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I think it might have been Eastertime – which, as Copts who clung both to our joys and our sorrows, we persisted in celebrating every year – when Basili Akram announced he was getting married. Then again, perhaps it wasn’t Easter, but just any other day. The ceremony was due to take place on the stage at the Utopia Club, the sanctum of the aristocracy vilified by the poor and the masses for being an exclusive place that inhibited social justice.
Basili was a distinguished Copt in Sur. In his mid-forties, he had only returned four years before, having spent many years, on his account, in England. None of those aware of his departure and the reasons for it – chiefly the murder of his textile-dealer father and the elopement of the Coptic girl he loved with an itinerant Indian pipe-pla
