Summer Maze

It was not her first time boarding the Egypt Air flight from Heathrow to Cairo. Nadia's life was a zigzag of these annual visits that sometimes stretched to every single day of the holidays and made the September return to school feel abrupt and unfocused. She had made sure to pack the PlayStation, but it might not be enough. Her mother's bulky arm pressed against her. Lateefa was in her best clothes but Nadia wasn't. They had argued about this.

The aeroplane was going to be full and there was a mix up over the seat arrangements. Nadia watched the steward struggle in his broken English to remove a couple from seats which their boarding cards indicated to be rightly theirs. He pronounced every "p" as a "b" so that it was, "Blease this is seat 3D." Just like my mother, Nadia thought. The next challenge taken up by the crew was to find enough storage space for the hand baggage of the Egyptian passengers. Big, bulging plastic bags testified to suitcases that were unable to hold any more, filled to the brim with the results of shopping. Like my mother, Nadia thought.

For weeks, Lateefa had walked up and down Oxford Street, searching for the best bargains, tightly clutching her receipts in fear that she would lose them. She would buy, exchange, and agonize over every purchase. Wearing her Dr. Scholl exercise slippers (because her feet always got swollen from too much walking) she would stand in the queue of Marks and Spencer's' Customers Services, tense, never quite believing that they would refund her money. She would hand in her receipt, crumpled from the sweat of her palms, and nervously explain her reasons to the bored sales assistant. And Nadia, if she was with her, would feel ashamed, not only from the slippers but from the furtive look in her mother's eyes.

It was happening again, and it was one of Nadia's anxieties about the summer. The air hostess was addressing her in Arabic and she could not answer. She turned to her mother and Lateefa not only translated but answered the stewardess, "No, we won't give up either of our seats, we are together." There was a time when Nadia had spoken Arabic; her baby chatter, her first fumbling words. But then, with starting nursery school, the language had started to evade her. Not overnight of course. There was a time when she understood, but would only answer in English, slyly, eager to hurt her mother. And then, finally, came the time when she could understand a little but could not speak fluently. Yet there remained within her a faint memory of a complete closeness with Lateefa, a time of unqualified approval that was somehow lost with her ability to speak her mother's tongue.

In Cairo she was a stranger, but a stranger who went unnoticed, who was not tricked into paying extra for taxi rides and souvenirs. The effect was like a disguise, a role she was playing in an overworld that did not demand from her much skill or strategy. She could not really think of herself as Egyptian, nor did she want to. The city's traffic overwhelmed her, the cars weaving in and out of the lanes, the pedestrians crossing in the middle of the road, the over-flowing buses. She would stare unnerved at the sight of a woman riding on the back seat of a motorcycle with a child balanced on her lap. On every trip, she would long for London and promise herself she would not come again. She would tell herself that she was not a child any more, some of her friends no longer went with their families on holiday, she could do the same. But perhaps it was her mother's anger that she feared; the hot, reckless words, like sandpaper on skin. Or perhaps she was bewitched by the welcome that she received from her aunt and cousins.

In England, her friends' lives were a smooth continuation of their parents...