NYT Article: A Baghdad Commander, Armed With Pink Tulle

Courtsey: New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/04/world/middleeast/04planner.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all&oref=slogin

BAGHDAD, July 3 — Question: How do you get 15 layers of wedding cake with butter cream frosting through eight checkpoints and 45 minutes of snarled Baghdad traffic in 110 degree heat?

Answer: Hire Nadia Habib, wedding planner extraordinaire.

Ms. Habib, a 53-year-old Iraqi Christian with a strong sense of humor and a passion for weddings and cakes that can intimidate even her own clients, has worked through two wars — the current one is her third — and a decade of devastating economic sanctions.

Despite Iraq's current suffering, daily life, however strange and stunted, still moves in many of its familiar rhythms. Couples meet. They fall in love. They plan weddings.

"I tell you frankly, nothing has changed," Ms. Habib said, sitting in a large banquet hall in the Alwiya social club and thumbing through wedding albums with examples of elaborate cakes from past years. "When we get married, we still want everything to be perfect."

Nothing has changed, but everything is different. Since the American invasion three years ago, Baghdad, home to a quarter of the country's population, has descended into a state of low-grade civil war. Populations are shifting as sectarian violence changes the face of once mixed neighborhoods. Body counts in the Baghdad morgue this spring have been the highest since the invasion.

The city is now divided. Western neighborhoods have fallen to Sunni Arab insurgents. Parties are no longer possible there. In eastern neighborhoods, dominated by Shiite Islamists, singing and dancing are forbidden, so traditional wedding singers no longer take part in ceremonies.

Weddings, difficult enough in times of peace, have emerged as little battles of their own.

As the violence has increased, Iraqis have retreated inside their homes, and fewer couples are choosing to hold wedding parties in public places. Ms. Habib now sets up between two or three weddings a week, compared with five or six before the invasion. Garden settings are out, for fear of mortars and bombs. Guests are far fewer. In the past, guests often numbered 500. Now they are rarely more than 300. Weddings are now held during the day, so guests can return home in the safety of daylight, before curfew begins.

Ms. Habib, flanked by her husband, Hekmet Ayub, a smiling 61-year-old who resembles a beardless Santa Claus, forges ahead fearlessly. Like an expert hockey goalie neatly deflecting or catching every puck, she skillfully accommodates, or adjusts, every one of her customers' desires.

Flowers? Take fake. Real ones, all imported, are no longer affordable since the road from Jordan became dangerous. Gold ribbon? Beige is better, easier to buy in markets that are safe. Hand-designed invitations? Printers are scarce. Better to use a computer.

"When they want something strange and complicated, they come to me," she said, in her melodic, accented, English. "I have done many strange things," she said, laughing.

Strange began in the 1990's, after Iraq's war against Kuwait, when Iraqis, Christian and Muslim, began holding weddings in social clubs instead of their homes, to avoid the cost of putting on a huge spread. Weddings got showier, too. Ms. Habib once hid the bride and groom behind a curtain on a stage instead of marching them down the aisle. Wedding cake constructions had secret chambers that hid caged doves. Flaming swords became fashionable.

Ms. Habib ticked off her baking triumphs: A tall cake made to look like a pile of presents. A church-and-village cake. A 10-foot tower of cake layers, each on pedestals, completely encircled by balloons that floated up when a string was snipped, revealing the cake inside. A rotating cake that stopped when the bride cut into it.

But in the past three years, as bombs have smashed families, and secret killings, often sectarian, have changed entire neighborhoods, couples have developed a taste for short, simple celebrations. "They want classic style," she said, as Mr. Ayub and their helpers blew up gold balloons behind her. "They want to finish as soon as possible, to complete the party successfully."

Anything can happen. In June, a bomb in the southeast neighborhood of New Baghdad killed an aunt of a groom, and the family had to call off the celebration. In February, after the bombing of a Shiite shrine that set off a spasm of sectarian killings and then a curfew, several weddings were canceled. One couple married early in the morning and left for Jordan without a party. In each case, Ms. Habib was left with cakes she could not sell. An average set of cakes costs about $140.

"Now, when I make the cake, I am afraid," she said. "I don't know if they'll take it or not."

Baking has its own frustrations. Baghdad has only an hour of power every four hours, and most households have two other sources: the neighborhood generator, operated by a much despised 'generator man' and a small, home generator. The official price of gasoline, needed for generators, is 10 times what it was a year ago. The voltage from the generators is different from that in the city's lines, forcing families to buy appliances in pairs.

Ms. Habib works in a small addition to her house. It has seven freezers and three refrigerators, and baking supplies of all types. Flowers fill one refrigerator. Her garden, she said, is crowded with fuel containers and two large generators.

"I canceled the garden," she said.

The violence on city streets has been a serious problem for planning. Invitations used to be hand printed on Mutanabi Street, a bookseller area in central Baghdad, but few people are working anymore and the area is too dangerous anyway, Ms. Habib said. Late last month, Mr. Ayub wanted to go to Bab al-Sharji, a local market area where everything from fake police uniforms to fake flowers (his intended purchase) is for sale. Ms. Habib told him not to go. That afternoon, a large bomb killed several people there.

"Always we are worried, even when we are laughing," she said, her fingers fluttering on her chest. "I am nervous until I put the cake down and finish the party."

One of the biggest problems is simply moving around the city. Once, on her way to get the cake, a long convoy of American Humvees blocked the road for so long that she did not make it back in time for the wedding. The bride made frantic telephone calls, but Ms. Habib was helpless.

On Monday, she drove from her neighborhood in northeast Baghdad to the Hindiya Club in Karrada. It is a 20-minute drive without traffic, but since the new government imposed the latest security plan, in which Iraqi troops operate hundreds of new checkpoints around the city, it now takes almost an hour. By the time she had reached the club, the cakes, stacked three layers high in the trunk of a Mercedes sedan, had begun to look oily.

"My butter cream is strong," she said confidently. "It doesn't easily go down."

As often happens, the club refused to turn on the air-conditioning before the ceremony. That money-saving habit seemed an insurmountable obstacle in one particularly hot wedding hall. Ms. Habib resourcefully placed the cakes on the seats of her car, and left it running with the air-conditioning turned on, until shortly before the couple arrived.

"You see how we work?" she said, wiping sweat from her face with one hand and digging angrily in her purse for a small fan, and offering a second one to a reporter.

Nearby, Ms. Habib's daughter was ironing a white linen tablecloth with a fan blowing directly on her face. Three assistants, all neighbors, including a well-known soccer coach, bustled around the hall, ribbons and pins between their teeth, and wads of pink tulle under their arms. A small boy wandered among the balloons, popping them. The adults winced at the sound.

Couples keep coming. In the Alwiya club last week, Rim, 25, a dental technician, and Amar, 29, a computer programmer, were beaming as they sat with Mr. Ayub, looking over seating arrangements drawn out on a piece of paper. Relatives introduced them a few months ago in Rim's house. Amar could not stop looking at her.

"I felt my heart beating," he said, with an embarrassed smile.

The sense of danger intensifies people's feelings for one another.

"We feel that we could die at any moment," he said.

Ms. Habib chimed in.

"It's very good of us that we are living here without law," she said. "Really, it's admirable."






Sahar Nageeb contributed reporting for this article