Finding My Place Page 11
Once my father had sold up our house in Chipping Norton, he joined my mother, brother, our furniture and me in Egypt. We bought one of those penthouse apartments in an upper-middle-class suburb in Cairo. On a clear day, I could look out of my floor-to-ceiling bedroom windows and see the sun glisten over the Pyramids of Giza. We lived on the thirteenth floor, which was nice for the view but crappy during power outages – which were often. My fitness levels improved with the frequent stair climbs every time the power went. I became skilled at prying open the doors to climb out of the building’s elevator, which regularly got stuck between floors with every outage. If the electricity wasn’t out, the water would be, so our bathtub was always filled with an emergency supply in anticipation of the inevitable.
Such was our new life that lingered somewhere between our working-class roots and our induction into Egypt’s elite.
In the three years or so since they had married, my sister and the doctor had returned to settle in his home town of Minya, where she lived among my mother’s extended family and had two girls. Our reunion took place when I had first arrived in Cairo and she was still pregnant with my first niece. My mother and I took the train from Cairo station and, upon our arrival in Minya, flagged down a horse-drawn cart to take us to the apartment block where Rhonda lived with her in-laws. It wasn’t like the town was completely cut off from the modern world. There were cars and even a few taxis, but the primary mode of transport to and from the train station was donkey.
Having mended the rift with my parents that was caused by her sudden departure with her new husband to live out her days as a real housewife of Minya, Rhonda would often visit us in our new penthouse apartment with the bathtub full of water. I came to see her visits as occasional intrusions into my life, because along with her two children, bags full of nappies and local gossip, she brought with her a reminder of the kind of life I could expect: a life that was consumed by the banality of small-town small-mindedness. It was hard to imagine that just a few short years earlier, Rhonda and I shared dreams and hopes of our own futures – futures we owned as independent, educated and professional women. It was as if we had travelled on the same road and then come to a fork which took her down a path that was a completely different trajectory to the one I imagined myself on. Her presence was confronting – like worlds colliding – only her world was all too possible for me and that was enough to scare me.
Being an eligible bachelor or bachelorette in Cairo carries with it certain responsibilities. One of them is the obligatory and unavoidable matchmaking attempts by well-meaning relatives who open every conversation with, ‘Aren’t you engaged yet?’ My parents’ standard response was, ‘Our daughter wants to finish her education first. She’s not thinking about marriage. Her head is in books and study.’ Of course that didn’t stop them from trying to set me up with my very own male protector. It became a kind of battle between my parents to see who could set me up with my future husband. The two of them ensured that there was a constant stream of men vying for my hand (and a passport to Australia). My mother, being a nurse, offered up a collective of candidates from within the medical profession – doctors and surgeons. My father proudly boasted about the young engineers he had lined up to meet me.
In a strange way, I became their most valuable asset – the kind of capital they could use to barter for a better deal from the mechanic or a nicer cut of meat from the butcher – ‘Look after me and I’ll introduce your son to my daughter. She’s a student at the American University, you know.’ In turn, I also learned to use my marriageability to bargain with my parents and to buy myself some time, knowing that the inevitable end to this bizarre game would be my ultimate betrothal to a stranger. When my mother asked me to meet a brain surgeon she had lined up, I agreed to let him take me out to dinner. Dinner was nice and he wasn’t a total loser. I almost felt a little sorry for him when I told my parents that he spent the entire evening showing me pictures of brain surgery so gross that I lost my appetite and had to retire to the bathroom to vomit. It was partly true. He did show me pictures of some of the surgeries he had performed and I did find it a little weird – but I still devoured a three-course meal. My father shot my mother a sideways look and shook his head. ‘You want her to marry some crazy guy who takes photos of himself poking people’s brains with a scalpel? He could be a closet serial killer!’
When my father tried to set me up with an engineer related to one of his friends, I agreed to meet him in the afternoon. It was pleasant enough, but my father’s admiration for the young engineer soon turned to loathing when I told him that he was so stingy, he only offered to take me for a walk along the Nile and I had to pay for my own peanuts. My mother laughed at my father. ‘Ha! You want her to marry some tight-arse who won’t even buy her a peanut!’
The ultimate failure was their mutual introduction of a ‘self-made’ bloke who lived in London and ran his own chauffeur business. This particular chap had the unfortunate surname of el Humar – which translates as ‘the donkey’. I could probably have coped with a lifetime of being called Mrs Donkey if Mr Donkey didn’t also show up to our meeting wearing his frizzy curls in a loose topknot, thick dark-rimmed glasses, a grey three-piece suit and silver boots tied with neon-pink shoelaces. It was a sight to be seen matched only by Mr Donkey’s arrogance.
Marriage, my marriage, became everyone’s business – my aunts, uncles, cousins and even our neighbours all knew someone who knew someone who knew someone who was looking for a bride. It’s like that in Egypt, where there is no such thing as privacy. When my mother first returned to Cairo she set about contacting all her old friends from nursing school. They shared photographs of their children and grandchildren and caught up on lifetimes that had been lived worlds apart. One of my mother’s friends introduced her to her daughter – an accomplished doctor who was married to a pilot and had a young son. They rekindled their friendship and reminisced about their days working and studying together. A month or so later, my mother travelled to Alexandria to rekindle another friendship from her early twenties. Her Alexandrian friend introduced my mother to her daughter, who had only just got married to a pilot. She apologised that her new son-in-law could not be there to also greet my mother as he was working on a flight to Paris and would not be back for a few days. Over tea and biscuits, my mother’s friend showed her photographs of her daughter’s lavish wedding and explained that the groom’s parents had passed away and that was why he had no family present at their nuptials.
I don’t know what the exact statistics are, but I hazard to guess that the odds of having two friends on opposite sides of a country with a population of roughly 55 million people whose daughters are married to the same man are pretty slim – probably about two in 55 million (still, better odds than winning the Mexican lottery). No prizes for guessing what my mother did. She took one of the wedding photos when her friend wasn’t looking, went straight back to her other friend and exposed the lying bigamist to both his mothers-in-law.
Even in a place where custom gives absolute strangers the right to comment on your private life, secrets can be and often are kept. My secret throughout my years at university was my first true love. In another time or another place our relationship may not have necessitated such secrecy. He was the son of an affluent and well-known community figure who had made his fortune through a string of surf and diving shops in the United States. And he was Coptic. In some parts of the world, a Muslim girl dating a Coptic guy would not be such a big deal – but this was Egypt in the late 1980s, where such relationships weren’t just frowned upon, they were prohibited.
We met at university through mutual friends and became inseparable. He was the quintessential rich, spoilt bad boy who drove his father’s Mercedes when his dad was out of town, got into fights and didn’t pay much attention to his studies. I was the academic high achiever who made the Dean’s Honour Roll every semester and boasted a perfect grade point average. I helped him with his assignments (and by ‘helped’ I me
an I wrote them for him) and he taught me how to swear in Arabic and showed me the seedy side of the privileged in Cairo. We dated secretly for nearly a year, knowing that our love was not accepted beyond the high walls of the AUC. We never discussed religion, but held on to an idealistic, and unrealistic, dream that we could separate ourselves from the conditions of our lives and find a place for us. Occasionally, we were confronted with the reality of our love, like the time when the morality police caught us in a parked car and demanded to see our identification cards. Egyptian ID cards state your vital statistics, including your religion. The police asked us to accompany them to the station, where we would be charged with breaking some kind of nefarious law that dictated who was allowed to sit in parked cars and what they were allowed to do in said parked cars. We managed to talk them into letting us go by offering a generous bribe. The incident scared me not because I was afraid of going to the police station, but because I was afraid of what my parents would do if they found out about my illicit relationship.
Not long after, they did find out. His mother, a very staunch Coptic, was the source of the information. Uncovering her son’s clandestine relationship with a Muslim girl, the woman who could have one day maybe, but probably not, have been my monster-in-law, rang my parents and told them what her son had told her – that I was hopelessly in love with him, had badgered him and would not leave him alone. She told my parents that they should rein in their wanton daughter who threw herself at her angelic Coptic son, who was not interested in being corrupted. When I confronted the boy who had professed his love to me and asked why he hadn’t defended that love, he offered a lame excuse about how he could not defy his overbearing mother. I walked away and never looked back. I didn’t even cry over it. I just walked away. I had no time and no effort to give to someone like that. I have wished that I could have been that kind of person – the kind of person who knew her own value – at other times in my life since then. The kind of person who took no shit, instead of the kind of woman who made excuses for the men she loved.
In my final year at university, my parents had decided that moving back to Egypt for the rest of their lives was not working out the way they had imagined it would. The country had changed but so had they. Australia was their home as much as, or maybe even more, than Egypt was or could ever be after so many years away. My father returned to Australia to set up home for my mother and my brother to return. My fate was less transparent. They weren’t too sure what to do with me other than to hope that I would be married soon. In the meantime, my mother sold the penthouse apartment where I had my own room with the wall-to-floor windows that looked out over the pyramids on a clear day. We moved into a two-bedroom apartment in another well-to-do suburb. Hosam moved his bed and all his things into the second bedroom. When I asked where I would be sleeping, Mum looked at me curiously, as if I was asking a rhetorical question to which I already knew the answer. ‘You and I will sleep in this room until you get married and have your own house.’
By the time I finished university, I was married with my own house. My parents were free to return to Australia with Hosam, where they set up house in Perth. It was 1988. The year I turned twenty-one.
14
The Hardest Years
Despite my family’s best efforts to match me with a suitable groom of their choosing, I ended up making my own mistake. It was not as if I deliberately defied my parents and the traditions of courtship that have been passed down through generations for centuries. I didn’t intentionally go out and seek a matchmaker as is popular among some people in Egypt. I didn’t join an online dating service – or rather the Egyptian version, which basically entails broadcasting one’s eligibility through the grapevine. It kind of just happened and the story, I’m afraid, is fairly non-eventful.
I was working at the British Council teaching English in between studying, acting in the university theatre company’s productions and anchoring the news at the Adham Center for Television Journalism – it was there that I first met Mona Eltahawy, where we both cut our journalistic teeth. As for my role at the Adham Center, I was never really serious about a career in journalism – happy to be just the face and voice of the closed-circuit TV station that ran from the centre in its early days. Mona was always the serious one and she went on to become an award-winning syndicated columnist and an international public speaker on Arab and Muslim issues.
Interestingly, the Adham Center for Television Journalism was named after Kamal Adham, who was appointed by Saudi Arabia’s King Faisal as the first head of Al Mukhabarat Al A’amah (basically the Saudi Arabian version of the CIA) in 1965. In his later years, Adham became better known as a prominent businessman in the Arab world. He played a critical role in maintaining Saudi Arabian ties with Egypt and the United States as the CIA’s principal liaison for the Middle East. His business dealings included the Kamal Adham Group, the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI), contracting firm Almabani and an early shareholder of Saudi Research and Marketing. He was also one of the founders of the Barrick Gold Corporation along with well-known fellow businessman Adnan Khashoggi – once considered the richest man in the world. Adham’s career ended in controversy (don’t they all) when he stood accused over the infamous BCCI scandal in the 1990s. In the end, he ended up paying a $105 million fine in return for a reduced sentence for his part in the illegal takeover of the First American Bank by BCCI (among other fraudulent dealings by the bank) and was barred from the financial sector for his various business blunders.
* * *
My life was busy then and I relished the feeling of falling into bed exhausted every night – it gave me meaning and purpose and maybe even the kind of distraction that drives some people to take drugs. I hadn’t paid much attention to the other Egyptian native in the teaching faculty. Most of the teachers were British expats who, had they tried to get similar work in their home country, would have barely made enough money to live above the poverty line. But here in Egypt, they lived a life of relative luxury earning more than ten times the average wage and living in fairly lavish homes complete with housekeeper. It doesn’t take much to become a teacher of English as a foreign language. It’s not like one has to complete a four-year bachelor’s degree or anything like that. The work, if one can get it, is actually quite interesting and attracts people who want to find a way to fund their travels around the world.
As one of the youngest teachers on the faculty, I was known for finding inventive ways of teaching some of the more complex grammatical concepts – like continuous past perfect tense. I was after a copy of a particular song that would fit nicely with a lesson I had planned for the next week, so I asked around to see if anyone could help out. The next day, a cassette (for those too young to remember, that’s an archaic contraption that was used for listening to audio recordings) with a single song – ‘Ghostbusters’ – appeared in my locker with a note; it was from Sherif, who had recently joined the council to teach computer literacy to a growing number of Cairo’s young entrepreneurs hoping to improve their chances of employment with a foreign-owned company.
Sherif and I struck up a friendship, and five weeks later we were engaged to be married. That was the way things were done among Egyptians who were primed and ready for marriage like we were – no long courtships or secret romances – it was all business.
Sherif did everything the right way. He met my mother, spoke to my father on the phone to get his blessing and formally introduced his parents – all the things that indicated to wary parents that he had serious intentions of marrying their daughter.
At my mother’s insistence, we had a short engagement of only a few weeks, which meant that my father could not attend the wedding. I didn’t fully understand the sense of urgency that my mother seemed to have around my marriage. I had been to weddings of friends and family members and had seen the level of detail that prospective in-laws went into. An Egyptian man asking for a woman’s hand in marriage could expect nothing short of an exhaustive
inquisition into every facet of his life. The bride’s family would compile a detailed dossier of the potential groom – his family and heritage, friends, education, work, finances, romantic history and, of course, how much money he currently earned, used to earn and had the potential to earn. The intelligence-gathering exercise also applied to the groom’s family – his parents, siblings and even his uncles, aunts and cousins. It was not unusual to hear disapproving whispers about a groom’s second cousin twice removed with a less-than-impeccable reputation. Such connections, albeit remote, could ruin a groom’s chances. The bride was not spared this rigorous scrutiny into her life either, and something as seemingly inconsequential as speaking to another male could be construed as a revelation of her true nature and an ominous sign of her adulterous disposition.
But there was no such investigation in the lead-up to my marriage. If I found it curious then, it wasn’t enough to warrant any concern. I just thought it was probably for the best, and besides, I was desperate to leave my parents’ home and finally have some independence and freedom. As it happened, that sense of desperation was shared by my mother. One day, in the midst of planning my rushed wedding to the man I barely knew, I overheard my mother on the phone to my father: ‘His family seem okay. Thank God that someone wants to marry her. Did you think she would ever get married?’
I wore a three-quarter-length lace wedding dress and had my hair and make-up done in Egyptian style – nothing natural about that look. We had a smallish wedding at the Police Club, where Sherif’s brother (a policeman) was a member. My aunts, uncles and cousins lined the hall and clapped along with the bagpipes that heralded our entrance to the venue as a married couple (yes, Egyptians do bagpipes and they do them very well). I returned to the family apartment after the wedding and slept in the room with my mother until Sherif and I could sort out our own place to move in to. We ended up renting a furnished apartment in Zamalek, just down the road from the Australian ambassador’s residence. It was the perfect place to play grown-ups in.