I arrived in June. My first month in Cairo, I kept mistaking strangers for family. Everywhere I looked I saw my parents and my sister, Lulu. In the bars of downtown Cairo, especially Zigzag, any of the curly-haired girls with enormous, glassy doll-eyes could be Lulu. My mother was every hefty tante in tassel-fringe capris, pointed-toe mules, and my father was the same cricket-legged bald man serving me coffee, driving me home. In my first week of teaching English at the British Council, I even called one of my students baba by accident, to the class’s uproarious delight.
