Arabian Nights

"I know how to make you happy", a man whispered in my ear as I was walking through the crowded passages of Old Cairo . Apparently, that day there was a sewage problem, letting water leaking from the pipes flooding the streets and turning the ground into a dark thick wet matter. Ignoring the secret smiles of men, I made my way inside a perfume shop. "Arabian Nights", the owner of the shop said in a hushed voice. "This scent has a special power my dear lady" and so he kept talking though I hardly remember paying attention to his words. I was rather staring at a photograph above his desk, of someone seated with his back on the camera and it occurred to me that this image was almost placed there on purpose - perhaps as a hint for the unsuspicious customer. I have no idea if that might have been really the case but there was something in the air that didn't feel quite right. After finishing his story which apparently I missed the juice of, he asked me if I was married. At first, I hesitated to answer. "Are you married?" the man insisted with an air of expectancy. "Yes, I mean no, no I am not", I answered and his teeth were now shining immensely in the dark room. The sun was about to set and I knew I had to get back to the hotel soon. All I could remember was that we should now head towards the main gate.

Mohamed was waiting for me outside. "What's the smile?" I asked. "That's because they know", he replied and we both looked at each other as if questioning the very nature of our latest exchange. There was a certain ambiguity in his words - the same sort of uneasiness that occurred to me earlier on while looking at the photograph above the shopkeeper's desk. In ancient Egypt, on the day of judgment, the heart was weighed against a feather to determine if the deceased had lived a life in accordance with Ma'at ; the Egyptian concept which referred to the natural order of the universe, 'the way things ought to be' and which also included the true relationship between human beings, between ruler and ruled, and between gods and people.  Shortly, we reached the entrance of Khan el-Khalili. For some reason, I began to count my steps, all equally arranged in small portions of odds and evens. As soon as we passed the gate, we heard some noise coming from the masses gathered around the mosque and there at a distance, a man appeared to be approaching us in great speed. At a moment of anxiety, all begun to turn into black and white. Colours, those beautiful vibrant shades one cannot dismiss anywhere and everywhere in the city had now dissolved into the realm of the monochrome. Sound became all the more piercing meanwhile words begun to lose shape. The act of doing now seemed to have its own rhythm. "Do you know what is strangely charming about this city? It's almost like falling in love; as if to understand the city's own mechanism and reasoning, one needs a certain amount of time which in turn demands a certain kind of forgetfulness".

We were now close by the hotel, I kissed goodbye my friend and I made my way through the massive crowd that was pushing towards the great mosque. Gravity pulled me down and I sat on a bench observing the young woman who happened to sit right across me. She seemed as if she was waiting for someone. The harmony of her facial features failed to hide the disappointment in her eyes. Had the enigmatic look of hers shadowed my better focusing on the prayers penetrating graciously through and above the city, I do not really know, but I guess that look remained fixed in my memory since. In any event, I am aware that perception is subjective and I am not sure if that 'look' was a reflection of my inner state of being at the time or if I had just penetrated into a tiny passage of her soul. In fact to assume that the latter was true, I had no proof and as I am not really an expert to be able to tell which is the case, I very quickly gave up on the idea and continued walking towards the last corner that led into the entrance door of the hotel. "Besides, I should not forget I am a foreigner here" I thought, "I have no right to come to definite conclusions other than making poor assumptions". At that point, I start ed recalling the night before as I had stayed in my hotel's room watching Egyptian soaps and dramas on television. Apparently, I did not understand a word, but the films still impressed me enough to keep watching them right to the end. Before I went to sleep, I wrote a short note in my diary:   'In the midst of our world, all knowledge must exist still intact somewhere between an infinite timeline and that moment of a blink of the eye. And when associations become impossible or reach a dead end, the world takes a slight turn and things begin to rest under the skin. Being left when dark in the middle of the Ocean, we are always incapable of discerning the horizon'. I do not really know why I wrote this then but at the time it made perfect sense to me.

Cairo, May 2006

Text & images © Haris Epaminonda

pg.49-53 /published by Undo journal
Issue #1/ 2007