It was around 9am and I was on my way home from a grocery run, having stopped at the lady who sells onions and the Queen of Yemen coffee store. Next to the grocer is what I call the Nasser Pharmacy because it is run by an older couple who were probably in their teens in the 1950s when Egypt elected its first native-born president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, and they have a large portrait of him on one wall. The pharmacy has no door, is more a shelf-lined kiosk open to the street, which I somehow associate with the populist optimism of an Egypt I never knew. I bought some vitamins, chatted with the Doktor and Doktora, and left.
On the corner, around 15 metres away, two young men were shouting because one had usurped the location where the other had lately been selling bread. By the time I reached them they were exchanging blows. A crowd gathered, mostly men, without intervening. One of the young men landed a punch on the other’s head, knocking him to the ground where his head hit the kerb and he fell, unconscious.
