C harmian Hills, a retired lawyer from Huron County, Ontario, fell for Luxor, Egypt, during a romantic Nile cruise with a lover, and continued visiting after they split up. During her fourth trip, in , the summer she turned sixty, she met thirty-two-year-old Samir in a spice-scented jewellery shop, where he sold heavy bangles and necklaces.
The pair hit it off immediately. Then they progressed to a long-distance romance. Six months in, he informed her over the phone that when she returned to Egypt they would be married, and she agreed. By , she had gone to visit him twenty-four times. In Luxor, approximately kilometres south of Cairo, donkey cart drivers bicker in traffic and butchers hang freshly skinned cow carcasses outside their shops.
This historical city shouts conservatism, but a woman sleeping with a younger man raises few eyebrows. Sex outside wedlock is forbidden and can land an Egyptian man in jail for months, and a survey shows that citizens overwhelmingly want adulterers stoned. Fortunately, however, a man may have as many as three foreign wives to support his Egyptian wife and kids.
Where are you from? But Luxor offers a delicacy: the facade of commitment, via informal urfi marriages, which carry little legal weight in many Western countries but pacify the Egyptian police, who can detain locals for merely flirting with unmarried women.
Charmian knew little about this when she arrived. Many expatriates know each other by name, and they exchange cautionary tales about poor souls who let love get the better of them. One Brit threw so much money at her Egyptian paramour that she had to shack up on his little sailboat and then flee to make more money back home. The wife, still wearing her wedding ring, sobs as she wonders if he ever loved her.
