Gamal Nkrumah explores the power of peddling coupled with the dwindling fortunes of what used to be one of Cairo's main shopping thoroughfares The buildings were once exquisitely proportioned and tasteful, like the shoppers -- elegantly dressed ladies of a bygone age sporting immaculate coiffures. Today, the hustlers and ragtag gangs of shady Mafioso-like characters hardly conjure up the refinement that once upon a time characterised downtown Cairo. The grand old dames of yesteryear have gone, and all that remains are the boys, scores of young men, and a girl or two, invariably sporting tight- fitting jeans and for the girls -- loose-fitting head scarves, with a lock of ochre-coloured dyed hair dangling over penciled eyebrows. The tarted-up maidens of ill-repute adopt the loud and vulgar parlance of street hawkers. It was once the heartbeat of downtown Cairo. A street like no other. Sadly, one can take the urban environment of Al-Shawarby Street as a barometer of what went wrong with downtown Cairo. It is all about survival tactics in the age of infitah, the late President Anwar Sadat's open door policy. Infitah was succeeded by privatisation and economic deregulation. Graduates discovered, much to their dismay, that they no longer stood a chance in the job market. Al-Shawarby became a metaphor for infitah -- quite literally a polluted landscape of dreams betrayed. Worse, ishtibah wa tahari (suspicion and investigation), dreaded product of the emergency policies, gave rise to plainclothes policemen stopping the many jobless people at random, questioning, investigating, interrogating and reporting on them. The many hapless young men hang round aimlessly. They have one thing in common: they are devoid of hope -- hope in the future, hope of ever finding a meaningful job, hope of ever marrying a suitable girl. Hopelessness is the cruelest bane of youth, of the young men in downtown Cairo. Still, there are those who put on a brave face -- they are the survivors in the concrete jungle. The buildings, reflecting the morose mood, are covered with ashen dust; window-shopping is upstaged by the crumbling façades, studded with broken glass, which say it all. The girls, too, wear too much garish make-up, badly applied. The women, of course, find it more difficult to build on existing social, economic and cultural networks offered by Al-Shawarby Street. They are far more vulnerable than the angry and aimless young men. They, too, must deal with their own grim socio-economic circumstances. They, too, must struggle to create bearable living conditions. They, too, must sustain themselves and their families. Al-Shawarby Street "is no place for a woman", I was reminded time and again by the hustlers. Even though women are not so visible in the vicinity of Al-Shawarby Street, there are some, but hardly any make a living off the street. As Alaa El-Aswani's Yacoubian Building so cleverly and sensitively reveals, the women are often the most oppressed victims of economic disengagement. The eponymous and now notorious Yacoubian building stands at one sad corner of Suleiman Pasha, a stone's throw from Al-Shawarby Street. Not surprisingly, many of the characters in El-Aswani's incisive and engaging novel resemble those who earn a living in Al-Shawarby Street. The novel, like the street, faithfully mirrors and documents the ups and downs, the personal angst and aspirations of contemporary downtown Cairo. It is extremely difficult to draw a definite line separating the modern and the traditional in downtown Cairo. Step inside a shop in Al-Shawarby Street and you will in all probability find yourself surrounded by curious young men eager to sell. They will tell you that their vocation is to sell you goods at bargain prices and they will try their best to interest you in their special offers. They are, of course, more interested in speeding up the buying process. Many of the residents and those who make a living in the street are engaged in informal economic activities -- self-employed artisans, hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes and rent boys. My excursus on the coping mechanism of these hustlers brings to mind the frustrations of marginalised masculinities, as R W Connell so aptly puts it. These frustrations are graphically depicted in the brilliant 15-minute graduation film project of the gifted young director Mustafa Youssef. His Shari' Al-Shawarby is the story of fraternal solidarity in the face of daunting challenges and dashed hopes. Youssef's poignant film documents the everyday life of the hustlers of Al-Shawarby Street -- simultaneously a curious combination of despair and defiance. Their ways are at once a vicious circle and a dead-end. Take Reda El-Negm, Reda the Star, as his fellow hustlers and hawkers proudly call him. He walks with a swagger. He most definitely earned moniker. He also "opened doors and possibilities for the film to take place", Youssef concedes. He recounted how at first the hustlers were suspicious of his incursions into their rough and eerie Dickensian world. "One hustler pulled out a pen-knife. He brandished it menacingly close to my throat and for one frightful split second I thought that he was about to slit my throat," Youssef recalled. "But Reda was different right from the word 'go'. He opened up to me. Some years back, he sold a Saudi man clothes for 20,000 guineas, and ever since he was nicknamed the Star. Youssef explained that Reda started out in one of the small shoe shops and had a passion for football. He views selling as a football game between himself and the potential customer. His aim is to score a goal, which in his market parlance is getting the customer to buy, to walk out of the shop with an armload of goods. Reda explained the code of conduct among hustlers and salesmen of Al-Shawarby Street which is based on friendship and trust. This mutual appreciation is part of the reason why few fights break out and when they do, they are quickly settled. Narcotics, I was told time and again, is the street's most pressing problem. While the young and jobless cluster around the rundown shops, the proprietors, on the other hand, rarely show up. They live in plusher suburbs and hardly ever venture into town. The owners of the shops in happier days were mainly Jews and a sprinkling of Levantines. Today, the Jews are gone, and the vast majority of the shops are owned by the thoroughly Egyptianised descendants of the Levantines -- Palestinians, Lebanese and Syrians. The street was named after a grand old Pasha whose palace stood as testament to his opulent wealth and economic prowess. Today, the palace is no more. The lawyer of the grandson of the original Al-Shawarby Pasha refused to have any dealings with Youssef. The proprietors subdivided old and crumbling mansions, selling smaller and smaller plots and rooms to the newcomers, many of whom were novices to urban culture, drifters from rural backwaters. People like the mad Am (Uncle) Zein. No one thinks for a moment that Am Zein is really mad; he is rather a personification of the failed dreams of the peddlers and hustlers. Shopkeepers take pity on him. He is the embodiment of the perks and pitfalls of being a salesman in Al-Shawarby Street. His judgement is merely clouded by futility and despondency. The street, too, is melancholic. Open a door in an old mansion and you may be rewarded by the ominous sight of a bat flying down an endless, unlit corridor crammed with street cats and stray dogs. Drawing rooms that have seen better days, courtyards that have become tanneries, and regal bedrooms that have ended up as brothels. The basement of the palace of the old Pasha is the proverbial den of thieves. Drug dealers have literally taken over the dungeon-like basements. The entire place is far more akin to a maze of misfortunes than a marketplace. Many of the shops are merely fronts for illicit narcotics. There are the traditional ghoraz, or opium dens. Drug dealing and abuse have become sources of conflict in the street, and so have the presence of women. There are no scantily-clad women on the street, but there are a few weirdly dressed women who are clearly strutting their stuff. Women's attire and their supposedly loose behaviour are topics of heated debate. Morality, or the lack of it, is still uppermost on men's minds. There is old-fashioned chivalry, too. Machismo -- where young men project their manliness through acts of honour and courage -- including coming to the rescue of damsels in distress. Shop assistants, for instance, fiercely tried to save the unfortunate girls who were harassed a few months ago during Eid Al-Fitr, the Muslim feast ending Ramadan. Even though the street was swarming with uniformed and plainclothes policemen, it was the peddlers who defended the young women from their assailants. The hustlers noted how you can always spot the police -- they have a decidedly swashbuckling air. Women, on the whole, are unmoved by such arguments. "I hate shopping in downtown Cairo," including Al-Shawarby Street, where people are always harassing you," an angry adolescent told the Weekly. "Plus there is a lot of sexual harassment," barked a friend of hers. "The place is filthy and the men are dirty-minded," she snarled in disgust. Youssef and I wandered through colonnaded patios. Eerily, they are coated with a thick layer of dust. Indeed, the whole is an unattractive purplish desolation that accentuates the sense of neglect and decomposition. "The street is dead," a peddler insisted. Most of the classical façades are gone or fast disappearing. A few relics of the 1950s and 1960s remain. These are ugly eyesores, to say the least. Then there are the L-shaped terraces, the French windows, the kitsch. Period tiles are scattered amongst the desolate ruins of what was once a stylish neighbourhood. Oddly enough, the resilience of the residents and those who make a livelihood from retail and peddling are precisely the qualities that make up the character of the district. The dark alleyways leading in and out of Al-Shawarby Street are the most desperate of places. These alleyways are the turf of peddlers, drug dealers and street children. I was even told that this is where children disappear without trace and there is talk about them being murdered and their organs sold to hospitals. The question is not whether this is true or not. What is certain is that the area is decidedly seedy. For many, the street is nothing but a great misadventure. There was a stable next to the mansion of Shawarby Pasha. Today, a shop called Cavallo (Italian for horse) stands in its place. The Pasha's stable quite literally metamorphosed into a shoe shop. The actual original mansion of Shawarby Pasha is now a tanning factory. Sudanese refugees and low income families have moved into the dilapidated buildings in the compound of the mansion, one of which was once a stylish shop called Big Ben; today it has become a microcosm of the area's decline. The photographer chipped in. He glanced up at a towering apartment building that formed a grotesque horseshoe: "Once upon a time it must have been an architectural jewel." He eyed the crumbling silent alcoves which like other relics of the palace crop up in the most unlikely places. Still, the street epitomises a certain kind of understated cosmopolitan Cairene charm. The street has a deserved role in the fashion history of Egypt, but its fall from grace is there for all to see. The campaign to restore faith in downtown Cairo still has much work to do in Al-Shawarby Street. Two obviously well-heeled and elegantly dressed ladies indulge in a bit of window- shopping. For a fleeting moment I feel as if I have been transported back in time. On Fridays there is often much commotion -- the ritualistic weekend foraging by the residents of Al-Shawarby Street -- Sudanese refugee families, Iraqi refugee families, Palestinian shopkeepers and countless others. Behind the veneer of dilapidation and decline, there is something of the past that lingers on though maybe it is wishful thinking. My mind goes back to the early 1970s when as a child, our family left Maadi and headed for downtown Cairo, to Al-Shawarby Street to be precise, for a shopping spree. In those days, the shops of that distinctive pedestrian-only street were packed with much coveted imported goods. In due course, its place was usurped by the shopping malls that have mushroomed all over the city. Is there hope for Al-Shawarby as disillusion sets in -- which it will -- with this latest consumer fashion?
