An hour or so before the sunset, everything starts coming to an emptiness and stillness, so much that fifteen minutes before the sunset and the call to prayer, the landscapes are deserted metropolis from some eerie sci-fi.
In my days in Casablanca, I would go by the corniche in Ain Diab around those times, back when people didn't think of taking the iftar by the sea and still thought it ridiculous to pay 120 MAD to break the fast in a low quality buffet just to avoid cooking, to be at the coffee shop as early as possible or to get the sunset by the sea experience along with the iftar.
So the corniche would be empty, and the place would be eerie. On both sides, closed and quiet nightclubs and restaurants, coffee shops with settled and exhausted people just waiting to eat and/or smoke. Then as I would go beyond the known area, I would arrive to the empty side of the corniche that extends to the small island of Sidi Abderahmane, the land of magic and voodoo and cards reading and few sex workers.
And that was the place that drove the eeriness to the penultimate level. The uneasiness and crippling melancholy mixed with some sort of resigned fear settled. And I know people from the island could discern a solitary figure hesitating to walk through the connecting bridge and shyly going few first steps, before giving up because of the deep conviction that it was a very stupid if not bad idea.
I don't know why but right now, I feel like everyone cooped up inside for Ramadan and keeping away from the streets is sharing in some sort of eeriness, and maybe it's that brand I used to feel by the empty corniche near that island, and maybe it's the one I would have felt if I had dared to walk to that place.
Damn, just thinking about it gives me chills, eventhough I am pretty far away from that land.
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