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A City of One’s Own Kyria Lysoon… Kyria Lysoon…Kyria Lysoon The man’s chanting is drowned by the pulling of the brakes and the screech of the train slowing down on its tracks. He does not get on. The station at the heart of the city is never empty; there is a never ending exchange of travelers getting on and off under the cold florescent light. Kyria Lysoon, he chants again. I do not move. I miss the train as I look at this man who seemed to have been there just for me. No one else would understand. For them, he is just another man driven mad by his city. Giza, 1999 By the dim light peeking through the tree branches and pouring through the window, I am arranging my grandmother’s photographs of faces which have become so familiar to me. The faces are all worn out, smiling; carrying something heavier than their features could carry. They could be called ‘authentic Egyptian faces.’ Even the children seem to have their years and wrinkles outlined for them. My...

The air conditioned office was shaking at a two seconds interval every time the old brown York air conditioner burped some cool air. Mubarak's picture was on the wall behind the desk. He looked like a teenager compared to the figure sitting in the dark chocolate brown leather armchair. The whole room was dressed in this shade which grotesquely matched the old York dripping water through an orange hose into a lime green bucket. Ghali lit a cigarette – Gauloises – and leaned forward while staring into the face hovering in midair between cap and collar. He opened his thin lips to say something but then changed his mind. No, he thought, asking for whisky is not a very smart move. He'd already said he didn’t want anything to drink. "Well, Mr. Ghali…" "Please General Fangary, there's no need for these formalities. You can call me Mr. Waguih." "Mr. Waguih" "I'm all ears General." "You do know why you're here" ...

I don’t even have a picture of him. All I have left is what he left everybody else: a couple of hundred pages bound and sold on bookshelves to get reprinted to sell some more copies with his ache inside, ever swelling on every page and always haunting me. God, I want to tear my flesh off my bones sometimes when I reach that part. How did he write it this way? Sometimes I ask myself as I go over it, wanting to lick every letter as if it was one of his fingers. How did he know. We should have seen 1970 together but he left us all a year earlier. He left me even earlier than that but it always feels that he never left. I knew how different we were as soon as I saw him and I also knew that resist as I may, I was going to lose myself in him completely. What I wasn't counting on was that I would drown in him. I sank into his smile, his boyish charm and his intensity which he flaunted around so casually he made you feel it was effortless to be so intense and heavy all the time. I sank ...