A weird thing happened to me yesterday on my way to a ladies lunch at Le Pasha houseboat. I hailed one of the new white cabs- normally I can walk to the restaurant, but I was wearing heels and I was the host and didn't want to risk being late. The cab driver is a young, hip-looking guy wearing a black beret over his long curly hair and sporting an artist's mustache and goatee on his chubby face. Right off he tells me he likes to pick up fares in Zamalek because they are so refined. I notice there is a big black boombox strapped to the front passenger seat and he explains it's a boombox he's taking to a neighbor's wedding. Then he starts to ask me what I think of Mohamed El-Baradei's chances as a presidential candidate, and other pointed political questions. This keeps up as we drive along, with me getting a little impatient because he is driving slowly and I am concerned about being late. Once or twice he asks me to raise my voice because he can't hear me. As we finally drive up the Corniche and pull up before my destination, the houseboat restaurant, he asks me if I watch television, and when I tell him not at all, wondering for a moment if my book reading event two days earlier was aired on "10 PM" last night and he recognized me from it. But then the cab driver goes on to ask me: "Have you heard of a TV program called Taxi Misr? No? Well, you're on it!"
Only then do I realize that I am a victim of a candid camera show, and that there was a camera behind the rear-view mirror, and that the boombox was an amplifier and recording machine. I told him I absolutely refused my permission to be on the show, and jumped out, leaving him his fare on the seat, although he kept protesting that he couldn't accept payment.
To the best of my recollection, I didn't say anything to the taxi driver that I wouldn't have said publicly, and friends reassure me that he can't air the "interview" without permission, but now there are twenty minutes of me on tape in someone's possession, and that tape will surely be shown to the "censors."
Moral of the story: never get into a taxi with a boombox in the front seat.

To begin with, you can't be a control freak about anything in Egypt, let alone a book event. Yes, it was lovely to walk into my local Shorouk bookstore cum Cilantro coffee-shop to find the place packed to the rafters with family and friends- that's the advantage of being a "local" author." Then the organizer- who happens to be an old friend- tells me the book, Love is Like Water, is still sitting on the docks in New York somewhere. But not to worry, I can always read from one of my two other books. She adds that she has a sore throat and can't introduce me, so I might have to introduce myself. After I pull out of the audience another friend who is a deputy minister of Culture and ask her to introduce me, the organizer tells me that the Senior Editor of Shorouk himself has just walked in and will be glad to introduce me.
We sit down at the table, myself between the Senior Editor and the organizer, and I prepare to give my talk in English- I recognize almost everyone in the audience and they are all fluent English speakers- but am informed by the Senior Editor that perhaps I had best do it in Arabic, "for the television." He points to a microphone in front of me and a couple of camera men behind big tripods at the back of the room. The television program in question is "Ten PM", a very popular talk and news show.
I give my talk in Arabic, furiously trying to translate in my head a number of abstract concepts that I am used to using in English. Then I read part of "Muslims in the Cul-de-sac" from Love is Like Water, in English, of course.
It all goes well so far, and then the question and answer session begins. While my supporters smile encouragingly in the background, and two drop-dead glamorous friends of mine fascinate the bookstore employees, I attempt to field a couple of rather hostile questions from a former ambassador among others: "Criticism of Egypt's politics in my books reflects badly on the country in the eyes of foreign readers" (even if it does, I believe in keeping literature and political engagement separate); "The Napoleonic campaign to Egypt and Bush's war against Iraq can't be compared (they can, to compare is not to equate.)
And the television program? Well, I am told the segment might air anytime within the following week, depending on what else in the news pre-empts it, but of course Mohamed Baradei has just landed in Cairo Airport and there is nothing else in the news for a while!

I've done book readings in Egypt before, of course, but this is the first since the publication of The Cairo House in Arabic. So it poses a different set of questions: should I read from the Arabic version, or from the English? The Arabic version is not in my own words. And if I read in English, should I read from The Cairo House, or from the two new books, The Naqib's Daughter and Love is Like Water? Will the Shorouk bookstore have the new titles available in time? The books may or may not be shipped to Egypt by Sunday the 21st, and, as with everything in Egypt, things are left to the last minute. Will the audience expect me to read in one language and discuss in another? Will there be an audience at all? Most importantly for me, will the air-conditioning in the Shorouk bookstore in Zamalek hold up to the current heat wave, unprecedented for February?

Cruising down the Nile in Upper (south) Egypt. Very sunny, even too warm, we tried to do the touring early or late, and spent the hot middle of the day on the top deck under the awning of our cruiser. No sign of the flooding from a few weeks earlier. One time when we came back from a temple tour, we found the gangplank had been raised and couldn't get back on the boat; we managed to get them to circle around and come for us. Some of the time our boat was anchored right by the shore but most often it was anchored four or five boats away: all the boats line up side by side so they are touching and you actually walk through the four or so other boats on your way from the shore to your own boat. We had a well-equipped cabin for its size, and of course three meals a day provided, very good food, especially by American standards. Indelible images: the sound and light show at the Temple of Isis on the island of Philae, transported block by gigantic block from its original site before the High Dam flooded the area. Kom Ombo, the temple rising right up from the banks of the Nile. Taking a horse cab to the temple in Edfu, the best preserved of all because it was buried in the sand. Luxor, the breath-taking forests of immense colums in the stupendous temples of Luxor and of Karnak- impossible to imagine until you stand under the gigantic pillars and experience the actual scale of these edifices. The temples of the south- Aswan to Luxor- are mostly New Kingdom and often added on to in the Ptolemaic period- after Alexander the Great- so relatively "modern" compared to the Pyramids, for instance. So many new tombs discovered on the West Bank of the Nile at Luxor, in the valleys of the Kings and Queens and Nobles. Lovely teas and lunches in the elegant, old-world Winter Palace Hotel in Luxor; the Old Cataract in Aswan, unfortunately, was under remodelling.
The comment of a fellow tourist before the Edfu temple, an unusually philosophical remark for this very worldly woman: "One gets the impression that it's all happened before, what we're experiencing today, this end-of-the-world feeling; the ancients thought it was the end of their world too, and yet here we are, thousands of years later." Or, as Percy Shelley would say: "My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings, etc."