Sunday, June 10, 2012

A special kind of silence

Suddenly, the loud din of the air winds down. The lights stop humming, the fan stops whirring. It is dark and quiet, except for Bikhatirha's loud “oof.” The power is out at the clinic. A sign of the seasons, it's the first outage of many more to come, I think to myself. Summer is here.

My instant reaction is to sulk, as if I have been conditioned to associate a power outage with a massive inconvenience and a forced pause on life. We were sitting in silence before the lights cut, and we continued sitting, silently, in darkness for a few seconds. Bikhatirha grunts and gets up from the wooden bench we're all sitting on. “Is the whole street out?” She asks, her voice slicing through the thick quiet and fading away as she enters the other room to look for something.

“How should I know. Probably.” The sole woman in the waiting room asks in response. Because of her niqab, I can't see her in the darkness, her voice––and her young daughter sitting next to her––are the only things that place her. “Allah is great,” she sighs cryptically, Egyptian Arabic for “hopefully this is fixed soon.”

The woman's young daughter, playing with the flame
Bikhatirha, over 75 years old and as nimble as a feather, comes back with two candles and a match. Hands shaking from too much insulin, she lets one candle burn for a few seconds before pouring some of the wax onto the wooden table. She sticks the candle into the waxy mound. A radius of light shines from the sole candle. She dumps out an ashtray filled with the ashy butts of cigarettes––illicitly smoked by men who think I can't smell their secondhand from across the hallway, and who hide them, like children, still lit, behind their backs when I walk past. I sigh in a sense of failure when I see how much ash is on the table. She lights the second candle and sticks it in the ashtray.

"Can the doctor just check up on me by candlelight?" The woman in the waiting room asks despondently.

I laugh and very quickly realize she wasn't joking. I consider turning my laughter into a faked coughing fit, but decide that it's okay if she thinks I'm weird. The lack of electricity is clearly no obstacle. Then again, why should it be? The only thing this clinic needs electricity for is an ultrasound machine, the lights, the fan, and an internet connection installed only for me.

Black outs, something that usually disrupts the very fiber of what productivity means to me and my peers, does not disrupt a moment of work and life at the clinic. In fact, it has given us something to talk about. Pausing the loud din of Cairo for a few minutes is enough to remind us, four very different women in a small room, to talk.

The Doctor is doing his Maghrib prayer––the fourth of five daily prayers in Islam––to be done after sunset. As we wait in the warm glow of candlelight, we laugh and ask each other about the inanities of life. So and so got into a fight when he was caught selling bongo (marijuana), so and so can't find a wife for their son. Did you hear, the workshop owner next door didn't want to pay for his worker's injury? And, the inevitable question: Who will you vote for?

It is refreshing to work in a context in which the only consequence of a power outage is silence: a special kind of silence, one that amplifies the voices of conversation.

The young daughter of the niqabi woman waiting is clearly unenthused. She reaches out and begins playing with the flame. Passing her finger through the top of the bright orange fire quickly once, then again, and again. “Bas!” Stop! Her mom barks. She stops only long enough for her mom to re-enter gossip with Bikhatirha, the woman who knows everyone and everything that ever was in the last century of Al-Sabtia, the working-class steel industry neighborhood this medical clinic serves.

Too soon, the lights loudly hum back on. Almost on cue, the Doctor walks out with a kind smile and gestures for the woman to enter his office. The candles are blown out, conversation stops, and our silent vacuum of technology is sucked away to make room for the infamous Cairene street orchestra.

4 comments:

  1. Of course our lives remain aligned! There was a black-out on my second day home. The first thing I noticed was how quiet everything got without the light buzz of plugged in appliances. Thinking of you bringing light to the darkness.

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  2. There's a particular kind of silence to power cuts. I'm a fan, personally - I love the thickness of the dark, and the way that it makes you notice everything that isn't electrically powered. Lovely piece.

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  3. Sometimes it takes a black-out to remember where the light comes from. I love how we always find the parallels between our lives, we really are never too far apart. Thank you, as always, my dear for reading and supporting.

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  4. When I was younger I used to get so excited whenever the power cut. It meant that we would all go stumble around looking for candles, that we could play hide-and-seek in the dark, or that we would shine flashlights on our faces and tell scary stories. I love that black-outs are as if the world is telling us "go hang out with each other and have fun." We have to remember every once in a while what things we create (and need electricity for) and what things are always there, no matter what.

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