From Mohamed Abd ElGawad’s ‘A Report on the Pussycat’

In A Report on the Pussycat, Mohamed Abdel Gawad takes us on a narrative journey in which reality intertwines with fantasy, the absurd with the mythical, and the everyday with the legendary. We encounter characters who move through alleys, cafés, and popular festivals, yet they seem to reach beyond time itself—as if carrying the memory of centuries while still telling their stories. This is not merely a collection of stories, but a satirical mirror of society and its working classes, where the street singer becomes a legend, the strong old man embodies an entire era, and everyday details transform into legend. It is a book that captures the essence of Egyptian life in all its contradictions: between laughter and tears, the real and the magical, the familiar and the strange. -Omar Ibrahim.

“The Great Odyssey of al-Labban”

from A Report on the Pussycat

By Mohamed Abd ElGawad

Translated by Omar Ibrahim

 

It was ridiculous, the way the battle of tuk-tuks and microbuses began.

“Omar Abu Treika”—his nickname recalling the famous footballer for his skill at playing under pressure—used to play in the al-Labban neighborhood club, where the pitch was drowning in sewage water, with drifting catfish lamenting a journey that had come to an end. He would hurl the mud-smeared ball at a player’s butt or face, score his foul-smelling goal, and then run—or dive, more like—through the stifling nine o’clock air, as though he were the real Abu Treika.

In reality, he worked on a tuk-tuk that belonged to Uncle Farag, proprietor of al-Omaraa Bakery, a man who had stubbornly lived past a hundred and managed to save four hundred thousand pounds through his sweat and blood. He spent half of his money on marrying a mentally unstable girl, while the rest was lavished on a luxurious new tuk-tuk: Chinese-made, Indian-assembled. He then entrusted it to Omar Abu Treika, handing him the wheel for a daily fee of fifty pounds.

Omar could easily multiply that sum into two hundred pounds in shadowy conversations with the teenage girls of the Mohsen family. He often used the tuk-tuk to corner a beautiful girl who had lost her way in his devil-riddled neighborhood, or to offer a courtesy ride to a relative or an acquaintance.

Omar Abu Treika believed in no religion other than his own influence in al-Labban. Even touching his tuk-tuk—or jostling it in passing—was considered a natural trespass against him, the god of the neighborhood, an insult heard by the “sons of filth” who time had gathered in that place. That was how the battle began, as Umm Sawsan—the Seer of the World, as she was called—put it. She said, “Set one rooster before another, and wait for the farce.”

But this was no farce—instead, it was a small-scale war.

The other rooster who confronted Abu Treika in this arena of power was Mahmoud the Gecko, so-named for his uncanny ability to scale walls and rooftops with the ease of a gecko from the moment his palms and feet made contact. It was a gift that turned him into a thief in demand in affluent neighborhoods, hired to settle conflicts of love and hatred alike. It also made him a person to be feared, since he was a professional thief of considerable experience—although he never thieved except by prior request and arrangement.

Mahmoud drove one of the Mash‘al al-Haram buses, vehicles originally designed as solid armored carriers to fight Nazis in the skirmishes of last century’s Europe, before finding their way—through a successful act of corruption—into the streets of Giza. He operated alongside twenty other buses that were driven by his associates. Together, they divided the earnings of night and day, adhering to a unified fare system that was, in its own way, admirable.

Al-Labban was one of the disreputable neighborhoods on his route, a place he passed through in his bus while hurling enough curses at its inhabitants to damn the dead a hundred times over.

What happened that day was this: the first rooster was heading toward a beautiful girl—one who still possessed the modesty that drove Omar Abu Treika mad. He stopped for her, asked where she was going, and turned up the volume on Nas Menny w Men Dammy, a song by Reda El Bahrawy.

Just then, the asphalt seemed to split open as Mahmoud the Gecko’s bus burst forth. He pulled up in front of the girl and, gesturing to the sacred empty seat beside him—one he reserved only for those whose beauty surpassed what he called the “threshold of masculinity”—said, “Front seat for half-fare.”

It was a tempting offer. The girl, who worked in an obscure nearby juice factory—where rotten mangoes were mixed with artificial colors to produce counterfeit mango juice—was feeling exhausted at the end of her day. So, she leapt up beside Mahmoud the Gecko.

What she did not realize was that she had stabbed Omar Abu Treika right in his prideful heart. To him, the fact that she chose the bus was as if she had chosen another man—abandoning him as her sole man, the man of all neighborhoods, living and dead alike. A brusqueness like this could only be answered with inevitable revenge.

He was truly enraged, to the extent that his head seemed, faintly, to catch fire. Umm Nesma swore she saw him from the window of her apartment in the seventh block overlooking the street. He sped after the bus in his tuk-tuk, driving into a reckless chase. It was pathetic, and yet thrilling enough to draw the street’s legitimate and illegitimate sons into cheering.

Omar Abu Treika was victorious. He forced the bus to stop just before it crashed into Mounir Tadrus’s kiosk of cigarettes and detergents.

It was an infamous insult. Miss Amal, who had been on the bus, later said it drove Mahmoud the Gecko to step down and speak with a politeness that stunned everyone, given what was to follow. He was drunk on the heroic image he was about to consecrate, with neither curses nor brawling. He said to Omar Abu Treika, who stood bristling before him, “Tonight, here in this street, there’s going to be a fight between you and me, my friend. Like men. And each of us brings twenty friends.”

It was a bewitching offer—one that after a long stretch of easy dominance and reputation-backed power, filled both men with the thrill of an unpredictable challenge. Each began to gather his supporters, fighters and spectators alike, while the girl—the cause of it all—slipped into the margins, where storytellers assembled to search for a reason for the clash.

Both men spent the day recruiting supporters. The residents of al-Labban decided to watch the showdown from the rooftops of the apartment blocks that overlooked the street, from nearby houses, and even from the mosque of the Society for the Adherents of the Prophetic Sunna. Some devised ways to charge admission for a viewing spot—a bottle of soda, or a sandwich of Roumi cheese—until the rooftops were packed. A few released flocks of pigeons to “warm up” the atmosphere.

It was a war over power, and over nothing at all. Still, some wagered on the outcome. Lame’i Gaber, owner of Lame’i’s poultry shop, declared he had staked three pairs of Pekin ducks. These were matched by Suleiman al-Ashqar, the fishmonger, who bet a tuna and four platters of seafood. Others placed more serious and more profitable bets: Abu Hassan wagered a slab of hashish against Abu Menna’s thirty grams of cocaine. The bets multiplied with the spectators, and neither Omar Abu Treika nor Mahmoud the Gecko had the slightest idea that their war floated atop other shadow wars.

At precisely eight in the evening, twenty tuk-tuks lined up opposite twenty buses, each side charged with the desire to prove its dominance over the street. Omar Abu Treika and Mahmoud the Gecko met at the center and shook hands like two noble commanders.

Then Abu Treika said—his words confirmed Sha’ban, the eternally dazed youth and the mad lover of Mona, al-Labban’s one and only sex worker—in a low voice, “The winner takes half the other’s fares for a year.”

It was a decisive move in the matter of wagers, and Mahmoud the Gecko raised the stakes even further—as Sha‘ban later recounted to Mona, who served as the neighborhood’s unofficial news platform, relaying the affairs of what she bitterly called “the sons of whores”—not without a trace of jealousy. Mahmoud said, “No, the full fare. And leave the rest to God.”

It was the battle of their lives. Here is the way it went: each bus and tuk-tuk was to race to the end of the street. Victory would go to whoever cornered the other and pinned him in place. In the end, the winner would be determined by the number of victories across the twenty smaller bouts. And, in case of a draw, the contest would be repeated until a final victory was decided.

Silence fell, as though it were Judgment Day, after voices rose demanding an end to chatter and noise. Over the course of an hour, buses and tuk-tuks traded wins repeatedly, until only one final round remained—preceded by a brief interlude filled with raucous mahraganat songs to stir the crowd. They were tied as they entered the last attempt, which would be decided by Abu Treika and the Gecko themselves.

The air was thick with sweat and boiling blood as the men raced with ferocious determination. Even Hosniyya, the vegetable seller, summed it up tersely, “Abu Treika was grinding with the focus of a man on a woman.”

Yet he did not win. Mahmoud the Gecko did not merely corner him in a foul-smelling nook beside the house of Hajj Muhammad Abd al-Rahim, but he lost his human balance altogether, crashing into the tuk-tuk and slamming the brakes, as though trying to outrun the impact. Then, as if waking to a miracle, he cried out in preemptive absolution, “I swear I didn’t mean it, you son of a bitch!”

And the last words Omar Abu Treika uttered—so half the spectators agreed in uncanny unison—were, “Guys… it was still too early.”

That was before he was kneaded into his tuk-tuk, until it became impossible to separate the two from that fatal act of lovemaking.

It was a catastrophe. At first, the street burned in silence. Then it erupted into another war, as the tuk-tuk drivers attacked the bus drivers. The clash, as the clerk of the Kanisah police station later recorded, left five dead who had nothing to do with the fight, as well as dozens wounded, before it was finally quelled by the arrival of Central Security vehicles and impatient officers.

What followed, as Hajj Shawqi would often repeat while stroking his beard, was cursed bloodshed, a battle born of nothing that had summoned a mother’s prayer. Abu Treika’s mother, bareheaded and unashamed, looked to the sky and prayed, “O Lord, wipe this neighborhood from existence.”

And it is with this that Hajj Shawqi would end his telling of the battle.

Three years later—after Mahmoud the Gecko had been sentenced to three years in prison for involuntary manslaughter, and as tuk-tuks and buses continued to reenact their war in scattered skirmishes, with threats that never quite came to pass—the governorate decided to demolish half the houses overlooking “The Street of Misfortune,” in preparation for a bridge project hastily named Kobri al-Labban, which was part of a larger transport axis in Giza. The Minister of Transport declared it would usher the area into a new era of civilization before startling residents with an unmistakable warning against resistance, saying, word for word, “We still remember the story of that Muslim Brotherhood boy, Abu Treika, and his clash with that woman-raised thief, the Gecko.”

In fact, the bridge that came to blanket the whole street seemed to bring an end to the life of the neighborhood—as it was now reduced to a mere passageway for others. It scattered al-Labban’s entire culture into distant, fragmented corners and cast the story of its great “Odyssey” into the oblivion of forgotten tales about a neglected place.

Mohamed Abdel Gawad is an Egyptian novelist, best known for his novellas: Friendship as Explained by Ali Ali and A Second Return for the Prodigal Son, published by Dar Al-Maraya in 2023. He released his debut novel, 30 Abib, with Dar Batana in 2022, which was followed by The Princess of the Seven Seas, published by Dar Al-Maraya in 2024. His novel The Private Incident of His Family’s Dead marks his first collaboration with Tanmia Publishing House.

Omar Ibrahim is an Egyptian literary translator and editor from Alexandria, with over twenty published translations across fiction, poetry, non-fiction, and children’s literature. A graduate of English Literature and Translation from Alexandria University, he began his career early, publishing six books before graduation and earning recognition as “the youngest Egyptian and Arab translator” by Al-Dostour in 2021. He has delivered lectures and workshops at prestigious institutions including the Bibliotheca Alexandrina and the American University in Cairo and currently leads a literary translation workshop within the Arab Humanities project. His work has appeared in major Arabic and international platforms, including ArabLit Quarterly. He has also served as an expert reader for the American National Translation Award (2020–2022) and worked with Migration Yorkshire.