To laugh

If you have five minutes, here is a kind of humour that I love and isn't much in evidence in the rational North. This is a vignette of (yes, you guessed it, Cairo) life written as a series of imaginary taxi journeys across town. They’re in a book called Taxi, by Khaled al Khamissi, which a friend gave me this summer. (Maybe I'm just weird.)

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I was on my way to Heliopolis [distant 'burb] where I had an important appointment at the Armed Forces public relations department to get permission to film in front of the podium where President Anwar Sadat was assassinated back in 1981. The appointment had been arranged a long time before and I did not want to be late, so I went at least half an hour early.

I took a taxi from Dokki [downtown] and we took the Sixth of October bridge. The traffic was heavy as usual but I was feeling smug about the way I'd planned it. By about the time I had expected to be there, we had reached Salah Salem Street [a notorious blockage], and as we approached the exhibition ground the traffic came to a complete standstill. I wasn't very worried but the waiting dragged on and the minutes passed slowly and we started to ask the cars nearby what the reason was. They told us that President Mubarak was making an excursion. [They close the streets when this happens.] Okay, I thought, may he arrive safely, and in a few more minutes the road would clear.

We stayed sitting in the car, which by some magical power had been transformed into a mere rock squatting in the middle of the road, unable to move a fraction of an inch, even if Hercules had been pushing. After we'd been waiting close to an hour, I decided to pay the driver the fare and get out and walk, for no doubt, I thought, walking would be better than sitting. As soon as I started to get out, a police officer approached me and prevented me from getting out.

"What do you mean?" I said.

"It's forbidden, sir," he said. "You have to stay in the car."

"What do you mean? This is a street and I want to walk in the street," I said.

"It's forbidden, sir. Get back in the car."

I got in the taxi dejectedly and the driver laughed. "You mean you wanted to leave me in this mess! See what God does," he said.

"I was trying to make my appointment," I said.

"Forget that. This is one big jam. Once I was stuck here for four hours without moving."

"Oh my God, four hours!"

"That day I got out of here, took the car back to the owner, paid him everything I had on me and told him 'Never mind, I'll give you the rest tomorrow.' I went home and by God we all went to bed without dinner. My wife and kids had been waiting for dinner, like, all day long, and I came home empty-handed. My wife cried and put the kids to bed. I stayed by the window listening to the Koran to calm down."

"So what are you going to do today?" I asked.

"That depends on you. You could compensate me for however many hours we get stranded here."

"So that whole story was so that I’ll pay you for today?"

"No, I swear on the Holy Koran. What I’m telling you is the honest truth, and if you don’t want to pay more than you’ve paid that’s okay by me. But stay with me to pass the time of day."

We sat for three hours, passing the time of day. He told me how he once loved Cairo with a passion, then he began to like it, then he began to have conflicting feelings about it, then he disliked it and now he loathed it.

In the end he told me about 20 jokes and I told him just as many back. Unfortunately I can’t tell you them because any one of them would be enough to send me to prison for slander, although I don’t see why I should go to prison because of jokes which most Egyptians know and which they circulate and laugh at daily.

Since I naturally do not want to be jailed, suffice it to say that we laughed a lot, even if I did not make my appointment. Since then I’ll never feel smug like that again.