Synaisthesia in Cairo

Pelt Merchant of Cairo by Jean Leon Gerome

Jamal hid from his father’s anger, because the black cloud broiling overhead frightened him.

It wasn’t just a metaphor. Not for Jamal. The cloud existed, because he saw it, though he never dared go so close. He wondered, in the hours between waking and sleeping when he had a private moment to think of such things, what it would feel like if he plucked the courage to buoy himself high, to the level of his father’s head and up beyond, and touch that cloud. At night when his father exchanged snarl for snore, when the clouds dissolved with the wrath itself, Jamal rose from the rugs they slept on and furled back the tent flap. He watched the dawn smear the constellations against the rocky face of night while stars fell like chalk dust. And he often wondered about the cloud, if it would evaporate out of his grasp, or perhaps stain his fingers with a blackness slick and heavy as tar.

Tonight, too, Jamal wondered, and kept this wonderment contained. That day had taught him to keep his mouth shut. The nomad merchants arrived in Cairo, their best-paying annual stop, and the birthplace of the boy’s mother. They stopped there for the whole day, and this year Jamal made his first escape. Captivated as always by the havoc of the great city, he slunk from their stalls to explore the labyrinth of booths and tents. His ears flooded with the jingle of the belly-dancers’ bangles as they shimmied in the alleyways, the piping of snake charmers’ flutes as serpents twined around their naked torsos. Life pulsed noisily in the clanging of goldsmiths as they pounded shape into slabs, a rhythm like a throbbing heart within the ribcages of their tents. Dervishes danced in the streets, each swirling body encased by a whirlwind of white robes, each face uplifted as if to watch the rising plumes of incense and strawberry-scented shisha and spicy hashish billow above the marketplace, as if it was the city itself that exhaled and breathed life into each being.

The boy sifted unnoticed through the chaos like a grain of sand. At every step, each sound blended another stroke across the palette of his vision. The synaisthesia overwhelmed him until he stopped and clutched his head. Agonized, delighted, frozen in the middle of the street—that was how his cousin Kishore found him when it was time to go, hours later, and returned him to his father.

"Angreek87"