Laborers let kites lift their cares away

CAIRO — They rise through grit and smog, lifting across the Cairo skyline, drifting over the Nile, twirling above graves, filling the desert sky with twine and color. They're flown by marble cutters and mechanics, men who have washed off the dirt and grease of the day and, with their boys, escaped the city's growl by tugging on strings and staring at the sky until the stars come out.

Kites, soaring and diving, tumbling and battling in the summer dusk.

"It is the tradition in poor neighborhoods. You get together and fly kites," says Hani Mahmoud, his blue-and-white kite held together by plastic, palm wood and glue. "It's nice and cool at sunset. There are days when you can't see the sky because there are so many kites, and sometimes we fly at night, tying little lanterns on them."

Mahmoud stands on his roof, reeling out twine. He glances to other rooftops and into the alleys, so many little dramas around him: a woman in a print dress laughs into a cellphone and minds her goat, a couple steals a kiss, boys yell for friends, laundry is hung, girls play tag between satellite dishes, cooking scents spiral from stoves and the shutters stay open in this crowded, hot city, where privacy and secrets are abandoned for the hope of a breeze through a window.

The pigeon keepers are stirring, releasing flocks that gather in formation, whirling around kites, racing beyond clay-mud mosques and skimming the city until a raised rag on a stick or the wave of an arm brings them home.

"Some fly pigeons, we fly kites," Mahmoud says. "Everyone looks for his own bit of pleasure."

He was born and raised in Cairo. His grandfather moved the family here from the town of Asyut. The house used to be wooden, but Mahmoud's father rebuilt it with brick. It is like hundreds of others in this neighborhood, ragged and mortar-rough, incomplete, standing beneath the silver domes and minarets of the 12th century Citadel and alongside Cairo's sprawling cemetery, known as the City of the Dead. Mahmoud lives here with his wife, brothers, cousins and mother.

He's a marble worker going through a bad spell. Construction projects are frozen, financing is scarce. The economy is holding back all who are not already wealthy.

"Five years ago, I worked every day," Mahmoud says. "These days I may work for a week and then I may end up sitting at home for a month with nothing to do."