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| Sobh |
Not long ago, only 10 or 20 years perhaps, you used to see them everywhere. You would step out of a bus, or a street car, and they would be shining all around, lighting vegetables and fruits on top of pushcarts on the side of the street.
The lanterns that were part of my childhood in the Shubra part of Cairo are all but gone now. When power cuts occur, people use battery-operated ones, which give off a brighter light and spare you the need to refill with kerosene.
People have moved on, but a part of me still yearns to the old lanterns, with their dreamy soft light that made you strain your eyes to make sure that the fruits you’re buying are not the inferior residual of the day, as you suspect they are – while the peddler stuffs more in the brown bag for you, lest you should change your mind. An hour later at home, you may be pleasantly surprised with your nocturnal shopping. But if not, at least the transaction was milder and more picturesque.
A friend of mine, the author Osama Kamal, tells the story of the old lanterns in his recent book, Raehat Al-Gheyab, or Scent of Absence.
Kamal went for months looking for a lantern of the type I described, and the search wasn’t an easy one.
He looked in all the old districts of Cairo, from Gammaliya to Sayyeda Zeinab. In desperation, he eventually walked inside the Klob Zeinabi Hotel, literally the Hotel of St Zeinab’s Lantern, to ask if they have any.
Perhaps smaller cities than Cairo still have them, Kamal thought. So he scoured Damietta and the fishing villages on Lake Manzala, not much luck either.
In Port Said, the northernmost city on the Suez Canal, he was discouraged by the merchants he spoke to. It is a wild goose chase, some told him.
But he persisted in the search, and one day, at the intersection of Al-Hamidi and Aswan streets, he ran into a man whose father was a klobbati, or lantern makers.
Al-Arabi Ibrahim Salem, talked about his father’s generation. He still remembered the name of the city’s lantern makers of the 1950s and 1960s: Ibrahim Salem (his father) Ibrahim Musa, Ali Soliman, Mokhtar Sobh, Ahmed Jalhum.
They are all dead now, but perhaps one of their children has kept the profession alive, Kamal thought.
His guess was right, or almost so.
On Kesra Street, Kamal found an old man selling smoking supplies. Yes, there is a klobbati shop right here. He pointed at a hole in the wall, a shop that can perhaps fit a desk and two chairs, not much to look at, not even a sign announcing its purpose.
The man who runs the shop, the smoke guy said, will arrive right after the sunset, or maghreb, prayers.
An hour later, a sixty-something fellow arrived. He opened the creaking doors of the small establishment, and invited Kamal into the brightly lit room that hasn’t received a customer in ten years or so.
It was like going into a shrine for things past, Kamal felt as he inspected the remaining lanterns, all six of them, made by Mukhtar Sobh, who passed away 30 years ago.
He spent the next two hours in this tiny shop, a business that the father started around 1957, when his son – Kamal’s host – was only five.
Over the years, the son managed to sell all the collection the father left behind, except for five lanterns that were still in their plastic wrapping, waiting for a buyer that doesn’t come, now turning into collector’s items by default.
As Mohamed, the son of the lantern maker who now works for a Suez Canal company as a pipe technician, lit one of the lamps, the atmosphere of the room changed.
Suddenly, the peeling paint on the walls seemed to blend into a cosier backdrop, the backdrop of Kamal’s childhood, Mohamed’s, mine.
Mohamed showed Kamal how the wicker, which he said is made of silk, works. How to fill the lantern with gas – the gas has to be of clear colour to burn better, Mohamed explained.
The glass top, he explained, was made in the Yassin Factories, once the top glass producer in the country.
The lanterns, Mohamed explained, come in two types, the one that stands on a table, which peddlers used to rent for 5 pounds a day until they no longer did, and the type that goes on a wall, which shops preferred.
This type of lanterns first came in the markets nearly 100 years ago, and went out of use 10 years ago or so, Mohamed said.
If he is asked to rent one now, the rate will be 10 pounds a day, he remarked. But when he was a child, peddlers would come and rent them for only 2.5 piastres (1 pound = 100 piastres) per day.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 26 June, 2014 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly.
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