As in many Arab cities, a conversation with a taxi driver in Cairo – or sometimes simply a ride in one – takes the pulse of the place. On my first night in the city, I jump in a shaky white cab that is passing my hotel and we enter the tentacular traffic of the Nile Corniche. After examining me in his rear-view mirror for a bit, the taxi driver engages me in a conversation that very quickly drifts from pleasantries (where I am from, what I am doing in Cairo) to his life, his job, then the traffic, then the people. “I don’t know why everyone is always running here. The country is not in its best state, but oddly enough tourists are back and things are working without us knowing how.”
This easy familiarity, so improvised and unexpected, turns the encounter into a theatre scene. In a few moments, the driver has condensed the current condition of Egypt into a few words – its perennial hardships and rises and falls since the 2011 revolution that toppled autocrat Hosni Mubarak. He has also summarised the way people feel and behave here, with more or less similarities: their emotional exhilarations, their cautious hope and, of course, the lightness, the comic relief, the forever joie de vivre, which they express with the term maalesh (“It’s fine”).