Life, to many, is the burden of birth; a timeline that never quite offers enough. As Yasmine El-Rashidi discovers, however, less at times can be a whole lot more Click to view caption Life, in a sense, is a relative state; 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. Take Mustafa Abdel-Kader, for example. Sitting in his two-by-four-metre room -- bare except for a washing line hung across it and a pile of galabiyas in the corner -- Abdel-Kader, a bawwab (porter) in a Zamalek building, hesitantly shares the details of his life. "You can say I'm 60," he mumbles from behind shy, dark 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. 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. Abdel-Kader talks about a colleague, Amm Ibrahim -- another bawwab in the building where he works, a wrinkled man with glasses and a hunched back. Abdel-Kader decides that he is the definition 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 Abdel-Kader, lacks consequence. So do time, in essence, and money. He would like to be young, and healthy, and have money, but ultimately he lives in the belief that life simply goes on. And he believes, talk reveals, that it 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 the building in Mohamed Mazhar Street for more than 35 years. I'd like to have enough money so that I can just rest." He would like, he says, 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 LE25 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 Abdel-Kader'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 go to the building on Mohamed Mazhar and drink tea and eat fino bread, and then I go to my relatives and drink tea and have lunch, and then I come back and have dinner." He gasps to catch breath. Dinner, or 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 paper dated March. A fact that would not bother him, and that he would not know. "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." Abdel-Kader is rather sceptical 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 here 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 pretzeled, it turns out, with the concept of 'things' in boxes, devices, and behind walls. Abdel-Kader fiddles with his sleeves. He is distracted -- uncomfortable with the attention. "Is it over yet?" he asks, once again cocking his head sideways and turning 90 degrees. He refuses to sit down, and will not look directly in my eye. Suddenly, his head starts shaking nervously, quickly. He eyebrows burrow 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 thinks of as TV. I offer to take him to the television building -- 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. Abdel-Kader is aware of the global change, the advent of consumerism, globalisation, and the high-tech revolution. His son, he says, is twenty- something, and he sees the change 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 Abdel-Kader'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 it is enough. He stands up, looks around, and sits down again on his bamboo-chair. As the photographer hovers around him packing up his things, Abdel-Kader fiddles with his fingers, then picks up the newspaper. "What are you reading?" I ask. He chuckles. "I forgot," he says, his eyes glimmering cheekily. "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 street with his newspaper placed strategically under his arm, Abdel-Kader seems content, to say the least -- blown away by the attention and the interest. Probably, though, he is puzzled once again -- having to rethink his place in the world and his role in life. He had not, before then, thought he was worthy of the world today. The meaning of his life, his eyes twinkled as he left, had suddenly adopted an entirely altered form -- transcending beyond the mere consequence of his role as a father. Suddenly, it ticked, he was worth someone else's time. He had ceased, for a while, to be a person of the past.
