Khan Al-Khalili Read Online Free PDF

out on to the apartment buildings and opened it. Looking down on the street below, he could make out groups of boys and girls yelling and laughing. They had divided themselves up into teams, and each team was playing a particular sport. It was as if the entire street had been turned into a primitive sporting club; one group was playing with new stuff, and another amused itself with old rags. Some were skipping, others fighting. The young ones stayed on the sidewalk, dancing, singing, and clapping. Dust flew up in the air and noise was everywhere. He realized that from now on an afternoon snooze was out of the question. He heard some amazing tunes too: “Dear friend, what a beauty!” “Children of our alley, mulberries ahoy!” “That’s a high mountain, my friend!” and so on and so on. He did not know whether to feel amazed, angry, or happy. Just then he heard a nasty, gruff voice let out a yell like a clap of thunder: “God damn the world!” and then intoned the same phrase to a clapping rhythm. The voice was almost certainly coming from the store immediately below the window, but from inside. He could not see who this person was singing curses against the world in general, but he could not stop himself laughing, something that put a bloom on his pale face. He stretched as far as he could out of the window and was able to make out the sign over the store: “Nunu the Calligrapher,” it said in elegant script. So, he wondered, did this craftsman make signs that cursed the world and then sell them to grumblers and malcontents? He needed to buy some himself in order to slake his own thirst for such things!

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    H e watched as the sun’s rays, reflected in the glass of the upper windows of the apartment blocks opposite his own window, started to disappear, a sign that the sun was setting behind the domes of al-Mu’izz’s Cairo. He looked up at the lofty minaret of the al-Husayn Mosque soaring in splendor over the fine mesh of sunset shadows. Leaning on the windowsill, he looked out on the roofs of the stores in between the apartment blocks and the windows and balconies that overhung the fronts of the buildings and the various alleyways that branched off. He could see fully locked windows and others that were half open. On the balconies housewives were busy collecting the washing or filling pots. By now the street was almost empty of children, as though the approach of nighttime had managed to scare them away. He secretly longed to venture outside, see the sights of the quarter up close, and explore the streets and alleyways, but he had spent so much energy organizing his room that he gave up on the idea. In fact, he usuallystayed at home these days; once he arrived back from the ministry, he would only go out once in a while. He decided to postpone his little expedition for a later time. That decided, he left the window and sat cross-legged on his mattress, that being his favorite position for reading. Taking a book from his library shelves he proceeded to read until it was time to go to sleep.
    His father, meanwhile, was sitting cross-legged on his prayer mat with the Qur’an open in front of him. He was reciting portions of the text in an audible voice, not paying any attention to the numerous mistakes he kept making in the reading of the text. Akif Effendi Ahmad was in his sixties now; he had a long white beard, and his face had a haggard and august look to it. After he had been pensioned off in the very midst of his working life and with great aspirations for the future, he had imposed a severe isolation upon himself. He seemed to be spending his entire life on devotions and Qur’an recitation. He only left the house on rare occasions, and then it was for a solitary stroll or to visit a particular shrine. The fact that he was financially hard up (his pension amounted to no more than six pounds) was probably primarily responsible for the regulated life he led, but eventually he reconciled himself to his new way