THE life of a news anchor on Egypt's official television and the chaotic 18-year-long relationship with his wife contain all the ingredients of a sleazy film by controversial director Khaled Youssef. The anchor, who was from a good family, married a rather obese young woman. His Cinderella was from a poor family living in an overcrowded slum. She was charmed by this good-looking young man from a powerful, affluent family, who lived in an upmarket area. Their life was full of sexual desire and drugs. Her husband was a jealous man and inconsiderate towards his wife's emotional sufferings. They had no children and kept on divorcing and remarrying. He was also a compulsive gambler, funded by his wife, who was terrified of losing her man. There was a love triangle (him, his wife and another lady, a friend of hers) and there were whores. This Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde finally shot his wife in the head at point-blank range, despite the appeals for mercy from the victim and his sister-in-law. The murder of the news anchor's wife also highlights the widening gap between the classes in Egyptian society and the way members of the upper class view the rest of us, poor, unfortunate people. In 1992, when Ihab Salah, the son of a late police general who was chief of security in the Suez Canal city of el-Ismailia, received a phone call from a girl he didn't know, little could either of them imagine their lives would be tragically torn apart 18 years later. The caller was a besotted lover of the young late-night news anchor. Unable to suppress her agitation any longer, she plucked up the courage to ring him and reveal all. In fact, she kept on ringing him, until she eventually persuaded him to have dinner with her family. Although he confessed that he was shocked to discover that his admirer lived in a slum in the Imbaba district in Giza, the upper-class anchor burned with curiosity to know how the other half lived. In a letter he sent the other day from his prison cell to a local newspaper, the murderer admitted that he grimaced with disgust as he strolled down a filthy street to reach his girl's filthy apartment. "It was not even an apartment," he said in his letter. "It was a small room divided by a curtain into a bedroom and a reception." The anchor must have shamed her family when he claimed in his letter that, during that very first meeting in her family's home, she did indeed reveal all, inviting him to make love to her, while her father and mother disappeared behind the curtain to sleep. He loved the 'love game' and soon agreed to marry her - on condition that none of his family attended the wedding party. "Magda and her family understood it, when I said my mother, brother and sister wouldn't welcome her as their daughter- or sister-in-law," he continued. When she discovered that her husband was a womaniser with a penchant for prostitutes, his wife did her best to safeguard their family life. Treating him like a spoilt child, she used to buy Salah expensive presents and compensate him for the money he kept on losing at the gambling clubs. She bought him a car and motorbike for his birthday, but the glaring lights of his popularity as a news anchor made him forget how decent and faithful his wife was. So callous and ungrateful was the anchor that he married a friend of his wife's, after his first wife, whom he shot dead, introduced them to each other. He was then forced to divorce his wife's friend, but he stipulated that Magda must still let him have lots of extramarital relationships. When he got fed up with his kind, longsuffering wife, the naughty child decided to break his fat doll into pieces and throw her away. Returning home late one night, undoubtedly after visiting another of his women, he fatally blasted the good, loyal Magda. Breathing a sigh of relief, the news anchor calmly rang the police. The love games were over. [email protected]
