Casablanca: Of All the Towns in the World
It was the prospect of the real world that first lured me to Morocco. I was living in a pokey London flat, with no space to swing a hamster let alone cat. I would walk the streets angry and desperate: angry at the high taxes and at the exorbitant kindergarten fees, and desperate for affordable sunshine and for danger. The way I saw it, England had become a nanny state par excellence. Any problems and the system would pick you up and dust you down. I yearned for a place where the safety nets had been cut away, where ordinary people walked on a high-wire of reality.
My wife didn’t share my lust for jeopardy. She clutched our toddler to her pregnant belly and ordered me to not be so irresponsible. Taking little notice of her concerns, I flew back and forth from London to Marrakech, where I had been brought as a child. I remembered the droves of fire-eaters and snake-charmers in the Jama al Fna, the main square, and searched for a cosy little house to buy. Unfortunately just about everyone in the western world seemed to have already come up with the same idea. Prices for riads, courtyard houses in the medina, were soaring, with the influx of the Euro-jetset. Someone suggested to go house hunting in Fès. So I did, and I found a crumbing merchant’s house there.
Colossal in size, it was owned by seven ghoulish brothers, each one more greedy than the last. In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you often have to coax the owner to sell. I sat with them for hours, coaxing, cajoling, begging them to allow me to buy their home. They spat out as fantasy price and narrowed their eyes greedily. I leapt up and ran out shouting. In that moment I broke the first rule of the Arab world: never lose your cool.
Eventually, we were offered a wonderful sprawling home in the coastal town of Casablanca. It was called Dar Khalifa, meaning ‘The Caliph’s House’. All I knew about the city, I had learned in the film. I expected it to be a showcase of the mysterious East, half-expecting Bogart and Bergman and be living it up at Ricks Café Americain. But instead I found a French-built city with fabulous Art Deco buildings and palm-lined boulevards. I fell instantly in love with it, and with the fact that there are no tourists at all.
On the night that I took possession of the great notched iron key to the Caliph’s House door, suicide bombs went off across Casablanca. I cursed myself for courting danger so openly, and feared for what my wife would think watching the news at home. It was a terrible moment. A few weeks later she gave birth to our little son, and we moved to Morocco. My wife was so resistant to the plan that I had to paint a sumptuous image of life steeped in true luxury.
My father, who was from Afghanistan, could never take my sisters and me to his ancestral home in the Hindu Kush. It was always too dangerous. So, often in our childhood, the family station-wagon would be laden with vinyl suitcases, and we would all be tempted inside. With our gardener at the wheel, we would drive south from the verdant county of Kent, through France, Spain, and would take the ferry over to Tangier. The journeys were a chance for my father to reveal fragments of his homeland. As he would frequently point out, the cultures of Morocco and Afghanistan are remarkably similar – mountainous landscapes, Islamic customs, and fiercely proud tribal clans.
When we bought the Caliph’s House, I though we’d be finished with all the work in about three months. But at the start I had no concept of North African time. With no power tools or specialised equipment, work progresses very slowly indeed. And as for money – renovate a large house anywhere and you exceed original budgets many times over. I was forced to take out bank huge loans to pay the bills which were stacked two feet high on my desk. I had hoped to pay a maximum of £40,000 to renovate and furnish the house. In the end it was over five times that amount. Having had no previous experience in renovating a large house, I found it extremely hard to see the ‘big picture’. I would go around buying last minute details, when I should have been concentrating on the structure of the project, and all the tedious stuff like water and wiring that no one ever sees.
Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does. Our experience was no exception. The first weeks and months were beyond miserable. There was no electricity, water or furniture, and there were so many rats that our shoes were eaten in the night. We found several dead decapitated cats in the garden, supposedly left by someone who didn’t want us to live at the Caliph’s House.
Then there were locusts, followed by a swarm of ferocious bees. After that a workman fell through a glass roof, and hordes of police tried to break down the front door. If in England you found a troupe of bobbies trying to batter their way into your home, you would probably ask them why they were there. But in Morocco the police are kept out at all costs. I quizzed one of the guardians why we were the focus of such police attention. ‘Because the architect doesn’t have permission to do the work,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t he?’
‘No of course he doesn’t. In Morocco no one ever gets permission.’
The architect brought a trailer full of the wildest men I had ever seen. They had unusually-developed shoulder muscles and were armed with sledge hammers. In a very short while they managed to smash down a large number of walls, ripping out wiring and water pipes as they went. Then they ran off and the rain began. Weeks followed in which the architect was an infrequent visitor. The reason for this was that, as I later found out, I had broken the second rule of the Arab world – paying in advance. On those long windswept nights, I would huddle in a blanket on a green plastic garden chair and congratulate myself for having broken free from the cycle of school fees, zombie-commuting and triangular chicken tikka sandwiches. My friends in London, I would tell myself over and over, weren’t having nearly as much fun.
Eventually the architect’s building team arrived. They spent most of their time camped in our unfinished sitting-room brewing up enormous pots of chicken stew. When they did do any work it was during the short time in between their feasts and long naps. The construction phase was completed at a snail's pace. After that we moved on to laying the floors with handmade terracotta tiles called bejmat, and coating the walls in tadelakt, a Moroccan form of Venetian plaster, made from eggs, lime, and marble dust. The architect brought a team whose work was so atrocious that I fired them all in a fit of fury. It meant sacrificing all the money I had paid to the architect in advance.
There was no choice but to locate and then to deal directly with the moulems, the master craftsmen. Morocco has an astonishing number of cowboy craftsmen. For every thousand there are one or two true masters who have learned their skills by long apprenticeship. Moualem Aziz was one of them. A great barrel of a man, his bulk poised above nimble feet, he was in charge of the floors. Over months, his team brought magic to the Caliph’s House. The only time he was caught out was laying a complex pattern of glazed tiles in the children’s nursery. On reaching the final row they saw they had misjudged the shape of the room. Without so much as a murmur they lifted the entire floor, rotated it through five degrees, and laid it again.
Two and a half years after moving to Morocco, the house is restored to its former glory. I watch my little son and daughter in the courtyards, playing at the fountains, prodding their tortoises across the lawn. I understand now that the difference between absolute failure and total success is less than a hair’s breadth. And I see that success is about endurance. Keep standing and you will get to the end. But most of all I see that a life without steep learning curves is no life at all.
(Written for The Telegraph Newspaper, London)
(C) Tahir Shah 2006
Ends
My wife didn’t share my lust for jeopardy. She clutched our toddler to her pregnant belly and ordered me to not be so irresponsible. Taking little notice of her concerns, I flew back and forth from London to Marrakech, where I had been brought as a child. I remembered the droves of fire-eaters and snake-charmers in the Jama al Fna, the main square, and searched for a cosy little house to buy. Unfortunately just about everyone in the western world seemed to have already come up with the same idea. Prices for riads, courtyard houses in the medina, were soaring, with the influx of the Euro-jetset. Someone suggested to go house hunting in Fès. So I did, and I found a crumbing merchant’s house there.
Colossal in size, it was owned by seven ghoulish brothers, each one more greedy than the last. In Morocco, before you even get to the matter of the sale, you often have to coax the owner to sell. I sat with them for hours, coaxing, cajoling, begging them to allow me to buy their home. They spat out as fantasy price and narrowed their eyes greedily. I leapt up and ran out shouting. In that moment I broke the first rule of the Arab world: never lose your cool.
Eventually, we were offered a wonderful sprawling home in the coastal town of Casablanca. It was called Dar Khalifa, meaning ‘The Caliph’s House’. All I knew about the city, I had learned in the film. I expected it to be a showcase of the mysterious East, half-expecting Bogart and Bergman and be living it up at Ricks Café Americain. But instead I found a French-built city with fabulous Art Deco buildings and palm-lined boulevards. I fell instantly in love with it, and with the fact that there are no tourists at all.
On the night that I took possession of the great notched iron key to the Caliph’s House door, suicide bombs went off across Casablanca. I cursed myself for courting danger so openly, and feared for what my wife would think watching the news at home. It was a terrible moment. A few weeks later she gave birth to our little son, and we moved to Morocco. My wife was so resistant to the plan that I had to paint a sumptuous image of life steeped in true luxury.
My father, who was from Afghanistan, could never take my sisters and me to his ancestral home in the Hindu Kush. It was always too dangerous. So, often in our childhood, the family station-wagon would be laden with vinyl suitcases, and we would all be tempted inside. With our gardener at the wheel, we would drive south from the verdant county of Kent, through France, Spain, and would take the ferry over to Tangier. The journeys were a chance for my father to reveal fragments of his homeland. As he would frequently point out, the cultures of Morocco and Afghanistan are remarkably similar – mountainous landscapes, Islamic customs, and fiercely proud tribal clans.
When we bought the Caliph’s House, I though we’d be finished with all the work in about three months. But at the start I had no concept of North African time. With no power tools or specialised equipment, work progresses very slowly indeed. And as for money – renovate a large house anywhere and you exceed original budgets many times over. I was forced to take out bank huge loans to pay the bills which were stacked two feet high on my desk. I had hoped to pay a maximum of £40,000 to renovate and furnish the house. In the end it was over five times that amount. Having had no previous experience in renovating a large house, I found it extremely hard to see the ‘big picture’. I would go around buying last minute details, when I should have been concentrating on the structure of the project, and all the tedious stuff like water and wiring that no one ever sees.
Buy a house in a foreign country and, it seems, that anything which can go wrong usually does. Our experience was no exception. The first weeks and months were beyond miserable. There was no electricity, water or furniture, and there were so many rats that our shoes were eaten in the night. We found several dead decapitated cats in the garden, supposedly left by someone who didn’t want us to live at the Caliph’s House.
Then there were locusts, followed by a swarm of ferocious bees. After that a workman fell through a glass roof, and hordes of police tried to break down the front door. If in England you found a troupe of bobbies trying to batter their way into your home, you would probably ask them why they were there. But in Morocco the police are kept out at all costs. I quizzed one of the guardians why we were the focus of such police attention. ‘Because the architect doesn’t have permission to do the work,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t he?’
‘No of course he doesn’t. In Morocco no one ever gets permission.’
The architect brought a trailer full of the wildest men I had ever seen. They had unusually-developed shoulder muscles and were armed with sledge hammers. In a very short while they managed to smash down a large number of walls, ripping out wiring and water pipes as they went. Then they ran off and the rain began. Weeks followed in which the architect was an infrequent visitor. The reason for this was that, as I later found out, I had broken the second rule of the Arab world – paying in advance. On those long windswept nights, I would huddle in a blanket on a green plastic garden chair and congratulate myself for having broken free from the cycle of school fees, zombie-commuting and triangular chicken tikka sandwiches. My friends in London, I would tell myself over and over, weren’t having nearly as much fun.
Eventually the architect’s building team arrived. They spent most of their time camped in our unfinished sitting-room brewing up enormous pots of chicken stew. When they did do any work it was during the short time in between their feasts and long naps. The construction phase was completed at a snail's pace. After that we moved on to laying the floors with handmade terracotta tiles called bejmat, and coating the walls in tadelakt, a Moroccan form of Venetian plaster, made from eggs, lime, and marble dust. The architect brought a team whose work was so atrocious that I fired them all in a fit of fury. It meant sacrificing all the money I had paid to the architect in advance.
There was no choice but to locate and then to deal directly with the moulems, the master craftsmen. Morocco has an astonishing number of cowboy craftsmen. For every thousand there are one or two true masters who have learned their skills by long apprenticeship. Moualem Aziz was one of them. A great barrel of a man, his bulk poised above nimble feet, he was in charge of the floors. Over months, his team brought magic to the Caliph’s House. The only time he was caught out was laying a complex pattern of glazed tiles in the children’s nursery. On reaching the final row they saw they had misjudged the shape of the room. Without so much as a murmur they lifted the entire floor, rotated it through five degrees, and laid it again.
Two and a half years after moving to Morocco, the house is restored to its former glory. I watch my little son and daughter in the courtyards, playing at the fountains, prodding their tortoises across the lawn. I understand now that the difference between absolute failure and total success is less than a hair’s breadth. And I see that success is about endurance. Keep standing and you will get to the end. But most of all I see that a life without steep learning curves is no life at all.
(Written for The Telegraph Newspaper, London)
(C) Tahir Shah 2006
Ends
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