Last night I saw the film adaptation of Alaa Al-Aswany’s novel The Yacoubian Building. It was a three-hour-spectacle of Egyptian drama of people living, loving, hating and plotting in this famous building in downtown Cairo in Suleiman Basha Street. For me part of the fun in the screening was to try to understand the Egyptian Arabic and it was also interesting to observe the reactions of the fellow viewers among whom there were many invitees from the Middle East, I gather. They sometimes laughed at issues, which were clearly culturally bound and which did not open up to me, linguistically or otherwise. Well, I would have made the story perhaps less ‘entertaining’ and with less caricaturized characters and depicted the social struggle and the clash of values in their lives with more rawness… I wonder how the book shows it. 

Cairo still remains a mystery to me… Maybe it’s time to pay visit to this megalomanic metropole and see what it’s all about. So far my experience of Egypt is reduced to the fictive world of Waltari’s Sinuhe The Egyptian, I devoured the novel when I was a teenager. 

When I was four or something, I had already heard about the pyramids and Egypt, and one day I decided to walk there! I took the direction to where I had earlier seen, from the bus window, these huge gravel heaps in pyramide shape. I had our German shepherd to keep me company. The fact that these heaps were perhaps 5 kms from my home made no difference, they were just as far or close from home as Africa might have been to a four-year-old…and this all happened of course before the era of mobile phones and it had taken quite a long time for someone in the family to trace me on my route and bring me back before I reached the pyramids. I was told later that a neighbour had spotted me somewhere on my itinerary but he could not make me turn around, because I was so single-mindedly “on my way to Egypt” and because our German shepherd was so protective of me.