By Wednesday it was evident the protesters were intending to stay at Tahrir Square. There had been reports of looting and criminal groups roaming residential areas looking for a house to burgle or a woman to molest. My father’s fears quickly came true. Resorting to the law was not an option. There was no law, or law you could trust, except what you created on the street with the people around you. Self-reliance suddenly became a skill harnessed daily and trust changed its meaning. Suddenly you had to trust whoever presented themselves to you. No longer could you trust someone because you went to university with them, someone who was related distantly, or because they came from a good family. If the fruit seller on the corner told you not to go to the shop on the next road, but to go to the one around the back, you went to the one around the back and you trusted him. He trusted you. He had to continue at that corner selling whatever fruit he had. If he didn’t, his wife and children might not eat. He had already accepted he would experience the revolution from that corner, circumstance made it so. So he looked to you as a comrade, someone he could call on if that corner became difficult to hold.
During those first three days the man who had stood on that corner most of my life, throwing me an apple on my way to school as a child, became the most charismatic and articulate news reporter you could ever meet. Rageh Omaar could have been standing in my living room, microphone in hand, reporting from Tahrir Square live and he would not have been able to match this man’s skills in hearing news and delivering it to the right people. It was he who suggested the neighbourhood watch. Slowly he presented the idea and then when enough men showed enough interest, which took a whole morning, they created a neighbourhood watch schedule. It was incredible how sophisticated this schedule was considering it had been devised on a street corner at the last minute. The men were put in groups, a patrolling group, an observation group, routes were figured out, lines were drawn marking the boundary of what we considered our neighbourhood. They instituted a shift system.
By that evening it was obvious the shift system wouldn’t work. Someone came to our door to ask my father to swap his shift an hour after the meeting. My father agreed of course. By the time his shift came round the men on the original list were nowhere to be seen. Instead they too had swapped their shifts. So a new shift system emerged; of men just agreeing, with no need for structure. And it worked.
The fruit seller became a crucial part of the neighbourhood, the eyes and mouth of the people. He reported messages between neighbours as they went about their day. He told my father about a baby in the next block with a high temperature. He told everyone what he heard about Tahrir Square, that protesters had been water cannoned. That those protesters dried themselves off and filled their pockets with stones and rocks to throw at the police. And how the police retaliated with tear gas. He told how the protesters covered their faces with whatever cloth they could find and bent to pick up the next stone. He told us of the 200 protesters being held not far from our home at State Security Headquarters and every time I heard a noise from outside I wondered if it was one of them. Their screams of pain rising above the noise of the neighbourhood and travelling all the way to my living room window.
His reports filled us with hope and some fear. Mostly, they filled us with a sense that something was happening, happening because of us, not to us. We were making something happen and all it took was an agreement to do so.
I am convinced a revolution is just self-organisation. A revolution is enough people deciding to do the same thing at the same time. And those people self-organising in an intuitive way, not a rational way. That was what was happening on my street that week. That was what I witnessed in Tahrir Square that Tuesday morning.
But, I still felt like a spectator, a more supportive one, but nevertheless a spectator.
My mother self-organised. She swallowed her pride and went to visit the other wives. She sat with them and drank coffee and by the end of that afternoon they too had developed a system of their own. They set up a small lunch service, a pot luck. They would each bring a small dish and one house would open up to the women’s families: husbands, children, grandparents. A plate would be made up for the caretaker and his son, the fruit-selling newsreader on the corner and the woman whose house it was would deliver it to them at their posts.
And then it went black. In the middle of the night it went black. The power went out, the phone lines went down and the internet was nothing more than something you thought you had dreamt.
We all knew what was happening and not because of Mustafa, the fruit seller. Even he knew this wasn’t news, wasn’t worthy of shouting out from his corner. Everyone knew what was coming, what we were building up towards.
Friday!
If a dictator is to be overthrown it will happen on a Friday. Even the government … regime … (the name was interchangeable at this point) thought so. They cut us off from the world by cutting the telephone lines and internet. They cut us off from each other by cutting the lights.
The darkness was oppressive. Imagine the light pollution in a city like Cairo. There are some parts where you can go out at three in the morning and feel like it’s three in the afternoon. And to be suddenly thrown into natural darkness …
Everyone had prepared. Candles ready and torches with new batteries, as it could happen anyway. But I still felt totally blinded when it came. So I stumbled to my brother’s room and lay next to him with a single candle on the bedside in case he opened his eyes to find he too was blind.