‘Right!’ said the Chief of the Secret Police. ‘So we’re not in the story now; we’re in what really happened?’ ‘Yes, Effendi, that’s right. And there was Mustafa, lying in a pool of blood- ’. Owen sighed. ‘What really happened’ was always a relative matter in Cairo.
-The Mingrelian Conspiracy: A Mamur Zapt Mystery, Michael Pearce
Whenever you might wander upon a Cairene dowsha just a bit too late to have seen what had really happened, when it was all over but the shouting, it always made for a fruitful lesson in colloquial Arabic to try to gather facts from the other bystanders, and of those in Cairo there were always many, very very many. Hasal eyh? What happened. Hasal eyh fil haqeeqi, What happened in fact? As a khawaja you would be met with many puzzled faces, some shaken right to left to right as if to say, Say what? What could be more improbable for an aimless Cairene to find on the street, say on the grand Talat Harb just outside Groppi’s famous tea room- an Arabic speaking foreigner or a real rip-roaring dowsha, [Wehr gives its meaning as “din, noise, clamor, uproar, hubbub, hullabaloo”, from the verb dawasha, meaning “to irritate or drive someone crazy with noise”], such as an overturned donkey cart hauling watermelons, a minor fender bender between two already beat up cars, or a woman claiming she had been rudely touched by a man. The last may not result in Mustafa lying in a pool of his own blood, but something else would certainly have been spilled by the time her shouting was over. Irregular verbs in the imperative mood, much idle time spent on this one street corner rather than any other in the city, perhaps even that morning’s third or fourth glass of tea, although tea is really too valuable to spill in that city. It helps you tolerate the next dowsha.