Summer, coded on me

Someone is turning a dial somewhere I can’t see. By June the air has a weight to it that wasn’t there in March. By July, I can feel it before I’ve even left my bed. I lived most of the year in Cairo and went to school there, with a three-month summer break. We’d stay there maybe half of it, sometimes fitting in a weekend beach trip to Ismailia in the north-east, if we were lucky. Then, every year, we’d fly to England to my mum’s side of the family, to escape the worst of it.

End of September we’d return to a hot hairdryer blowing in your face with no off switch. The streets had a dusty hue, everything slightly muted and coated, broken only by the glare of colourful shop signs. On cars and underneath them, stray dogs slept in the shade they’d made for themselves, leaving dust outlines like crime scene silhouettes. Cats watched from flat rooftops, lounging, completely unbothered. To me, Cairo in summer smells like white jasmine, fire-grilled corn, hot garbage and exhaust fumes, often all at once. It isn’t always romantic, but it’s the smell of a city fully and completely alive.

The sounds arrive before I fully wake up. As a kid, I’d lie still for a moment and let it wash over me: horns beeping, the clang of a spanner against a metal milk canister as the seller does his rounds. Before I even open my eyes, I know exactly where I am.

You’d lower a basket from your balcony with money in it and wait, the seller taking the money and leaving a full canister, you hauling it back up. My sister and I would fight over who got to do it, the choreography of getting it past the washing lines, timing the money right. Transactions like these are a complete social system: trust between neighbours, the street and the home in constant conversation, a network of mutual dependence.

Fruit, sugarcane and jasmine sellers work the same streets. White yasmeen (jasmine) garlands sold from carts and hung from taxi mirrors as a natural air freshener, covering the smell of cigarettes chain-smoked from the driver’s window. A small act of beauty in a hot car, the instinct to make something lovely out of whatever’s available. Alongside it, the smell of corn grilling outside the naadi — the sports clubs and parks where members socialise in the summer, the burnt smell drifting from streets away. The naadis in Cairo tell you a lot about status: members only, those who can afford it. The corn outside its gates is available to everyone.

A donkey brays somewhere nearby; I know what comes next. My teta’s explanation was always the same: he has seen the shaytan, a force of evil, and she’d raise her right palm, saying khamsa wa khamseen (“fifty-five”), repeated to ward it off. This isn’t superstition in the dismissive Western sense, it’s just embedded into ordinary Egyptian life. My teta knew this, and so did the donkey, apparently.

At the hottest point of the day, Cairo goes quiet, never silent, just slower. The energy is pooled inward, movement suddenly effortful. I used to fight it as a child. Now I understand it was wisdom.

Wooden shutters closed, apartments existing in darkness. A plastic water bottle frozen and rolled onto your bed to cool it before you nap. The calculation of which route has the most shade. A bag of mini cucumbers to snack on, cold. Each of these is how an Egyptian family like mine navigates heat without air conditioning, the generational wisdom of people who live inside the heat rather than behind a wall of cold air. It’s passed down without being written down and is completely invisible to anyone who’s never needed it. The craving for air conditioning gets satisfied in the mall, the cinema, or anywhere artificially cold.

Cairo is also where the summer writes itself on the body, literally. I wore a hijab in Egypt, but not in England. By the time I packed for England, I had a line on the side of my face where the sun had caught the skin but not below the fabric’s edge, a tan stopping in a clean diagonal at my jaw. My hands and arms tanned differently too, darker on the back, paler where my long sleeves covered up to the wrists. It embarrassed me. I only understood it as a record once I landed in England, took the hijab off, and watched the line get noticed and ridiculed by my white British cousins. I spent those visits trying to blend in during the odd Lancashire heatwave.

When the sun goes down, Cairo comes back to life. The shop signs blaze. Horns and music from cars and shops compete for the same air. People spill onto pavements, cracking lib, roasted pumpkin and watermelon seeds between their teeth, drinking tea, smoking, standing around joking about nothing and everything.

Egyptian summer nights are the city exhaling, releasing everything held in during the heat of the day. I feel it too, like regaining my freedom.

This summer, the night has an extra layer. Egypt qualified for the 2026 World Cup, their first in years, and the cafés have been reorganising themselves around screens in corners.

The men with their shisha and black tea, glued to the match. The sound of the street changes when Egypt score. The horns, the shouting, the windows opening. The flag is everywhere this summer. Red, white and black with the golden eagle of Saladin at its centre. On cars, on buildings, draped from balconies and worn as capes by kids on bikes.

Cairo is a city in constant communication with itself; summer just turns the volume up.

And then, every year, the plane to escape to England. The hijab would come off somewhere over the Mediterranean, and the line on my face would still be there, visible now in a way it never was at home, where lots of women’s faces had some version of the same mark and nobody looked twice. I’d watch it fade over the weeks, the city’s grip loosening until I couldn’t quite remember the shape of it. Two versions of myself, one country at a time, the line fades, but the summer always finds somewhere else to write itself.