CAIRO — Her suitor had the ring, but she lost her dowry.
It was buried beneath the fallen limestone cliffs that smashed her home and smothered her neighborhood two months ago, killing at least 200 people. That morning seems long past, but there are still funerals and newly made orphans when the digging men pull another body from the rock and grit. It goes on like this, names whispered in alleys, hearts broken.
Sana Amr's heart cracked four times: The evening after the earth trembled they found the body of her brother; the next day they reached her dead father, a Koran pressed to his chest; 40 days later they unearthed her sister, lying face down, lifeless but barely blemished, except for bruises on her cheeks and stomach. Amr's dowry, which included a refrigerator and a washing machine, vanished too, and with it the hope of marriage any time soon.
A poor girl's worth is in her dowry, not in her charms. Amr knows it is not the time to marry Ahmed, a truck driver and soldier in the Egyptian army. Her other sister, Sumaya, her dowry also lost, has put off her wedding too. They live with their mother and brother in an unfinished two-room apartment provided by the government. There is no furniture, no pictures on the walls, no scent of family history, only borrowed mats hiding a concrete floor.
"This abaya is the only thing of mine that survived," Amr said. "I even lost my slippers."
It is a pretty abaya, a black robe embroidered in silver and red. Her stout hands slip from its sleeves, sometimes rising to her lips to hide a smile, when a smile comes, which isn't often.
She's 23 and never went to school; she tried teaching herself a few times, but it was hard and confusing. Her father talked about hiring a tutor to educate the family; now he's gone and it's not likely a tutor will ever come. Learning arithmetic won't bring back her dowry, won't stop her mother's tears.
"I spend the whole day trying to distract myself," she said. "I keep doing laundry."
Millions seek distraction in the slums and poor neighborhoods that rise on Cairo's edges, grow at its heart. They live in houses and apartments illegally built decades ago when migrants from the Nile Delta and the southern deserts followed stories of fine clothes and wealth. Most found the city of 17 million too crowded, too stretched, a brick-and-mortar maze of car horns, staccato heartbeats and smoky alleys rattling with tin shops and looms.
