The magic eye riddle

Other Voices

RBy Ahmad Al-Sarraf

ecently, silly and naïve videos have been circulating that wellknown hotels have installed hidden cameras in the bedrooms to take pictures of guests in intimate situations.

A Kuwaiti traveler saw the ‘magic eye’ atop his TV set in a luxury hotel in Azerbaijan. A few days later, the guest apologized after learning the ‘magic eye’ is nothing but the eye of the special remote control.

That and other stories brought me back to 40 years, when I and a group of bankers from several countries were receiving banking training at the Wharton School in Philadelphia.

One day, two Kuwaiti friends visited me from a distant country and because there was no room in any hotel in the city I facilitated their stay and asked one of the trainees like me, but from Tehran, to host one of them in his room while the other slept on the sofa of our group’s guest room. I could have hosted him in my room but I had my wife with me.

The next day my Kuwaiti friend, who slept the night before with the Iranian, told me that his host was a strange person. He said, as soon as he entered the room, the Iranian asked him to bend at a certain angle in the corridor and he obliged.

The Iranian then took off his clothes and faced the wall at a certain position for a moment and then wore his clothes again. When my friend asked him for an explanation, he said

Al-Sarraf

there is a secret camera in the wall that depicts his movements and that he believes that he is under surveillance because he is opposed to the regime of the Shah.

Unaware of the consequences of his actions, he said he had been doing that for months whenever he sees a light in that small hole in the wall. He told me, after the end of the training course, he was considering of seeking asylum in the United States instead of returning to Iran.

My wife and I laughed a lot after hearing that story. We knew the reason, but I did not tell my friend about it, waiting for our friend Reza to ask him more about the subject. When he came and asked about the camera or the magic eye, he talked a lot about it and expressed his fears.

He added, all his phone calls are tapped, so he acts very cautiously in his room when he makes or receives any calls.

I told him there is something similar in all our rooms, which is not a magical eye or a secret camera, but just a light which comes on automatically if there is a call to the room, and no one responds.

We all laughed at the naïveté of our friend Reza, who went to his room to check on the authenticity of what we had told him. When he was assured that he was not under surveillance, he laughed with us, felt relieved and told us that he had changed the idea of political asylum and that he had decided to host us for ‘tonight’s dinner’.

Correction: I mentioned in an article last Monday that the last eclipse of 1918 and the eclipse of 2024 are related to the phenomenon in the United States only. I apologize.

e-mail: habibi.enta1@gmail.com