Chapter 1

The shelves in front of me were loaded. They looked almost too weak to hold the load they were tasked with. It was a huge hidden library of Betamax tapes.

All kinds of movies were on display: Westerns, action, kung-fu, and of course a slew of Egyptian (local) movies. I could sit and watch all I ever wanted. It’s one of the perks of the job.

The library I was looking at was my uncle’s tape collection. This was the 80s, and VHS hadn’t won the market yet. My uncle had received his immigration visa to Canada and left with his family a month prior. Since my father was his younger brother and closest in location, our family was tasked with caring for their residence while they were away. One of us had to go to their house and make sure that everything was in order, and we did it twice a week.

At the beginning, my father went all the time, then one week he took me and my older sister Habiba to show us what to do. He said it was simple enough and he was too busy to do it.

We complained as usual at having even more chores to do, but we did it. Dad showed us a list of things to check for, from flushing the toilet to make sure that water stays in it so that the odor trap works correctly, to checking all the windows and doors and many little things like checking for leaks under all the sinks. My uncle’s house was way bigger than ours because he was richer than my father.

The tour didn’t take long, and soon enough we were back at our tiny two-bedroom apartment.

In our tiny place, my father and mother slept in one bedroom, and myself (Karas), Habiba, Mariam, and the youngest Samia shared a slightly bigger bedroom. I slept on my own single-sized bed, Habiba slept on a same-sized bed in the middle of the room, and Mariam and Samia slept on a wider bed that was part of the wall.

At the time this started, I was seventeen, Habiba was eighteen, Mariam was sixteen, and Samia was only ten years old.

The next week, my father called me to him and gave me a set of keys, saying, “These are your uncle’s house keys. It’s your turn to go check on it like I showed you last time.”

I didn’t like the assignment, but I didn’t dare complain. It was very common to get a severe whipping with a belt for disobeying your parents in our environment.

So I went and did everything like my father did the previous week, but of course, being a curious teen, I felt compelled to snoop around. I really wanted to find out how my affluent uncle lived. I went through everything, from the living room, dining, kitchen, empty pantries, bedroom, etc.

It was then that I stumbled on the remote control in my uncle’s bedside table. There was no TV in the room that I could see, so I started clicking buttons. I pressed the ON button, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when a sound came out of nowhere announcing the news. I started pushing buttons randomly until an unmarked button seemed to activate something that was felt in the room. The sound came from behind a curtained side of the room. I pulled the curtain only to find a wooden wall splitting in half and the sides moving out to reveal a TV, VCR, and a huge library of tapes.

I stood in awe of the giant movie collection that my uncle had left behind. I knew at that moment that I would want to come here often. After checking out the movie library, I decided to watch a western. I chose ‘For a Fistful of Dollars’, put it in the player, and settled on the bed to watch it.

Next time, it was my sister’s turn. I wanted to offer to go for her, but since our father decided that we both had to do it, I didn’t want to risk his wrath.

So Habiba went, and she seemed to take too long, nearly two hours. Nobody noticed but me. I knew how long it would take for a true go-check-on-the-house trip would take. I had a hunch that Habiba had discovered the library too.

No matter, next time would be my turn.

For a while, we did this regularly. Habiba and I never discussed the ‘chore’ of checking on our uncle’s house. We simply did it. It was clear, though, that neither of us minded doing it, and it seemed that we both took way too long to come back home.

One day, I was at my uncle’s house and looking for something to watch when I noticed at the highest shelf a tape that was sticking out abnormally. I clearly remember never seeing a tape out of place, so I figured that Habiba must have not pushed it in as far as she should. Habiba was shorter than me, and I could barely reach the top shelf, so she must have not been able to do it correctly or didn’t care to. My curiosity was piqued, and I wanted to see what Habiba was watching.

I pulled the tape and was surprised to find no label on it.

However, when I started watching it, I got the surprise of my life. It was a porn tape; something that I never even heard of until that moment.

See, in Egypt in the 80s, there was no such thing as a sexual revolution. There still isn’t. Sex was taboo until you got married, and that was it, even for us Coptic Christians. I had never seen any nudity other than my mother’s nipples when she had breastfed my younger sisters. My mother’s nipples were of no interest to me.

I couldn’t believe my eyes. People did this? Men and women did this? What kind of degeneracy was that? Well, it was a fascinating kind of degeneracy. The kind that I couldn’t turn my eyes away from and gave me funny feelings in my gut and a huge hard-on below.

The tape had four main ‘scenes’ with different characters. The first scene had a blonde woman getting fucked by a man, very straightforward. The second scene was a woman that bragged about making a cock cum in under a minute, and she demonstrated her skill. She gave that anonymous cock in the shot a blowjob that was almost inconceivable. Her ability to take it that deep, including into her throat, left me scratching my head. The third scene was two women and one man. Lucky fucker! The fourth and final scene featured a woman taking it in the ass from one hairy dude.

To illustrate the level of ignorance that I was raised with, it was then that I learned that women had an additional hole in there for a hard cock to go into. Yeah, no sex ed in school and no proper biology lessons.

As I watched that tape open-mouthed mostly, I couldn’t help but masturbate. I came four times. One time for each of those scenes. I had discovered masturbation a few years earlier when I started having wet dreams.

After exhausting myself and rubbing my dick raw, I put the tape where it was, as Habiba had left it, and walked home in a daze.

As I walked slowly, replaying those scenes in my head, it dawned on me that Habiba had watched them too!

Did she make a mistake by leaving that tape sticking out a little, or was she purposefully giving me a hint about the tape?

Habiba and I weren’t particularly close as siblings. And since sex was such an unknown taboo, it was inconceivable to broach the subject with her. See, even though the four of us slept in the same room, I had never seen Habiba or any of the others even in their underwear. Well, except for Samia when she was a toddler and ran around half-naked most of the time. But Habiba and Mariam, never, not even in underwear. We all dressed for bed or for the day in the bathroom, as our mother had taught us.

So it was with new eyes and different recognition that I saw Habiba that night as we had dinner and got ready for bed. There seemed to be a new tension between us. Unacknowledged tension, but something new was there.

For a month or so, I went to my uncle’s house to watch porn and masturbate. It was becoming a nasty habit. I started to look at women in a completely different way, mostly wondering what they looked like naked and whether they did any of the things I saw in the tapes if they were married.

One day I made the decision to start sleeping without underwear, so I would take off my briefs after I got in bed and under my sheet. See, Egypt is generally very warm and everybody, even men, slept in a Gallabiyah, which is basically an ankle-length sleeping gown like the women wear in the West. Up until that moment, I always wore underwear under the Gallabiyah.

At first I only took off my briefs, but as I got more into the porn and the sex I was watching on a weekly basis, masturbating at night became a habit. I would pull up my Gallabiyah up to my waist and masturbate after I felt that all three girls had fallen asleep.