In this post, I shall meander simply because I want to.

My first time in Cairo was in 1974. On the drive from the airport to the hotel, I remember looking out of the window and thinking to myself, I’ve been here before. Home!

It was a typical family vacation, visits to the new and old, a taste of culture, a peek into local rhythms, interspersed with sibling repartee and fights. My sister Raghida was approaching her 17th birthday and about to go into full bloom; my brother Fadi and I were the agitated teenagers in the middle; and Iman, five years younger than me and the last, at six, was a sweet, delicate thing.

It’s true that Cairo has changed over the past 50 years. It’s also true that it hasn’t. It’s still a hoary, hypnotic city, crowded and loud, so very tired and yet so very alive, sultry and hard, lush and dusty, flirtatious and dead serious, with gray permanently coating its tree leaves and skies.

When I first visited, there couldn’t have been a sharper contrast between two Arab cities than between Cairo and Amman. At that time, Ammanis were no more than 475,000, Cairenes  5.5 million. They had the Nile, we had Aqaba, three hours away by car, on the Red Sea. Cairo hustled and bustled, we maundered and purred. On a clear day in Amman, and they were many, you could see where the horizon and earth meet. Our circle of life was a few minutes away in any direction.  In Cairo, you had to ride the Nile to set your eyes free, and you felt as if that city could go on for an eternity.

I became a regular visitor to Egypt since that first encounter. In 1992, I even thought of making a documentary on the “mou’alimat,” female patrona who presided, much like old-style tough guys, over sundry traditional trades and neighborhoods. They used to feature all the time in old Egyptian movies but had become a fading quirk of the country’s fast-changing urbanities. I accompanied my friend and relative Hanan al Shaykh, the novelist, who was invited to lecture at Cairo’s literary atelier. As her daughter Juman and I sat, along with Egypt’s literati, in the cozy space listening to Hanan and the Egyptian writer Edward Kharat musing about prose and literature, Cairo’s distinct scents and pollutions wafted through the tiny window. In Cairo, life sang through such intimate frictions, all intense and wonderful.

Christopher Dickey, a dear friend, was Newsweek’s Cairo bureau chief at the time. So, our one-week stay ended up as a total immersion, with excursions to artists studios’, Chris’s Zamalek apartment, the old meat market, the Hussein Mosque, the Fishawi Café, Midaq Alley, City of the Dead, and the garden of the Marriott Hotel.

I lived Cairo the way a daughter of hers would. It all felt deeply familiar: good habits and bad, the dos and don’ts, the unwritten rules that guide relationships between the rich and poor, the thinkers and the money makers, the open spaces and the no-go zones.  Nothing came out of the documentary project, though.

In her recent letter to me, my best friend Joye recalls “the evening smell of burnt corn husks,” that filled Cairene air.

We were perplexed coming home from dinner every evening to find all manner of family groups picnicking on the traffic islands well into the night. I’ve never felt so safe in a multitude. Every evening, they came out in droves and repossessed their Pyramids with picnics. They lounged upon the rocks. These stones were theirs and they played over them as if the two-ton plinths were beloved children that they’d shared with the world for a time and then took back. 

I haven’t been to Cairo since 2014. It’s 10 million people today and counting. A changed city, I hear from friends. A changed Tahrir Square. A changed Nile scene, now all but emptied of its legendary houseboats, those enchanting Feluccas that dressed the river’s banks.