Judgment in Absentia

The misdemeanor court of Abdeen in Cairo, a morning in early October 2025. Judge Adel El-Tokhy walks from his home in Garden City, and the whole street is color: the bean seller's voice is dark red, car horns are sharp yellow lines, and a child sings in light blue. In the courtroom there are 47 cases, and Uncle Ramzy calls the names in his flat green voice. A witness says he saw everything with his own eyes, his voice clouds over with the color of mud, the judge closes his eyes, and he rules on the papers, as he has for 20 years. At the end of the session a thin young man stands up, a scratched yellow helmet in his hands, sentenced in absentia to one year in prison. The judge asks: what do you say to the charge? He lifts his head and says: I did not hit him. And Adel opens his eyes, because the voice is clear blue, like water in a clean glass.

Adel has seen sounds as colors since childhood, and he sees the voice of anyone who knowingly lies cloud over with mud. But he has made himself a rule to judge only by the papers, because what he sees is not evidence, and no one would believe him. And here every paper is against Rami Fattouh, a delivery rider: the motorbike's number was read by Moallem Abdo, the café owner; the bike is in Rami's name and was found in Reda's workshop with a broken headlight; and the victim is an old shoemaker, Sobhy El-Gammal, on a street Adel has known since he was a boy. The victim's daughter Hoda wants the truth, and the prosecutor Basel believes every word he says. At home there is his wife Mona, her small sketchbook, and small kind lies she does not know he can see. His old teacher Helmy warns him: a judge who rules by what is in his own head alone can become unjust. Will Adel break his rule? And what will it cost him if he does?

Seeing sounds as colors is a real condition called synesthesia: one sense switches on another. Scientists have found that about 4 in every 100 people have some form of it, and that it is not an illness. A simple picture: two wires side by side in an old building, so when the doorbell rings, the stairway lamp lights up. A clever test reveals the real condition: the person gives the same sound the same color weeks later, without remembering or memorizing. As for lie detection, no machine and no person can do it well even today; people get it right about half the time, like tossing a coin. At the end of the novel, a section called "What is real and what is imagined" separates the real science from the fiction.

The book is written in Arabic.