturbed, angry with the state of affairs. Lots of promises, lots of big talk, but not much implementation. "Where's the hospital? What if one of us gets hurt while fixing a car? Where's the development bank?" It's a tough existence, and the main pleasure comes from success at the job.
A week later, a perfect copy of the juggernaut has arrived, and the automatic window is working once again. All for only LE60. Mursi is modest about the achievement, but he knows exactly what he's doing. "They make the pieces out of plastic, not metal now," he says matter-of-factly, "thinking they can't be replaced, and people will have to buy the whole machine. But we're smarter than them."
He speaks like a spokesman for an unofficial, non-existent union. He smiles again. He means all of them -- this brotherhood of modern Egyptian magicians and sorcerers of metal, plastic and steel. The hirafiyyin.
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