I KNOCK at the black metal gate of the awama (houseboat) and a small woman dressed in light blue opens it with a smile. As she does so, her cat, called Pussy, dashes out into the street. "Come here Pussy! Come her!" she calls, while rushing out after her. She manages to catch her furry Pussy, strokes her tenderly and brings her back onto the houseboat, before locking the gate. "Many of my cats have been killed after darting out into the street and being run over," she says. Ekhlas Helmi adores cats and now has about 30 of them on her awama in Nile Street, Agouza. Most of them she finds in the street, while some are passed on to her by her friends, when they die or travel abroad for work. We descend a 15-rung ladder onto the deck of the boat. We are near the level of the water, surrounded by aquatic plants. We walk through a glass door into the living room. There's a big television in the middle of the room and there are three cats sitting on the carpet, apparently watching the football on the TV. "Would you like to sit here in the living room or on the balcony?" Ekhlas asks me. As we speak, our conversation is interrupted by one of the cats jumping onto my back, while her dog starts licking my trousers. It would definitely be better to sit apart from them. "On the balcony, please," I reply. Unfortunately, I'm wrong. As we step onto the balcony overlooking the Nile, I am surprised to find seven cats playing there, with another three asleep on the seat. "Wherever I go, they follow me like my shadow," Ekhlas says, looking pitifully at them. I begin to feel satisfied with status quo. Her balcony overlooks the sky, two bridges and the Nile with its boats and launches. Ekhlas didn't like cats, until something happened about 15 years ago. "One day I heard meowing coming from the manwar [lightshaft] in the block of flats where I lived, in Zamalek. I asked the doorman what it was. He told me that one of my neighbours had got rid of his cat because she was ill. I told the doorman to bring her to me. "I took her to the doctor and she recovered. You can't imagine how much I loved that first cat in my life," she recalls. Since then, her life has been transformed. Whenever Ekhlas spots a small cat in the street or in the rubbish or in a box on the pavement, she stops her car, retrieves the animal and takes it to her flat. As the number of her feline friends increased, she decided to build an awama to feel free with her little companions, especially after her husband died ten years ago. Ekhlas'dog walks up to us and gives his owner that ‘I want my dinner'look. She beckons him to the garden, where she gives him some dry food. "Three years ago I found this dog in the Nile. Someone had thrown him off one of the bridges and he swam to my houseboat and I plucked him out of the water. He has been living with me ever since." One day, a doll disappeared from on top of one of her cupboards. She discovered that the dog had taken it and was sleeping with it. She put the doll back, but the next day the dog took it again and the same thing happened on the third day. "This time, the dog tore my doll apart, as if to tell me that he was angry with me for keeping on taking it away from him!" she recalls with a laugh. In fact, Ekhlas, who attended the Collège de la Mère de Dieu in Garden City when she was a girl, doesn't just have 30 cats and a dog. There are chicks, a cock, four hens, seven ducks and geese too. She let the ducks play on the Nile, but that's a problem in itself. "They don't just play around the awama, as they like to swim into the middle of the river and the fishermen have to bring them to me" of course I give them some bakksheesh," she says. "Geese are better than ducks. They do acrobatics and dance near the awama. They keep close to it, as if they were bodyguards protecting me," she adds with a smile. For Ekhlas, who is 70 years old and has no children, these creatures entertain her and fill her spare time, especially now she has retired from her job with an import-export company. She finds her little companions safe, warmhearted and tender. The more care she gives them, the more love she gets from them. She uses her husband's pension to buy them food and pay for their medical treatment. When she has a problem, she talks to them, so they can bear the burden with her. "For me they are better than humans. At least I'm sure that when I tell them a secret they won't tell anyone else," she says. When one of her cats dies, you'd imagine Ekhlas to be broken-hearted, but in fact she feels happy. "I'm happy when one of my cats dies before me. After all, who will look after them when I'm gone?" asks Ekhlas, whose name means ‘sincerity'.
