Professor Hassanein told us about his school friend from the village, smartest and first in his class, who stole money from his stepfather whom he hated, bought all his friends imported Pepsi Cola, then jumped in a taxi and told the driver, Take me to Cairo and show me everything (at age 7 mind you), he was sent to reform school and later married a beggar. Hassanein met him again years later, after he’d gotten his Doctorate at Princeton, in the streets of Cairo selling sodas.
-Letter Home, December 13, 1978
Hassanein told a lot of these fish out of water stories, in fact he himself lived one as a village boy who showed academic promise and ended up at Princeton in 1974, trying his best to keep his Egyptian Colloquial mush mouth out of the precision of the Modern Standard Arabic he was supposed to teach us. But he couldn’t always help it- You can take the boy out of the countryside but you can’t take the countryside out of the doctoral candidate- and he would sometimes let slip the village-ism, Mish Kidda? Isn’t it so?, at the end of an otherwise classically wrought sentence, instead of what he should have said, Ma hadha ka dhalika shay’un? Isn’t this like that thing?, which if you say fast comes out of the mouth as a peasant would talk, with the Negative particle Ma, Not, and the noun Shay’un, Thing, eliding into a single Negation, and everything between mostly swallowed up. Mish Kidda?