Absence
On the subject of my destiny, I should have learned something from October 12th, 1992. Then a student, I’d left university early that afternoon – my lecturer’s wife had given birth, and he’d cancelled class. As always, I took mini-bus 49, and daydreamed most of the way home. When we reached Zamalek, our neighbourhood, and passed my grandmother’s, I noticed a crowd lingering outside; in the background, silhouetted, two of my cousins, Randa and Dalia, who lived on floor five. The bus jolted on, and one block down, I got off – my stop – ‘Safir Hotel’. I turned left, starting the five minute walk home. It wasn’t only my grandmother’s building that had mysteriously acquired a crowd – all had. One, in particular, struck me as odd – a foreign man in a towel, out of place, gesticulating to his neighbours in front of Bally, the shoe shop, before they all slowly wandered back inside.
My daydreaming soon enveloped any further reflection on the extraordinary clustering till I got home.
“Oh my God… did you feel it… where were you?” my sister screamed as I walked into the kitchen.
“What?”
“The earthquake! You didn’t feel it?” added my mother in disbelief.
People in vehicles don’t feel earthquakes, I later found out.
Whirr the clock forward to January 7, 2011.
“Join us for lunch,” I tell Nora, my friend.
“Can’t… sorry, there’s a protest, and I should go.”
“Waste of energy,” I said.
“Actually, labour movements are getting stronger, and the government’s afraid.”
“Just come for lunch – I’m going back to England tomorrow.”
“I’ll try.”
Ten days later, I watch grainy footage of two protesters standing in the way of an armoured car in Cairo.
“Do you think anything will happen?” I ask my father via Skype.
“Not sure.”
“You should come,” my sister says, “we’re protesting every day… the crowd’s getting bigger. All your friends are here.“
“But I’ve just returned. I’ve got a lot of work.”
“You come back for weddings – this is more important,” she says.
“Nothing’s gonna happen.”
Then I camp out in London, watching television with a group of Egyptians, only one of whom I know. We flick channels, mobile phones adding, piecemeal, more information from home. (There aren’t too many Egyptians in the north where I live).
Two weeks pass. Every evening, post conversation with my family on Skype, I watch what I know’s already happened – online.
One Friday in February, in the library, editing pictures using Photoshop, I pause, and check bbc.com. Flags wave, people jump, from Tahrir, where for four years I took bus 49. There are no speakers and I cannot hear what’s going on. My phone penetrates the silence, and, embarrassed, I rush into the downpour outside.
Euphoria suddenly floods my ears….
“There was a revolution… did you know….. and we’re all here in Tahrir.”
“Can’t believe he missed it,” my sister tells my mother, who tells me months later when I get home.
It’s said that people in motion miss earthquakes.
Seif El Rashidi is from Cairo, Egypt but moved to England 3 years ago, where he is currently the Coordinator of Durham World Heritage Site. He is interested in creative writing, especially creative non-fiction. In 2010, he won first prize for his essay ‘Four Aces’ in the 2010 Unbound Press Creative Non-fiction Competition and was also shortlisted for the Wasafiri New Writing Award.
