9 - 15 May 2002
Issue No.585
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Al-Ahram Weekly Online 9 - 15 May 2002 Issue No.585 |
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Empire of the senseless
Nabil Shawkat remembers the roaring seventies
Samihah is an obsessive-compulsive collector. She collects everything, from plastic cups to chipped china to real estate property. Samihah -- her name has been altered to protect her anonymity -- is my sister! She is a tall, robust, sartorially challenged woman who owns the biggest collection of airplane disposable plastic ware in the entire planet. You can trace the history of the EgyptAir food service kit by looking at her kitchen shelves. She has the old baby blue plastic cups (circa 1970s) and the adventurous red ones (circa 1980s) and the art deco chequered white and blue ones (early 1990s). She also has an imposing collection of matching serving plates that, piled in a one-foot high stack, dominate the skyline of her left-side kitchen cabinet. The latter are actually useful for serving side dishes and snacks, but I know Samihah has collected them for purely aesthetic reasons.
At one point in the mid-1970s, thanks to Samihah's diligent campaign of acquisition, my family, huddled in a small, three-bedroom flat in Abdin, managed to acquire three television sets. Two were in a working condition, one in a box, and one (the grand old Nasr model) we had covered with a sheet and used (what's more fitting?) as a TV table. We also had three fridges (but used only the older one, a proto- type Ideal with a towel on the handle to protect the chrome), and two washing machines. My mother kept using the non-automatic, Hoover washing machine she had had for decades. The automatic one remained, a puzzled expression on its programming panel, in the sitting room. These were the roaring 1970s. You could get anything, given that you put a small down payment and wait, a few years, for delivery.
Down payments, back then, were your ticket to the future. Inflation ran at a robust 20 per cent or 30 per cent per year, which means that, if you lock on to some valuable future purchases (a car, preferably), you can put your feet up and watch black and white TV while your real worth mounts by a healthy two per cent or so per month. It was a way of life. People made thousands (actually hundreds, but it felt like thousands) on reselling car purchase receipts. It was an automatic redistribution of income in the favour of the most annoying buyers.
People borrowed money -- Samihah sold a bracelet or two -- to place down payments on stoves and TVs. A friend would come to you and say: "they are accepting orders for fridges in the General Authority for the Manufacture of Ball Bearings, and I have a cousin who works there." And, early on the next day, the two of you are crowding in a non-descript office (or shoving other prospective buyers in a corridor) to make the lucrative bid. Samihah would sometimes be there already, having woken up earlier than the birds, with her cash on the ready. It is queue-up time in down payment land.
It was only a matter of time before Samihah graduated into more respectable acquisitions. The housing crisis that had brewed for a couple of decades was in full swing by the early 1970s. People were buying flats on paper in areas they were not sure even existed. (we lost our way repeatedly trying to locate a friend in something called Midan Libnan). Flats were going up in value and renting was out of the question. The last leasing contract on any flat in Cairo was turning into a moth-food formula, as landowners disconsolately collected rents that were cheaper than a movie ticket. Our rent was LE2.8, just enough for a movie outing and a dinner for a medium sized family. No wonder, restaurants went downmarket as landlords sulked in their kitchens, nibbling on take-away shrimps (LE1 per kilo). The boom of the real estate had just started, and it went out of its mind in the post-1973 oil boom. There was money to be made, and down payments to put down.
Samihah's graduation into real estate investment began with a mere LE500; she placed an order on a flat in a new riverside development just before Maadi. The instalments were flexible. In other words, you pay what you are asked, when you're asked it, or the contract is forfeit. I still remember Samihah, towel slung over shoulder, toes wriggling in Zannuba-clad slippers, discussing her real estate futures by the kitchen sink, in which a fledgling smattering of airliner ware were making their plastic debut. The tone was grave as the family debated whether it was wiser to sell a few more bracelets and or exchange dollars (black market: LE0.7 for $1) to keep the stream of payments going. These were weighty decisions, for they depended on whether the market for the dollars would strengthen first, or that of gold.
Samihah persisted in her payments from 1976 onwards, a lifetime onwards. Her flat was finally (and poorly) finished in 1995. By then, she was settled in a lively neighbourhood in Mohandisin, with an exquisite dish antenna-reamed view of Cairo skies. She is trying to rent the Maadi affair out, but no one seems interested in a riverside 15th floor flat in a towering cement block with an erratic elevator service. She's also trying to find buyers for her never-used chalet in Marsa Matruh and her unprofitable farm off the Alexandria speedway.
She nibbles on olives from an EgyptAir red container and makes phone calls to friends who own abandoned villas in Marsa Alam. If she can get rid of the real estate collection, she promises, she would just buy a new car, hire a chauffer, and travel back and forth to a newly purchased flat in Miami, Alexandria. I offered to buy her EgyptAir collection. She said, gallantly, that she would give it to me as a gift, but only if I buy the entire real estate empire first. I am no speculator, but I am considering.
Perhaps the good times will roll again, with another real estate boom, or at least a surge in the market of plastic antiques.
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