Peace be upon you, You have preceded us and we follow you later, Everyone in their life goes here and there, meets people, undergoes experiences, likes and dislikes, wins and loses, plays and feels sad, kills and steals, judges things as lawful and judges others as unlawful and at the end of the journey, one is back to this place, next to you, where each soul is held in pledge for what it earns and where one's grave is either a garden of the gardens of the Paradise or a pit among the pit-holes of Hell. I do not understand why graves in our village in Upper Egypt were built at the village boundaries southward and northward. Where exactly the sanctity of the dead people is: to build their graves in the heart of the city like in the capital, or build them at the city entrances, so all people have to say peace be upon you and bow their heads while passing next to the graves! Nine-tenth of the feat is a prize from God to those who love life and know its value and the rest is a quick look at death. People in feasts visit one another. They restore the severed relations. Their hearts feel kind to one another and they get together. They swing their kids or let them feel free to play in gardens. And in feasts also, some might shed few tears at the door of a grave. But in our village, the feast only means a show of graciousness for the dead before it is a celebration of life. Each woman in the village poor or rich becomes very keen to satisfy her deceased person more than she used to do when he was alive and kicking. She puts the basket in front of her in the night of the feast and starts recalling that the departed liked eggs boiled in an unwashed tea utensil because dust tea that remains in the cup turns egg colors into beige. The departed liked the watermelon that is still closed as a virgin. And if it is the season of apricots, let's take some with us as the deceased liked apricots. And in winter, all dead people like orange, tangerines and sugarcane, tea and sugar, plus some cakes and fresh bread. Women prepare their baskets and go to bed, thinking of nothing except their meetings with the beloved tomorrow. They do not think about clothes, cakes, meat or any thing of that kind. And in the morning and before people go to mosques for prayers, each woman hurries to her basket, carries it over her heads, or let a little girl carry it, or sometimes puts both the basket and the little girl on a donkey, which is faster. And the earlier she arrives in the graveyard, the better it is for her and the deceased! Once she arrives to the grave, she puts the basket down at the grave door, salutes the dead and recites Surat al-Fatiha of the Quran (if she memorizes it) and drops some tears while saying hello brother, hello sister. Then she sits waiting for the undertaker. And if the dead person is fresh, then a small funeral is required by putting some dust over the head, slapping cheeks, crying and screaming while some other ladies should join her for a while and then start to calm her down. And when she calms down, she starts wiping off the tears. Then she lifts the piece of cloth she uses to cover the basket. She sets aside part of the food for the undertaker and distributes the rest of it among children whether she knows or not. “My portion, aunt,” they would shout. So some children get a cake, other kids get eggs and others wait to get anything! And the undertakers eat, sleep and guard the dead and, of course, bury them. They are the happiest of the feast because the dead feel appetite for food while they eat. But undertakers do not feel satisfied with what they get in feasts from grave visitors. They always get our own portions too. The undertaker who sells reed pipes, drums, earthen horses and balloons lures children of what he sells and takes from them the food they got in return for a balloon, a reed pipe or whatever. And the most important thing in this visit is that a woman should not leave the grave before it distributes all the food she brought with her. Her return to home means the end of the feast celebration. These stories are very similar to what the Pharaohs used to believe that a dead person's soul departs the body only for 40 days and then returns to it. And that is why they were putting in the dead people's caskets everything they liked in their lives: this is what we have realized after we had grown up and have been reading about Upper Egypt in books and watching it from train windows.
