		Al-Ahram Weekly 21 - 28 January 1999 Issue No. 413
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875

Paris Ramadan Paris

A gift for the feast: George Bahgory captures scenes and sights of Ramadan

Through the cloud of powdered sugar that accompanies the feast, I remember Ramadan. When the attendant at the EgyptAir counter at Orly checks my ticket, she scribbles: Paris Cairo Paris. I think she means: Paris Ramadan Paris. And a sweet nostalgia seizes me as I dream out of the window at the grey French skies. Ramadan has been my sketchbook's favourite subject for years. I live every day of this month -- every instant, perhaps -- with more intensity than usual, especially when I let time hypnotise me at Wikalat Al-Ghouri, sitting behind a small mashrabiya screen in my studio there.

I can spend hours there before the Iftar cannon booms, sweeping greedy eyes across the pious faces of fasting people. Deprivation marks the rhythm of this month -- but it is a deprivation to which one succumbs with some pleasure. Time is different during Ramadan. It is a strange land, yet a familiar one -- although the stress and frustration of urban life increase even further during this month, the reversal of day and night takes us back centuries, to an epoch when traffic and streets and buildings did not scan day and night.

I am a little afraid that these faces I draw are watching me, in their turn. My trepidation increases in the minutes before sunset, which find me sitting in the courtyard of Al-Azhar, or at one of the tables set up for the poor, or perhaps on the footpath, observing the street. Tension and relief grow in these faces that I see. It is a sacred moment, one that does not allow itself to be recorded, preserved on paper: swift glances wrap themselves around my sketch pad, and some glances ask questions, or demand explanations.

Perhaps the instants that follow the dusk meal mingle appetite and devotion in equal parts. I want to draw the expressions in which this satiety of two sorts appears so transparently. Hunger has a different taste in Ramadan, this country where I spend a month.

Morsels are pushed into circular mouths, eyes have eyes only for the round plates and flat disks of bread. No one eats alone during these 30 days: families of people who have never seen each other form around a long table, spill over into the street. There are pictures everywhere: families in glittering watches and shiny shoes, bearing sweets wrapped in crinkly paper and tied with shiny ribbon, wrapped round and round and snapped off with the sharp sound of a knife; men in thick coats and embroidered shawls cross-legged on the green carpets laid out by shopowners in Al-Hussein; hands reaching out, pressing food on sons and daughters, old friends and old enemies; money changing hands -- alms for the poor, a new dress for the feast, a bag of nuts and dried fruit. And up above, as the sky deepens and changes, the glittering green neon lights begin to scintillate upon the minarets.



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