PLAYING CARDS IN CAIRO
by HUGH MILESAbacus, 279pp, £10.99
HE CAME ACROSS AS AN AFFABLE chap on Radio 4's Midweek programme recently, but for the first few chapters of this autobiographical tale it's difficult to warm to Hu
gh Miles. When we first meet him he is living it up in Cairo as a freelance journalist and ex-pat barfly, and suffering from "Künstlerschuld – the guilt an artist feels at leading such a trivial existence when all around him others struggle with the daily grind". All this existential angst, however, does not prevent him from writing somewhat contemptuously about many of the people he encounters.
The son of a diplomat, Miles was born in Saudi Arabia and studied Arabic at Oxford and in the Yemen, and he has the unfortunate habit of coming across as smugly superior – as if he is the only westerner living in Egypt who really understands the place and its people.
"For the tourists in Cairo the halcyon days of pharaohs and polo clubs have never stopped, at least in the oriental comic strip inside their heads," he writes. "Leaving behind their suburban lives for a few weeks, they step off the plane in costume."
Ex-pats living and working in Cairo don't fare much better. Of the altruistic souls helping to process vast numbers of asylum seekers at the United Nations Refugee Agency, he writes, "Many … seemed to think that coming to Cairo was a bit like going on holiday to Goa, dressing down in beachwear, nose rings and flip-flops … the more conservative Egyptians spoke about them disdainfully in Arabic behind their backs."
Well Hugh, I thought to myself, as I tossed my copy of Playing Cards in Cairo at the nearest wall, at least they are trying to do something useful with their lives – not just sitting around taking the piss out of people less privileged than themselves.
I would have given up on the book there and then, but as it lay on the floor in front of me I realised it was called Playing Cards in Cairo and, as yet, there hadn't been much in it about playing cards. Perhaps it'll get better when he gets to the cards, I thought, picking the book up again. And to my surprise, it did.
Miles first came to Cairo when he was 17 to work as an au pair for a wealthy Cairene family. His Arabic at the time was "so rudimentary as to be useless" but in spite of this his short stay taught him a lot about gender roles in Egyptian society, particularly a brother's role in protecting the honour of his sister and, by extension, the honour of the entire family. These early lessons were to serve him well in later life.
The story proper gets going when a grown-up Miles does a spot of house-sitting for a banker friend in one of Cairo's upmarket residential areas, Zamalek, while finishing his first book (Al-Jazeera: How Arab TV News Challenged the World) and working as a freelance hack. At the very end of his time there, he meets a beautiful Egyptian doctor, Roda, and falls head-over-heels in love.
After an unfulfilling few months back in London, he sends her a drunken late-night text, she calls him straight back and a day later he has returned to Cairo, hoping to win her heart. Dating in Cairo, however, proves to be much trickier than dating back home. Even though Roda doesn't have any male relatives in the city to guard her honour, the pair still have to be careful: if it ever became known that she was meeting regularly with a man – and a non-Muslim man at that – her reputation could be ruined, and in Egypt, a woman's reputation is the most important thing she possesses.
At the start of their courtship, then, the only way Miles can meet Roda is by going to her flat with her girlfriends and playing tarneeb, a four-player card game similar to bridge. During these chaperoned soirees, love evidently blossoms, because before long the couple become engaged. This forces Miles to come to terms with the fact that, if he's going to marry a Muslim woman, he will have to convert to Islam himself.
Oddly, even though she's the object of his affections, Roda gets only a walk-on part. The bulk of this book is taken up with the stories of the other players: Nadia, whose husband beats her; Reem, who is suffering from the effects of a botched plastic surgery operation; and, most memorably, Yosra, a strung-our prescription drug addict with a sick father, a violently over-protective brother and terrible luck with men.
These are the real stars of Playing Cards in Cairo and, at a time when the culture and customs of the Muslim world remain a mystery to most in the West, Miles should be applauded for telling their stories so compellingly, and for giving us such a detailed insight into their everyday lives.
The full article contains 862 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
