With women, however, in most cases it was a great help!
He told us once that in Liverpool he had fallen in love with a girl. They became engaged and a date was set for their wedding but unfortunately she died in a tragic car accident. He said she was his first and last love and that he would remain faithful to her memory forever and would never get married. Mansi had a strange way of expressing sadness: he would tell you he was sad, but you would not see any traces of it on him. We were taken by surprise when, shortly after that episode, he came to tell us he had got married. We then found out he had married a girl from a prominent English family, a descendant of Sir Thomas More. Some of us knew who Sir Thomas More was, but those who did not gave Mansi a golden opportunity to boast about it and explain everything to those of us who knew as well to those who did not, and in a scholarly English as if we were in a classroom:
“Sir Thomas More, the great-grandfather (many times over) of my beloved wife, is the minister and philosopher and author of Utopia. Of course you haven’t heard of Utopia, Abdel Hai. What an ignoramus you are! He was senior minister to King Henry VIII. Yes, that same king famous for his six marriages. The King sentenced Sir Thomas More to death for refusing to pay allegiance to him when he separated the Church of England from the Vatican authority in Rome. Sir Thomas More also objected to the King’s divorcing his wife Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn. Understood, ignorant bunch? And oh yeah … remember Robert Bolt’s play, A Man for all Seasons? That was about Sir Thomas More. He, in a nutshell, is the ancestor of my beloved wife.”
In such situations, Mansi would be at his best, boasting about his impeccable English and in-depth knowledge of English history. Now, he seemed to have another reason for boasting: he had himself become a part of English history. Adding to our surprise, we understood that the bride, over and above all that history, was an up-and-coming pianist who played in concerts at the famous Wigmore Hall.
“But what on earth would make such a respectable lady fall in love with a mule like you?” Abdel Raheem asked.
He told us he had met her at a meeting of the Young Conservatives, the youth wing of the Conservative Party, where Mansi had a heated discussion with no less a figure than Sir Anthony Eden, Britain’s Prime Minister at the time. I am going to tell you later how Mansi outsmarted one of Britain’s most skilful politicians in a debate on the Palestinian cause, of which he knew little. But that night at the Young Conservatives Mansi believed he was great, dealing verbal blows at Eden, that veteran diplomat and politician. Mansi defended Egypt’s decision to nationalise the Suez Canal and criticised the Eden government’s adversarial policy towards Egypt. After the meeting, a kindhearted young woman approached Mansi to express her admiration of his courageous defence of his country. She invited him home and introduced him to her family. That very night, Mansi decided to marry her.
Thus Mansi underwent a complete transformation. From his small room in Fulham, he moved to a two-storey house on the famous Sydney Street in the posh district of Chelsea, where Mary and her mother lived on their own, her sister and two brothers having all married and moved elsewhere. In no time, Mansi became the undisputed master of that conservative English house. His mother-in-law, who had been brought up by French governesses and spoke English with a French accent, lived on the ground floor, so he took over the entire upper floor. Whenever we visited him, we would see him running around, up and down, issuing orders. He turned that house upside down and it would never have crossed the minds of Mary’s noble ancestors, lying in peace in their graves in the English countryside, that the kind of people who now frequented their home would ever set a foot there. Call on Mansi at home, and once he opened the door, cooking smells of molokheya, kammoneyah, kawarie, and masaqaa1 would invade your nostrils: smells that would have caused the intestines of those ancestors to writhe as they lay in their remote graveyards.
Abdel Hai, who was doing his PhD in economics at Oxford, said, in his favourite accent of Egyptian Delta peasants: “How ironic, you saeedi2, Coptic son of a … coming to England and ending up marrying a descendant of Sir Thomas More?”
Mansi’s torso, now showing signs of indulgence and a comfortable life, shook with laughter, his round face grew taut and his saucy eyes radiated with that childish laughter which was part of his appeal: “You just don’t understand, you poor peasant. Do you think it’s a big deal? Who cares about Sir Thomas More? Don’t forget I’m a descendant of the Pharaohs, the kings of Upper Egypt!”
“Who’s a descendant of Pharaoh Kings? You’re a descendant of the beggars of Upper Egypt!”
“Shut up, peasant! Just listen to what he’s saying! And he’s here to do a PhD in economics. What a joke! What have peasants got to do with economics?”
1 Popular Egyptian dishes
2 A person from Upper Egypt
3
Mansi was blessed with two wonderful qualities: genuine sympathy towards poor people, and faithfulness. He managed to maintain all the friendships he had developed over the years, adding many more along the way. He had an amazing ability to make, and maintain, acquaintances and friends of all races, sects, tastes and ranks. And he treated them all – the prince and the pauper alike – on equal terms, in his amazing down-to-earth way. He accorded special attention to poor people, and to children with whom he would be carefree and truly himself. With children, he was transformed into a child himself, and was very much one of them.
During his first visit to Doha – in the early 1970s, when I had just arrived there – he managed in a very short time to develop the acquaintance of a large number of people, who still remember him and ask about him, particularly taxi drivers.
He was the type of man who would leave a lasting impression on people – a good one in most cases, and a feeling of annoyance and alienation in rare instances. In all cases, however, whoever happened to meet him never forgot him.
No wonder, then, that he found old friends wherever he went. When he travelled with me to India and Australia, a trip I will tell you about later, a young man visited him in our hotel in Sydney. I noticed that he treated Mansi with profound respect. When I asked him why, Mansi said: “He’s the son of X, the butcher in Sloane Street – remember him?”
The first time I went to that butcher’s shop with Mansi, the butcher gave me a huge quantity of meat but charged me an incomparably small price. “There must be a miscalculation,” I told him. “This meat should cost much more.” Looking around the crowded shop, he finally said: “You’re right. I’m sorry.” He took the meat back, scaled it down to the quantity I had requested, and charged me a much higher price.
As we went out, Mansi said angrily: “When will you stop being such a dumb person? He was trying to give you special treatment because I’d told him you’re a friend of mine.”
“You should have told me,” I said. “I thought it was a miscalculation on his part. How could I know you play your devious games even with butchers?”
But that particular incident was not one of his devious games, as I later came to understand. It was that butcher who had offered Mansi accommodation when he first arrived in London, treating him very much as a member of his own family. Mansi remained faithful to him for the rest of his life. When he became rich, one of his presents to his friend the butcher was a Rover car.
In Sydney, I asked Mansi why that young man had treated him with profound respect. “Because I saved him from what would have been a gloomy future. Had it not been for me, he wouldn’t have gone to university and become an engineer.”
His friend the butcher was a member of a strict religious sect that lived so apart from society that they would not even send their children to school. But Mansi kept after his friend until he convinced him to send his son, his eldest, to school.
“Were