ON A TRAIN
travelling from Alexandria to Cairo one day I met a man named Mr Haniff. He
was a businessman, he told me, and a great lover of Alexandrian sweets. So I did not
ask him what he did but listened instead to his extolling of the virtues of
Alexandrian ice-cream. I learned later that Cairene visitors are in thrall to
the the cool sorbet of the Corniche.
As we
arrived in Cairo early evening, he asked me if I
wanted to meet a famous writer living there.
I had nothing planned for the evening except a kebab and the walk back to the Beyt
al Shabbab (the youth hostel), so I followed Mr Haniff to Garden City where
we took a flight of stairs and then walked a few steps to a flat where a very
impressive man opened the door. He was, I remember, wearing a three-piece suit
and he struck me there as this imposing figure holding a glass in his hand. This is Mr
Abbas Al Aswany, Mr Haniff introduced him to me.
I can't
recall much of what Mr Al Aswany said to me, but he did smile, I remember, and
then he beckoned me to a chair. Most of the time we were there he spoke to Mr
Haniff in Arabic and I gathered from the way they conversed that he was a man
greatly respected by my train-travelling friend. During the course of this
conversation Mr Haniff turned to me to add another notch to his respected
friend's glittering career: Mr Al Aswany is also a prominent lawyer, he said to
me.
I could
tell from the lay-out of Mr Al Aswany's flat in a leafy corner of Garden City
and the appurtenances gathered therein, and his books, that he must have been a
gentleman of some wealth. Law would have been a likely supplement to his
livelihood besides his writing propensity. They continued to chat about things
as Arabs do when they meet, with flows and stops and excitable rises in tone
and the mellifluous flow. And then the time came for us to part. I shook Mr Al
Aswany's hand and thanked him for the cup of tea and then, outside the imposing
block in Garden City, I bade Mr Haniff goodbye.
ONE DAY,
many years later, at the Eurostar station in London, while rushing for the train
to Paris, I grabbed a book from the newsagent's display rack before going
through the immigration rigmarole. A rush followed as the train was about to
pull out and only when the drab backyards of the Waterloo tenements were rolling
past us that I could take take a closer look at the writer's bio-data. He was
Alaa Al Aswany, and the book that fate sent me was The Yacoubian Building, his
first foray into English language publishing via a translation by Humphrey
Davies.
This is the
story of how trains brought me to a book and the author, via an early prelude
to his father. Alaa Al Aswany, I discovered to my amazement was the dentist son
of the man I had met years earlier in Garden City, the man who had also won the Egyptian
State prize for
literature in 1972. In the Yacoubian Building the writer son represented the disparity and
the varied miens of Egyptian life in a building in Cairo,
the Yacoubian Building where the rich lived their
prosperous lives in the main tenements while the poor snuggled up in the spaces
that were available to them, that were out of view, in the rooftop mainly. Could
this have been the building I went to in Garden City, that well-heeled part of Cairo?
PHOTO: Book sculpture, The Old House by Su Blackwell.With thanks.
i had to backtrack on your train [of thoughts, that is] to satisfy myself that El Aswany the elder had a another profession more sedate than writing, a practice which his son El Aswany the younger, evidently saw fit to emulate. could that explain their prosperity...
ReplyDeleteYes, both pere and fils have another profession have another profession besides writing. Pa was a lawyer, son was (is?) a dentist.
Deleteis fb so frightfully clever to have chosen a different photo (of Thomas the Tank Engine) for the fb entry?
ReplyDeleteSomehow when you tag this page to FB it gives a glimpse, not of the photo here but of something looking faintly like a video window. I used Thomas over there for a larf.
Delete