Cairo Journal: Happiness is a Relative Thing

By Maliha Masood

Life, in a sense, is a relative state of affairs - the sum of time, money and meaning, and the value one places on all. To some, nothing is ever enough. Not the time, not the meaning, and certainly not the money. To others, however, the quantifiable elements of existence hold little consequence.

I learned this lesson from the caretaker of my apartment building in Cairo, where I lived for four blissful months that now seem like half a century ago. But the memory of Ghuma is firmly etched in my mind’s eye. I first met him when I arrived with Aunty Nadia, my landlady, to live in her spacious sixth story “flat”, my new home in Egypt. That night he was a bony slender figure draped in a striped galabiya and an elegant white turban, effortlessly balancing my 20 pound cobalt blue backpack on his head, along with two heavy duffle bags that dangled like noodles on one of his arms. He looked at me in silence and softly murmured “Ahlan, Ahlan”, or welcome.

I would often run into him in the mornings as I raced down the stairs, tugging at the black embossed scarf that felt so new and unfamiliar bandaged around my hair and rummaging through my shoulder bag to make sure that I had not forgotten any essential items – guidebook, camera, notebook, passport, sunglasses, the address of the school where I was going to enroll to learn classical Arabic. Ghuma stared at me with a mixture of curious apprehension and amusement, as I rushed out of the building and wished him a breezy “subha al-kheir” or Good Morning. Perhaps he thought it unwise for a single girl, a complete new comer, uninitiated in the ways of Al-Qahira, to be exploring the city all alone. But he never uttered his concerns. He simply smiled and continued sweeping the courtyard with his tattered yellow broom.

One day, a steady stream of knocking at my door revealed a tiny giggling boy who quickly ushered me downstairs. His father was sitting on the floor of his two-by-four-meter room – not much bigger than a prison cell, bare except for a thin straw mat placed squarely in the center, a small mountain of clothes in the corner and a few blankets neatly rolled against the wall. There was a small pot of tea brewing on the samovar and a smiling motherly woman next to it. So began my friendship with Ghuma and his family. I particularly remember the evening when the temperamental bawwab (porter) in my modest building in El Demerdash, hesitantly began to share the details of his life and unwittingly produced fresh, new pieces of knowledge for my hungry mind.

“You can say I’m 60,” he mumbles from behind shy, hazel-speckled eyes. “Yes, say 60,” he repeats, nodding his head.

He isn’t quite sure, however, about what he has said. He pauses, tilts his head in his trademark leftward slant, and opens his mouth, as if to unleash the thought - only to pause again.

“Or do you think that’s too little for me? Maybe 65 or 70,” he volunteers.

I smile.

“You mean more?” he asks, his voice going up a decibel in reflection of shock. “I know I’m not young, but I’m not really that old,” he assures—firstly himself.

Ghuma talks about a colleague, Amm Ibrahim—another bawwab in the building where he used to work, a wrinkled man with glasses and a hunched back. He has decided that his friend is the qualifying benchmark of old.

“He’s at least 90. Or maybe,” he says, rethinking for a moment. “Even 100 or 120.”

He shrugs the matter off casually and continues his haphazard spiel.

Age, to Ghuma, lacks consequence. So does time, in essence, and money. He would like to be young, and healthy, and have plenty of money, but ultimately he lives in the belief that life simply goes on. And he believes, as our talk reveals, that life goes on for about two hundred years. His present age, in retrospect, doesn’t bother him that much.

“I was much prettier when I was young,” he says, turning his head almost to face the other way. “And I had a lot more energy. But thank God,” he continues, “at least I’m healthy.”

They are not the words of someone resigned to giving thanks, but rather a man who expects—on a worldly level—relatively little, and asks for little more.

“I’ve worked all my life,” he says. “I’ve been working at this building for more than 35 years. I’d like to have enough money so that I can just rest.”

He would like, he says, only 50 million Egyptian pounds.

“How much is that?” he asks naively. “Would it fit a bag this big?” he asks, stretching out his arms to indicate an elongated suitcase.

It would fit, I respond, a lot more than one suitcase—I guess randomly.

“Really?” he replies in surprise. “Oh no, then how about LE 25 million? I only want one bag of money. It’s enough. How will I carry more?”

The first thing he would do is send money home to his family—his twelve-year-old daughter and twenty-something-year-old son.

“And then I’d be able to drink lots of tea,” he says.

Tea is one of the bare necessities that comprise a luxury in Ghuma’s life. He drinks at least six cups a day.

“I wake up, wash my face, drink my tea and eat some bread, then I clean around the building and drink tea and eat fino bread, and then I go to see my relatives across the street and drink tea and have lunch, and then I come back and have dinner.” He gasps to catch breath.

Dinner, of course, is made up, among other things, of tea and three whole baladi loaves -quite surprising for a man who carries around not an ounce of extra flesh. The only thing he carries with him on his mysterious errands around town is a newspaper, folded neatly and tucked under his arm. On this particular day it is a five year old paper dated March 1995. A fact that would not bother him much, even if he had known it.

“I don’t read,” he volunteers.

He can’t, actually, even tell the time.

“But I carry it so that people think I’m clever,” he says seriously, his head shaking like a pendulum in overdrive. “So that they don’t try to cheat me.”

Ghuma is rather skeptical of the world, burdened by a growing puzzlement at technology and its gadgets.

“This mobile phone thing,” he says. “My cousin has one. I can’t though. I’m not good enough for it. My cousin is a doctor. I’m not up to its standard.”

He does not think, unfortunately, that he is up to the standard of anything, really.

“I’m not educated,” he says. “I have no profession. All these things are for important people,” he continues seriously, without remorse or resentment. “I went once with the bey to this place in Zamalek, and he pressed a few buttons on the wall, like this,” he says, poking his fingers in the air, “and all this money came out. It was a very strange thing; all this money coming out of the wall. You think money would come out if I did that?”

The wall, it turns out, is an ATM.

His mind is often knotted like a pretzel; it turns out, with the concept of ‘things’ in boxes, devices, and behind walls.

Ghuma fiddles with his sleeves. He is distracted—uncomfortable with the sudden unwarranted attention.

“Is it over yet?” he asks about our interview, once again cocking his head sideways and turning 90 degrees. He refuses to look directly in my eyes.

Suddenly, his head starts shaking nervously, quickly. He buries his arched eyebrows deep into a frown, and lowers his eyelids so that he is looking through mere slits.

“I have a question then,” he states, an ounce of aggression in his voice. “I mean, I want to know, what if I want to come out on TV? How does it work? How do I get inside?”

His head continues to shake. It intensifies as he thinks of the enigma he conceptualizes as TV. I offer to take him to the television building downtown—for a tour, at the very least.

“No!” he gasps. “What if I never come out?”

He eventually confesses what is spiraling around in his head. He is scared, he says, of getting stuck inside the TV itself.

“How does it work?” he repeats. “They make us smaller and put us inside the television? And then they bring us out and make us bigger?”

Shrinkage, he concludes.

His eyes widen, and gleam, and turn into a smile when he finds out the truth.

“Ah!” he sighs in relief. “But still, better not.”

Again, he repeats, it is too much for him. “This new world,” he explains, “Is for the people of now. I’m of the old times.”

He is from a time, he recalls, when things were simple, when there were fewer people, fewer buildings, and less traffic.

“Now,” he says. “There’s too much of everything, so there isn’t enough money for everyone anymore. It’s running out. I don’t know,” he asks, “If it’s the same in these other countries. The people look different—they’re white and pretty, so maybe there’s enough money in other places.”

He shakes his head.

Ghuma is keenly aware of changes in his native Egypt, the advent of consumerism, globalization, and the high-tech revolution. His son, he says, is twenty- something, and he sees the contrast through him.

“He’s different,” he says. “He wears foreign clothes and sunglasses, and he understands all these new things. He’s not like me, he wears trousers.”

The height of Ghuma’s “modern” persona is a pair of Converse trainers.

“With shoelaces,” he adds hurriedly. He glows at the confession. “They’re from abroad.”

He is unsure what “abroad” is all about, and cannot quite comprehend if another country is like another village, city, or even planet. It is stuff, he says, which he is not quite clever enough to understand.

“Cairo is what I can handle. Cairo and Aswan. Other than this, I don’t know.”

He doesn’t know and doesn’t really want to. The changes overwhelm him and the knowledge suffocates him; all he really asks for are his LE25 million.

“That’s all,” he says. “The other things are for the new generation. Not for me, I’m from the past.”

He is from a slice of the past that is content to stay there. A sliver of a population which somehow slipped the material tide that has swept a nation. He watches the glossy cars zoom by from his gate-side chair, and observes quietly, the stream of passers-by with their odd-looking gimmicks. It does little to rattle the bubble that makes his life—a peaceful place devoid of the complications of modernity.

“Of course sometimes I say it would be nice to have a car,” he says. “But I don’t know how to drive, so what would I do with it?” He laughs at the absurdity of the thought.

“Hamdullilah,” he says.

There is silence, so he turns his head.

“Are we done yet?” he asks.

He decides that our conversation is enough. He stands up, looks around, and sits down again on his bamboo mat. As I think of more things to ask, Ghuma fiddles with his fingers, then picks up the newspaper.

“What are you reading?” I ask.

He chuckles.

“I forgot,” he says, his eyes glimmering like a winter sun on the Nile. “I can’t read.”

He gets up and excuses himself.

“I have to go now,” he murmurs. “I have business to take care of.”

Walking down the neighborhood streets with his newspaper placed strategically under his arm, Ghuma always seemed content, to say the least. Is he now blown away by my attention and interest in his quiet, humble life? Maybe I’ve succeeded in puzzling him all the more—having to rethink his place in the world and his role in life. Perhaps he had not, before, thought he was worthy of the world today.

His eyes twinkled like a fanous lantern as he stood up and smoothed his galibiya, softened like butter after years of washing. The meaning of his life had suddenly adopted an entirely altered form—transcending beyond the mere consequence of his multiple roles as father, husband, son, caretaker, doorman, cultural conduit. Suddenly, it clicked that he was also worth someone else’s time. He had ceased, for a while, to be a person of the past. He became my bridge of understanding about another time, a world different than the one we live in today, but perhaps not so alien in the deep trenches of the human spirit.

Maliha Masood is a recent graduate of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy with a Master’s Degree in International Affairs. Masood is co-producer of Nazrah, a documentary film on Muslim women living in the Pacific North West. Her forthcoming book about her travels in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and Turkey is being published by Cune Press in 2005.