Work in progress

I.

She always keeps a sealed pack of Marlboro lights with her.

Her friend, Nicholas Beam thinks it’s a crutch. That at any given moment, when she realises that she’s really too weak to quit, she can rip open the thin sheet of cellophane that stands between her and one of her many addictions.

The way she sees it, it's a testament to her willpower. She says it’s like she’s giving the finger to Phillip Morris et al.

She hasn’t had a cigarette in over three months. It would have been four, but her weakness got the better of her when she decided she wasn’t going to leave the apartment for three days straight and spoke to no one, save one man, across the Atlantic

She ordered greasy pizza and garlic bread from Maison Thomas, and ate it sitting on the cool tile of the living room floor, the television on mute, savouring the fact that for three days she had no one to answer to, and didn’t have to worry about garlic breath.

Her husband was out of town at a conference, and she was at home breaking her promise to him about not smoking, and breaking her promise to herself about not eating greasy takeout.

Her work allows for these self-indulgences since, in essence, she works for herself. Hers is the job of taking words in Arabic, and bringing them to life in English. Hers is the job of a mimic.

She has a vast library of Arabic literature that has only been read by those fluent enough in the language to grasp each innuendo, each double entendre, each guttural grunt and each weightless murmur. She leafs through the pages, falls in love with the story, and commits herself to creating it all over again, in another language, presenting it anew to those who would never have had the chance to appreciate it otherwise.

When she finds one of these stories, she goes straight to her editor and tells him, “This is it. This is the next one I’ll be working on.”

And then she spends a few months, locked inside the story, trapped in between the pages, until it all comes tumbling forward, in a rough-around-the-edges, half-sister of the original text. The final part requires the finest attention to detail, picking at the loose threads, fine-tuning the off-centre notes. And then she passes it on, complete and proud, to the editors, proofreaders and publishers to do their work.

Most of her peers, the other translators, are older British men, with colonial style homes in small agricultural towns in Egypt. Ila stands out. Her father is Egyptian, her mother British. She is only 32. And she’s a woman working in a field that has been long dominated by white-haired, wrinkled men old enough to be her grandfather.

Her real name is Zillah, picked by her father from the Bible, but she answers only to Ila. Especially in Egypt, where the meaning, derived from the Hebrew word for shadow, is obvious to anyone who speaks Arabic.

And then a friend told her that in Swahili, Ila was in fact a name that meant blemish or birthmark. “Shadow’s sounding a lot better now isn’t it?” she joked. Ila did not find it funny.

Most people wouldn’t give that much thought to the meaning of their name. But to Ila, the meaning, origin of the word, the language in which it was spoken was of the utmost importance.

II.

Ila was raised in England. Her childhood was nothing out of the ordinary. It was bland, and conventional.

She went to a typically British school, in a typically British town. But Ila was anything but typically British. Her father's genes seemed to follow in the footsteps of his boorish personality, seeing to it that Ila looked purely Egyptian.

Her childhood was a cliché of bullies picking on the one kid who stood out. She didn't have friends. She had no one to run around with, climbing trees, and falling out of them, no real friend to join in hosting tea parties to imaginary guests, no one to trail back home with at sunset, dishevelled in that way children become when one is watching – so Ila chose the next best alternative. She read.

At first she read only in English. Her school library offered a cornucopia of childhood staples – Enid Blyton and Judy Blume for the girl in her, Tolkien for the tomboy in her. Ila outgrew them quickly and found herself moving onto Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Melville, long before they were required of her at school.

On a random Saturday morning, she found herself with nothing to read. All the books on her shelf were dog-eared. She knew their stories all too well and Ila was bored.

She wandered into her father's office, where he kept a small library he had brought with him from Egypt. The books on the shelves were alien to her, the covers usually colourful drawings of women, their large brown eyes widening either in fear, sadness or shock. Their crisp thin pages covered in words that Ila always thought of as drawings. On that Saturday, Ila decided that she wanted to learn to read what was written on those pages.

Her father, surprised, but delighted, began the slow and arduous task of teaching his daughter his native language. Ila could understand her parents when they spoke in Arabic – her father with his deep, comfortable accent, and her mother, who tripped and stumbled over letters that did not exist in the English language – her words hollowed out versions of the real thing.

Soon Ila surpassed her mother, and the books on her father's shelves showed her a country that she had never seen on her summer visits to her father's home. She read of the back alleys of Cairo, the buildings shared by the poor, the struggling, the revolutionary. She read about the hot sun beating down on the dark skinned farmers, grime and dirt pushed up under their fingernails, lodged firmly alongside the hard life they were destined to live. She read books by all the Egyptian greats – Taha Hussein, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef Idris.

Summer holidays to Cairo were transformed. In the past, they were two sweaty, confusing months, spent with relatives who treated her like she was a guest in their family. With her newfound knowledge, her holidays became a scavenger hunt for new books to heave back, wedged in her suitcase, as she took a part of Cairo back with her.

She spent hours at Sour El Azbakeya, a goldmine of old and rare books and magazines in every language imaginable. Stall upon stall of books stacked from floor to roof. Men sitting outside their stalls, a glass of dark sweet tea in one hand, a Cleopatra cigarette in the other, shouting after her in accented English, “We have every-sing. All English. Deekens? You like Deekens?”

The strangest combination of books could be found in their stalls, but for some reason Great Expectations seemed to be a staple for each vendor, with several copies on just about every shelf, sitting next to old tattered back issues of National Geographic.

When she was 22, during her annual summer holiday, Ila decided to stay.

Her mother tried to convince her otherwise. She couldn’t understand the need for this total upheaval of her life, chasing after a dream in a country that she saw as anything but inviting. Ila’s mother was sure that it would end badly. Her father surprised her when he sided with her mother.

She had thought he would be the first to support her. But he told her that for her to live alone in Cairo was unwise, that his family would only berate her for her choice, and in turn, him for letting her have her way. “They won’t understand Ila. A girl cannot live by herself in Cairo – especially not a girl who is so obviously Egyptian. What will your neighbours say? What will my family say? That I cannot control my own daughter?”

Ila did not listen. She knew what she wanted. She kissed her father on the forehead and turned away. She could not look him in the face, because she knew that in one way – he was right. His family would not understand. Her aunt and two uncles would no doubt do everything they could to ensure that she would live with one of them.

But she knew that she could not live with any of her relatives. She could not live with the aunt in Shoubra who had continued to live in the family apartment, with the cracked walls painted a deep shade of green, covered with her grandfather’s old oil paintings. She could not live with the uncle in Heliopolis and his two sons she had never gotten along with. And her father did not expect her to stay with the uncle who had never married, because he was an old man who would not have the patience for her, accustomed to a life of quiet solitude.

They all thought that sooner or later, Ila would grow tired of life in Cairo, would long for the comfort and organized life in England, and would quickly buy her second and last one-way ticket.

Ila surprised them all.