(Egypt)

I sat on a low stool in a street café, smoked a nargileh water pipe and played backgammon with a wise old man. His parents gave up the nomadic desert life when he was a boy, and came to live in the city. He bought me glasses of tea, and in return he had the pleasure of winning several games of backgammon. He threw the dice, one red, one green, onto the board of black wood and pale mother-of-pearl. “All the four colours of our flag,” he observed, exhaling a plume of sweet apple smoke. He spoke of backgammon as a philosophy for life. “It is black and white and you have no choice over what is dealt for you, or over what other people do to you. The choice that you have is how to best play your own pieces, to make all you possibly can out of what you have been dealt.”