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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  In Cairo, follow Mahfouz
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In Cairo, follow Mahfouz

Many Cairos come together in the present-day city. We visit its greatest novelist's hunting grounds

Naguib Mahfouz wrote his great Cairo trilogy about the old city he knew intimately. Photo: Barry Iverson/Getty ImagesPremium
Naguib Mahfouz wrote his great Cairo trilogy about the old city he knew intimately. Photo: Barry Iverson/Getty Images

In the beginning there is the smell. Of fresh, soft, round bread, hundreds of loaves, bread which looks like rotis, far tougher than the roomali but much softer than the tandoori, spherical like a flying saucer, like a rugby ball, piled high in a cart, smelling of flour and smoke and fire, emerging straight out of the bakery. The bread is not stacked in rows; it is dumped in the cart as it is prepared, and people pick it up casually, pay the baker, and carry on, munching, their first meal of the day. Its smell is sweet. You hear the gentle pounding of the dough, which will soon take the shape of more bread.

It is not yet hot—it is the hour after the first prayers, and the street is full of old men walking the uneven streets, wearing their long gowns, pale blue and green, as they meander through the tiny streets, past shops opening for the day, patting children leaving for school, avoiding the holes on the sidewalk, ignoring the tourists, out with their flashy cameras and large telephoto lenses, capturing the slow beginning of activity of a street in old Cairo in the morning.

I had seen the old city from a garden the previous evening, before the sun went down. Minarets had sprouted on the horizon, and under that pale, fading sun, the domes had shone, making the twilight hour magical. The next day we were in al-Gamaliya—the long road that formed the central artery of Naguib Mahfouz’s life in Cairo, Egypt—the mosque of al-Hakim, the sabils, or water fountains built by devout traders for people thirsty for water, the suq (market) and the hamam (public bath), and those shops and the persistent hawkers of Khan al-Khalili. We saw women in niqab quietly inspecting lacy lingerie, concealing their excitement, shrouding it beneath their veils, the mountain of fresh olives and garlic and tomatoes and mint piled up for sale, the milkman pouring milk in steel tumblers and selling it to women who look away, hiding their faces when I try to photograph them. Then the shops with Qurans and carpets, a chicken seller, an old shop selling palm leaves, an ironing shop, the cafés with their fresh coffee and more bread, the store selling cotton by the sack, and toy stores now flooded with Chinese goods. Beyond, the wholesale market, where traders sell copper, coal and steel bars; and still beyond, the street with jewellery and perfumes. Across that, another store, as if stuck in 1917, selling large clocks and watches, each showing a different time, as if each is frozen in another age. A donkey cart passes by, oblivious of us.

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Many centuries meld in Cairo’s architectural sprawl. Photo: David Silverman/Getty Images

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Published: 15 Nov 2012, 06:05 PM IST
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