basara (v), to scowl, to frown
busr, pl. bisaar (n), unripe dates
baasuur, pl. bawaasiir (n), hemorrhoids
-A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic by Hans Wehr
Ahmad was the bawaab for my building on Darih Sa’d Street. He sat in the front and lived on the roof, he wore a rarely washed gallabiya and a ta’iyya, he kept his wife hidden behind a door and his dentures in his pocket. I learned many new vocabulary words from him, some dirty, some clean, but not how to pronounce them correctly. No teeth.
One day he was absent, and then the next and the next. Mahmoud the Makwagi, ironing man, who worked next door said that Ahmad had gone to Qasr al-Aini hospital for an operation- ‘amal ‘amaliyya, “they operated an operation”. I knew that expression because they had done the same to me on my collapsed lung a few months earlier. They did it to Ahmad on his bawaasiir, a word I had to look up, a broken plural.
Mahmoud said Ahmad was in Ward 5. I wanted to visit the hospital, Cairo’s big public hospital where people go to die, as the colloquial expression said it, but mostly to see if Qasr al-Aini was any better than Agouza Hospital, where they had operated an operation on me.
Ahmad had no teeth because he liked sugar. You can get your Egyptian sugar fix easiest by eating basbousa, a semolina cake soaked in sugar syrup. I went to a sweets bakery and bought a kilo and a half, wrapped up like a wedding gift, and took it to the place people go to die.
I found Ward 5, jammed with maybe 15 beds, and walked up and down at their feet looking for Ahmad. His face was even more shriveled than usual, without his dentures and with no food. He smiled at me, and played a “Woe is me” card. I didn’t buy it and handed over the package.
He didn’t know what was inside, so he unwrapped it hoping maybe for a new gallabiya or something imported. Instead, just three pounds of basbousa. Which he could not eat. Doctor’s orders. So he passed it around to his ward mates and they had a big sugar rush party. Broken bones and puncture wounds don’t impose Nothing by Mouth restrictions. Most Egyptians would not follow them anyway with so much basbousa in the room.
When Ahmad came home a few days later, I tried out my new joke on him, calling him Abu Bawaasiir, which did not go over well at all. In fact it hurt his feelings. So I did not have any use for that word until 5 years later in the Sudanese desert, when a camel thief came riding up to our camp in a strange looking saddle I’d never seen before, a kind of carved wooden cup, called a baasuur.
I was not sure if it was spelled the same way as the word I had learned in Qasr al-Aini Hospital. The people I was with could not spell. But it made sense. Riding camels all your life can give you a bad case of hemorrhoids. Maybe riding in a baasuur helps you avoid bawaasiir. Just ask Ahmad, I think he’ll know.
