MUKARAM

Cairo has not changed since my last visit ten years ago, dusty, congested, and noisy, but yet still active and full of life. Egyptians say Cairo is the city that never sleeps; soon any visitor will discover this fact. People and traffic movement actually never stop day or night. What have changed however, are life style and the cost of living. More and more cars in the streets, more air pollution and more noise, it is a local habit to blow automobile horns for little or no reason, in expression of joy, anger or to deliver a message to other drivers telling them how bad their driving was. Khawla, my wife fears crossing the streets, she thinks if she was to die for any reason other than old age.. She would die in a hit and run incident in Cairo. Most probably this was the reason behind her reluctance to move from Istanbul to Cairo, I honestly think Istanbul is not a much better place compared to Cairo especially in traffic jams and pollution.

Khawla has enjoyed living in Istanbul, apart from traffic and pollutions problems – which Khawla did not have to experience staying at home most of the day, she enjoyed the sceneries around the Posphore and Mermara straits in the week ends, she also found great pleasure in visiting Bazzars and old Souks for shopping but mostly for sight seeing. My elder daughter Mai – she looks very much like Khawla, long hair, fair skin and symmetrical body shape, has accompanied Khawla in here ventures. Maha, The younger daughter spent much time with her friends playing basketball, she thought playing basketball can improve her height, she is a little short and a little overweight, but this has never deterred her from being happy and joyful almost all the time. It was hard for the three for them in the beginning to communicate with neighbors because of the language barrier, Mai and Maha learned Turkish faster, they actually finished high school in a Turkish college few years later.

We traveled quite a lot together, as a matter of fact Khawla, Mai, Maha and I moved around several countries with stays from one year to several years, Mai and Maha hardly know their own home country, they traveled with me since their early years in life. I feel guilty for not giving them stability, I am not the social type myself but they need friends, why Cairo? they keep on asking me, we lived here before and lived in cleaner and better cities after we moved some ten years ago, they don’t quite understand my reasons but in any case and regardless of those reasons I decided to help them make the best of it, at the same time I am planning to make their life as easy and as pleasant as possible.

Our new home was composed of two bedrooms, a setting room, kitchen and a balcony overlooking what the landlord described as a garden. May be it was meant to be a garden but turned into a swamp out of neglect, drainage water flooding the ground, untrimmed trees or what was left of them where a comfortable home for several kinds of insects. Temperature that summer was probably swinging around the 100’s with humidity possibly in the 90’s, our new home didn’t have an air-conditioner nor a fan for that matter, besides, the apartment was so dirty Khawla, Mai and Maha had to work so hard all day long to clean out tons of dust and hundreds of cockroaches. What a beginning..! I anticipated quite a handsome amount of complaints from my partners (the family members) and prepared my usual weapon of defense.. Why do people die in the wilderness? I ask them… they laugh and reply… because they keep on blaming themselves.. It worked again, I learned this phrase from Anthony Hopkins in his movie the Edge.. it always works.

We spent few months trying to coupe with the new situation; I think they managed quite nicely and made some friends, located stores where they could buy house necessities and enrolled in some computer and language schools.

It’s now been ages since I heard from my other family members; they only contact me in cases of disasters or out of a guilty conscious, they think keeping family ties means keeping god happy… ironically I was never contacted for the later reason. This is perhaps why I had a bad feeling when I received a call from my mother “Mukaram” saying she is coming to visit me in Cairo after some six years of total silence. She said she is coming next day on flight number RJ799 at mid-day… So quick!! On such a short notice!?

Although I was not on good terms with Mukaram since my childhood, I learned a lot from her. She seemed to like in the early years of my life, she was much of a caring and loving mother... but good things are opt to end, either I grew up a little and understood what was happening around me, or perhaps I joined the enemy by merely growing up into manhood, we had several disagreements and so many unpleasant confrontations.

I still feel her smell around me as if I gave her hug just minutes ago, actually last time I met her was some six years ago, such a long time passed without even a telephone call, even before that we hardly met… some thirty four years passed since we lived under the same roof, I still remember her words: Go away and be happy, I thought at the time she was eager to see me leave the family house, I was under the impression that I was the odd one out.. say the black sheep of the family. I drove this conclusion from the fact that two of my elder brothers where staying with her along with my younger brother as well, of coarse not to mention my two unmarried sisters.

Well I found a way out; I joined the Air Force, took few months of military training and then went for some technical training in England, which lasted an additional few years. I thought that was one way of cooling down a troubled mother and sun relationship.

Now that I am fully grown up man, a family man, particularly with a wife and two daughters, I realized I never gave my self enough time to figure out why Mukaram was behaving in such a manner, always on the defensive, always a protectionist. She told me many stories that I couldn’t understand at the time, I also heard those or similar stories from Mukaram brothers and sisters, I did not take these stories seriously either, because I was too young to believe them, or perhaps I didn’t want to, I was brought up in a culture that plants the seeds of masculine superiority over females in the family… even towards my own  mother. 

Mukaram was borne in the early years of the last century in Yafa on the east Mediterranean coast; her father a policeman was quite active in his love life with her mother, he had around eleven children plus an adopted one, we used to make laughs about and say.. mother: if your father had a TV set you would have had less brothers and sisters. She used to reply bashfully: shut you devils.. no TV transmission was available at that time facing her head to the flour and shying a way into another room. She seemed to remember only from when she was eight or nine years old not earlier, they lived a one room house.. i.e. Mukaram, her ten brothers and sisters.. and.. her father and mother, quite a crowd ..ahh!.

Mukaram used to enjoy going to the beach with her younger sister and a little girl almost her age from the neighborhood, they would play on the sands for hours and hours, no one would bother to call her back home even if she was late until after dark, after all, who would notice a missing sheep in such a big heard. Her father was more or less on the poverty level always complaining that his sons would work to support, especially Khalil the elder son, he has a job but spends his money all in the wrong directions, nothing to his father, never the less, he exerts all his masculine rights on his sisters as well as on his younger brothers. He punishes those who commit any wrong doing severely; he found great joy in pinpointing Mukaram quite frequently, one of his very often punishment styles was forcing her to kneel on olive seeds on the flour and stay like this for couple of hours.

In an unforgettable summer day by the beach where Mukaram was having fun, in an unusual move, Khalil came and picked her up and dragged her home, at an age of eleven, Mukaram  didn’t know whether we did something wrong, she was crying and screaming: please brother do not let me kneel on the olive seeds I did nothing wrong. He answered with yellow smile on his face: don’t worry Mukaram.. Today is your happy day.. You are getting married.