In Cairo

Cairo was a lesson in un-learning men. It took a few days to train my eyes to the ground, to back down if I made eye contact with a man in the street. Apparently it was my responsibility to prevent passing men from acting like assholes. The women frightened me nearly as much: when I first got to Dokki my sister told me, "watch your back outside, especially around women." I didn't understand, but then she pointed to my back where, because I was bending to unpack, I had exposed a strip of skin above my jeans. "It's haraam. Women will come up to you and yank it down for you in public." On my way to the churches of Coptic Cairo, I stumbled onto a women's car of the Metro. I was covered--more so than the girls on the car in Westernized clothes--but I wasn't fooling anyone, least of all the 4-year old on her mother's lap, staring at me as if a man had just sat down across from her. But though I wasn't a part of it, there was a quiet solidarity in that car. Halfway to Mar Girgis, one girl crossed the aisle to ask another to pour some of her bottled water onto a handkerchief, so that the first girl could wipe off her hands. I rode the F from Brooklyn to midtown every day for a year, and never saw such presumption of the kindness of strangers.