After serving us an incomprehensible amount of molokhia, salata, macarona, and fried chicken, Hatim’s mother emerged from the kitchen with her pièce de résistance: a whole fish, baked with lemon and herbs. It had been caught, she announced, just that morning in the Nile. The same Nile I knew to be contaminated with agricultural drainage, untreated sewage, and the occasional farm-animal carcass. The very same Nile my not-unadventurous professor had urged me never to eat from. I looked at the face of the fish, stared into its glassy eye. To refuse this dish would be a huge insult to Hatim, his mother, and his whole family, an epic cultural failure in my first foray into a real Egyptian household.
“Is something wrong?” Hatim asked.
I thought for a moment about how I might explain that I was allergic to fish, but I didn’t know the word allergic in Arabic. I didn’t even know if the concept would translate as anything more than the elaborate excuse it was.
“No,” I said, surrendering. “It looks great.”
Hatim’s uncle smiled as big as the fish and served me a huge piece. “The best part,” he said, cutting off the head and placing it on my plate, an extra treat for Mr. Michael.
Grinning back my squeamishness and willing a few more cubic inches of space in my stomach, I picked up my fork and dug in. It was at this very moment that I fell in love with the city, in all its sensory guises: the tender flakiness of the fish, the sticky-sweet smell of shisha smoke, the honking of taxis, the sometimes overwhelming friendliness of its residents. To this day, it’s an infatuation I can’t quite explain apart from having tasted of the forbidden fish. It is said in Egypt that those who drink from the Nile will always return to Cairo. I might add a small addendum: Those who eat fish from the Nile will always carry with them a piece of Cairo, that wonderfully hectic city known to Egyptians as the Mother of the World. Maybe that’s what my professor meant. Maybe he was, indeed, being philosophical. Never eat fish from the Nile, because if you do, the city will never leave you.
Author of The Oracle of Stamboul, Michael David Lukas has been a Fulbright Scholar in Turkey, a late-shift proofreader in Tel Aviv, and a Rotary Scholar in Tunisia. He lives in Oakland, California.
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