18 - 24 April 2002
Issue No.582
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 18 - 24 April 2002 Issue No.582 |
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Walking in between
Qasr El-Aini is on the cusp: it is not quite anywhere, not really Garden City, nor yet Mounira. Its straight line abruptly terminates the serpentine curves that are Garden City's irredeemable affectation, and one of its more attractive features. Nor do the Italianate buildings that line one side of the street provide a smooth transition to the more stark modernity that stamps the domestic architecture across the road, at least at its northern end. The balustrades, it is true, are festooned with dust, just like the balconies opposite, and dust is the great Cairene leveller: here, though, the straight lines of Mounira's buildings, their neat geometries, continue to provide a startling counterpoint to the decorative excesses, the swags and swirling metalwork they face. It is less, then, a zone of neat transition than one of those surgical sutures that mark the face of the city. And as such it is entirely typical: the misalignment that marks the palimpsest. It remains, too, something of a no man's land. Garden City may well have become déclassé, but not quite as studiously as the area with which it maintains its long-standing face-off.
And the street that stands between? Well, it has its fair share of non-shops, those peculiar businesses that remain simply because they opened there, and that are a seemingly essential feature of a great many streets. There is a slightly above-average concentration of grog-shops, establishments that boast grimy shelves denuded of anything beyond a handful of equally grimy bottles of Stella and the kind of liquor that the short-sighted might easily confuse for a more convincing brand but may well not be in a position to make the same mistake once the contents have been consumed. You know the sort of thing -- Beefteater Gin, Johnnie Talker Whiskey, White Hoarse, and the slightly more curiously sourced Happy Queen Sin. So desultory are these shops, so mired in desperate hopelessness, that they might well be used to front an anti-alcohol campaign. Equally unengaging, though, is the near derelict barber's shop, and the less than celebratory emporium from which you can hire thrones with chipped gilding, stained upholstery and one broken leg inexpertly repaired, glasses, an array of mismatched plates, serving platters and eccentrically shaped dishes, the necessary accessories for a wedding. They, in turn, might front campaigns against personal grooming, or the assumption that there is anything inevitable about connubial bliss.
There are, in addition, plenty of shops specializing in the miscellaneous article, where you can buy scissors, and Chinese- made alarm clocks, packs of playing cards and electric elements that allow you to heat mugs of water individually. The only criterion that seems to limit the inventories of such establishments is that no individual item retail at more than LE20. Such shops can be a great source of wonderment: the shelves are lined with appliances such as the Kitchen Miracle, a plastic trough with an impressive array of interchangeable parts that promises to "juice, grate, slice and grind", if only you can work out how to assemble the various bits and pieces. It was from such a shop that on Christmas Eve last year I procured the box of "Multi-chasing Star Light Twinklers" that boasted a five- speed setting switch and promised to replicate the "twinkling of the heavens at midnight." This latter, it turned out, was something of an overstatement, but such is the morality of advertising.
There are, too, more convincing businesses: stationery shops with a paint department inexplicably included in a slightly separate aisle; my own preferred grocer, who even at midnight will deliver a single packet of cigarettes to the door without a grumble; a reassuringly unpretentious junk-shop among the cabinets of which can occasionally be found a pretty piece of silverware, with a reassuring Ottoman hallmark.
And recently there have been signs of a renaissance. The first indication was the appearance, in front of a petrol station, of four polished granite columns with gold capitals that on closer inspection appeared to be some sort off non-tarnishing brass. It was not an entirely auspicious start and one did begin to fear the worst. And then one of the vegetable shop succumbed to the current vogue for vegetable shop renovation, the tile cladding of the interior, with blue and white patterned ceramic to back the natural wood shelves, which seemed slightly more auspicious. In the last month one of the many juice shops has taken the plunge, and while this was a less than radical makeover, involving the hammering down of various ill- fitting sheets of formica, it is quite likely to be the harbinger of more changes to come since the juice shops have been, in the years I've been living in Garden City, among the most competitive of Qasr El-Aini's businesses. Where one goes, the rest will follow.
And then last week the first of the hardware shops began an overhaul. They are places for which I have a long-standing weakness, and this was one of my regular stropping points, punctuating journeys up and down the road. You can never have too many storage jars, and the appetite for different designs of garlic press can be insatiable. So there was, initially, trepidation at the changes that may be wrought, even a change of function. But no, it was a relatively simple paint job, replacing the melted pistachio- ice cream green that was such a seventies hallmark with a band of imperial -- no, ecclesiastical -- purple to dado height, surmounted by a variety of burnt orange.
Is this how we will colour code the next decade? Only time will tell. But Qasr Al-Aini, whatever they tell you up-town, knows where it's at.
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