Cairo

July 2009

How can we love summer in Cairo? 

I've been told so, but nobody can justify such a strange attachment. Talking to those profess to adore Cairo is somewhat reminiscent of those daytime talk shows where addicts talk to celebrity psychs. "I love it but, I mean, it's really rough and I got grabbed again today, and I just feel dirty and I want to leave... but I just cant." 

And, somehow we stay, counting the minutes of the afternoon-- the creeping, dripping minutes of 105 degree weather. The wind blows down the streets; the tumbleweed trash looks like its trying to keep off the sizzling cement. The tar in the cracks melts, clinging to passing feet. The cats hide. Heat mirages shimmy down the road like ghosts of gaudy streetwalkers.

Then the sun sets. The heat leaks out of the day and for a few hours the city is truly quiet as though, having survived another day the population looks around each other with the shell-shocked eyes, "You made it, I see--khamdullilah!  Me too." 

There's a pause. An urban sigh.

And then, once the last glimmer of light has been sucked down into the Western Desert and real, dark, soothing night has set in Cairo comes to life.

The downtown streets rip into action. The sidewalks are packed, a nighttime reenactment of the day's traffic highways. The sun-numbed children wake up and take to the streets-- there's no such thing as bedtime in Cairo. 2:30 in the morning and the streets are filled: people street sitting, talking, drinking tea, laughing, and shouting. There's music. A olfactory cacophony hovers in the air as heavily the  perfumed women compete with the cooled sweat-soaked clothes of their men. And the true owners of the Cairo streets--the cats-- tear through the day's fresh-baked trash.

Cairo gleams in the headlights and winks neon eyes, heading to early morning assignations.

Maybe it is just the upside down, inside out schedule of Cairo's summer that makes us love it, and why we make it through the next day's heat. It's just the idiosyncratic nature of summer that just confirms what those of us who love Cairo already know: the truth of Cairo is in its incongruities. This is the city of millions comprised solely of small villages, where hoses are left to run into shriveled gardens in the middle of the Sahara, the water immediately swallowed by the sand.  Here are the the clean and open shanties of the dignified homeless and the bon vivant attitude of the neighborhoods in the city of the dead.

Night as day-- well, it  just makes a kind of sense.