The Day I Lost My Name

Cairo, dawn on 8 January 2025. It has rained all night, and there is a patch of oil on Qasr al-Aini Street that no one can see. A small grey car spins half a turn on the water, an old bicycle with a crate of bread goes down, and the hot loaves float in the gutter. Six days later the two men lie in neighbouring beds in intensive care, each with a cap of electrodes on his head, part of an open medical trial. Then the power fails, and the two devices run together for 11 minutes. That night Sherif opens his eyes, and Salma takes his hand and counts his pulse with two fingers. But he pulls his hand away politely and calls out: "Sabreen." And from behind the curtain the stranger, a baker, whispers: "Salma. Why are you crying over there?"

Salma is an internal medicine doctor at Qasr al-Aini hospital, and she knows its corridors as well as her own kitchen. Her husband Sherif is a 40-year-old architect who draws houses in straight lines. Ragab Qenawi is a baker from Bulaq al-Dakrour, with a small oven, a wife named Sabreen, a daughter and a son. Now the architect is in the baker's body, and the baker is in the architect's. Dr. Maher Selim, who runs the trial, tells the truth from the first day, his green notebook in his hand, but he does not know what happened. The hospital sends each body home under its own name, so each man goes to a house that is not his. Sherif stands at an oven he does not know while his hands knead on their own, and the body he carries has a weak heart. Ragab lives with a mother who is not his, while his son Yahya waits for heart surgery. Salma decides to believe and to fight, and every door she knocks on asks for an ID card before it asks for the person.

Real science lies behind the story. In 1694 the philosopher John Locke asked: if a prince woke up with all his memories in the body of a cobbler, who would he be? In 1962 the scientist Brenda Milner found that a patient who could not remember anything new got better at a drawing task day after day, without remembering he had ever tried it. Memory of events is one thing, and the memory of the hand is another, just as you forget when you learned to ride a bicycle but never forget how to ride. In 2013 a scientist moved a colleague's finger in another building with a signal from his brain, but what crossed was a tiny signal like "yes" or "no", like a neighbour ringing your doorbell, not moving his whole life into your flat. A whole person moving from one body to another is fiction. At the end of the novel, a section called "What is real and what is imagined" clearly separates the real science from the fiction.

The book is written in Arabic.