Osama drives like Cairo breathes—fast, loud, unpredictable, but always with purpose.
His yellow-and-white taxi rattles down the Corniche beside the Nile, weaving between tuk-tuks, buses, donkey carts, and Mercedes-Benzes with the same fluid confidence of someone who has seen it all and stopped being surprised years ago. The horn is his second language. The rearview mirror holds a small photo of his mother, a plastic keychain of Mecca, and a cracked rosary that swings with every pothole.
He is in his mid-forties, with crow’s feet etched deep by sun and sarcasm. His galabeya is faded from sweat and steering wheels. His laughter is infectious. His curses are inventive. And his opinions are a Cairo landmark of their own.
“The president? Wallahi, he should drive this taxi for one week—then we’ll see real change.”
He says it with a grin, eyes sharp in the mirror, daring you to laugh with him. To us, he was more than a cab driver. He was our guide.
Osama knows the backstreets better than Google Maps. He knows which traffic lights are “respected” and which ones are just decoration. He knows where to get the best koshari for under ten pounds and which petrol stations don’t water down their gas. He reads people like fare meters—fast, instinctive, never wrong.
Tourists love him. Some are terrified. Many write about him later, unsure if he was joking, wise, angry, or just Cairo personified. The truth is, he’s all of it.
He once studied engineering, he says. Or maybe he didn’t. It changes depending on the passenger. What doesn’t change is the photo of his son tucked into the sun visor—handsome, twenty-one, studying computer science in Alexandria. “He won’t drive a taxi. Inshallah. He will build things. Big things.”
Every day is a thousand kilometers of stories. A French backpacker late for her train. A businessman asleep in the backseat. A veiled grandmother who pays with dates and prayers. Osama remembers them all, retelling the best tales between red lights and potholes with the timing of a stand-up comic.
At night, Cairo glows with dust and neon, and Osama’s taxi rolls on, part of the bloodstream of a city that never fully sleeps. Sometimes, if the meter is low and the mood is right, he’ll turn off the radio and speak softer—about the old days when taxis were black and white, when fuel was cheap, when the city was slower, poorer, but somehow gentler.
Then the honking returns. Someone cuts him off. And Osama is back—shouting into traffic, laughing before the sentence is done, his hand on the horn, his eyes on the chaos ahead.
He is a driver, yes. But also a philosopher, a navigator, a historian of asphalt and human drama.
And as long as Cairo moves,
Osama will keep driving—
threading through its noise and sun
like a man who belongs to the street.