6 - 12 December 2001
Issue No.563
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 6 - 12 December 2001 Issue No.563 |
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Muddying the waters
There was a time when it was perfectly possible to look forward to rain. It was a clearing of the air, a cleaning away of the dust that gathers in a suffocating layer on the trees outside my balcony. They look immensely sad, so choked: better by far, I always felt, that they should receive this natural hosing down.
Yet the last lot of rain managed to lend the city a remarkably desultory aspect. What usually comes as a relief instead of cleaning the trees gave them a hang-dog look, lending them zebra smears of mud through which occasional green stripes appeared, creating something a little too psychedelic for any one with a timid constitution. In all fairness, of course, I should probably have to concede that this might be a case of psychic projection on my part. Something, perhaps, to do with the phases of the moon, or a few too many ions (whatever they are) lurking in the atmosphere.
Whatever, the rain was not quite the blessing it usually is. Maybe it simply did not rain enough. When it rains, it really should pour rather than half-heartedly drizzle. A torrent might wash away the mud that after Tuesday impeded, in its grubby little way, any sort of progress on foot. A deluge would at least have the virtue of providing a bit of spurious excitement in a city without a proper drainage system. But instead we were blessed with a half-hearted shower, grey and mucky and bland.
Anyway, my mood was not really up to the muddiness that ensued. It had all begun with the arrival, in my carefully constructed domestic life, of a small dog. The circumstances surrounding the arrival of the animal are incredibly complicated, and it was to stay for only a few days. Those few days, though, involved the morning walk, the mid-afternoon walk, when possible, and the obligatory early evening walk. Which might sound a recipe for a slightly more healthy lifestyle for one who takes so little exercise. The only problem, though, is where to walk.
Cairo does not lend itself easily to the exercising of a dog. Initially, my early morning route took me around Garden City, along those confusing, curving roads that even after two years of living in the area still have an incredible ability to lead me to precisely the point at which I started. A dizzying progress, then, round and round in ever decreasing circles, with a dog attached to the end of one of those complicated leashes with buttons on the handle that allow the length to be extended or retracted. Press the wrong button, though, at the wrong time, and embarrassment will ensue. When the dog has decided it is going to chase one of the neighbors' children, and you press the wrong button, neighborly relationships that you have steadfastly built over many months can evaporate in a split second. But it was less the intricacies of the leash that affected my mood, more the increasingly depressing sight of the streets.
Now bits of Garden City can be quite pleasant. One or two gardens have somehow managed to cling on, and there are several impressive trees, not least two enormous eucalyptus that shield the side of an almost derelict villa, and which afford more than a little pleasure as I lie in bed in the morning and contemplate them through the window. Yet the ghosts of a less desperate way of life lurk around too many corners -- witness the almost derelict villa behind the eucalyptus trees -- to allow for any accidental surveys of the scene when in less than a positive frame of mind.
Now I am perfectly aware that present day Cairo is in essence a product of the political economy of Nasserism. There is endless pressure on land, space is at an enormous premium, the population of Greater Cairo is the same as that of the whole of Australia. Yet such facts have a hard time penetrating the despair felt at the seeming willfulness of the destruction wreaked on the fabric of the city. Garden City, after all, if somewhat declasse, is still a relatively well-heeled neighbourhood. Yet the sheer ugliness of so many of the apartment buildings is really no more than an act of vandalism on the part of their developers. There are, too, the strange, curved, black-painted lamp posts, each of which supports an as yet empty Plexiglas sign, that have sprouted up on every street in the past few months. The civic authorities, it would appear, have abandoned even the pretence of providing a basic service such as lighting the streets, farming it out to an advertising agency that now has the franchise on each and everyone of these lamp posts. Talk about privatising public space.
Saddest of all, though, are the remaining villas. They have either been vandalised by their new occupants, banks and institutions of the same ilk, that have managed the most unsympathetic of additions, often disguising the original building behind a shiny, new facade of breathtaking vulgarity, or else they slowly crumble, waiting for the time they can be bulldozed. The one silver lining in the cloud that is the banks' foolhardy support of speculative development is that there is no longer any credit left to finance the construction of yet more multi-storey apartment buildings that will be left empty for years before being repossessed by their creditors. Which affords a breathing space of sorts, during which, hopefully, somebody will come to their senses and something approaching sensible regulation covering construction will not only be passed, but having been passed will actually be enforced.
In the meantime, though, anyone in anything less than a state of hopeless optimism would do well to invest in a pair of very dark glasses when venturing out in the streets. I cannot bear to go out anymore, a ninety year old friend once told me, because the city has become so ugly. Years ago I pooh-poohed her comments, and resented her easy nostalgia. Last week, though, walking a dog on a retractable leash, I heartily agreed. And the rain made things worse.
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