I need to tell you about the dog.
This was maybe the end of week one. I was on a call at the cowork, the one near Blue Beach Hotel that I’ll complain about properly in the next chapter. The call was supposed to end at 9pm. It didn’t. It went to 9:30, then past 10. It was a good call. But long. My fiancée had come with me because we’d planned to eat after, and she was waiting outside.
Outside, at 10pm in Dahab, looks like this: the promenade is mostly empty, the sea is right there, a few metres away, softly doing its thing against the rocks, the moon was up and the water was catching it. It was January and a bit cold and she was sitting on a low wall scrolling her phone, waiting for me to stop talking to people on the other side of the world.
And at some point a dog came and sat next to her.
Not in the way that street dogs usually approach you, the sideways creep with the lowered head, checking if you’re the kind of person who kicks. This dog just walked up and sat down, close but not touching, facing the same direction, like she’d been invited and was slightly late. They sat there together for a while. My fiancée and this dog, looking at the sea, waiting for me.
When I finally came out, a bit stressed, annoyed at being late, and even more annoyed at the bad internet, the dog was still there. She looked at me. I looked at her. My fiancée said, “this one’s been keeping me company.” We walked to get food. The dog came with us. We didn’t discuss it.
When we passed an empty bowl, the dog pointed at it. We went to buy a tin of tuna. We didn’t have an opener so we opened it with a rock. It was a mess. But we felt like we bought a friend with that tin.
And indeed, she came back the next morning. And the morning after that. After about three days we stopped being surprised.
Her name was Forsha, which means “brush” in Arabic. I don’t remember who told us this or why it fit, but it stuck. She was medium-sized, sandy-coloured, with short fur and calm eyes and the general demeanour of an animal that has figured out how the world works and is not especially impressed by it. She was not cute in the way that dog Instagram accounts require. She was a street dog. She had the build of something that feeds itself.
For the next three weeks, she was ours. Or we were hers.
She waited outside the dive centre when we went diving. She walked with us to Alawahy in the morning. She knew the route to Darwish and would lead us there, looking back occasionally to check we were keeping up, like a slightly impatient tour guide who has done this walk too many times. She slept near our door. Our landlord even bought a small carpet for her.
She didn’t care about our deadlines or our calls or our WiFi problems. She operated on a different schedule, one that ran on tide and light and the smell of grilled fish and whatever else dogs use to organise their day. When we sat at a café and worked on our laptops, she lay under the table and slept. When we walked, she walked. When we stopped, she stopped. There was no anxiety in her. I found this annoying at first, then admirable, then something I didn’t have a word for.
I’m going to mention Forsha a few more times in this piece. To me she is Dahab. She saw us at our best, eating fish by the water in the late afternoon sun, and at our worst, swearing at a hotspot that had dropped out during a VC call. She had no opinion on either. I think that was the thing.
❤️🐶❤️