‘Half a Day’ is a short story written by the Nobel Prize winner Naguip Mahfouz. He wrote this story in the posterior part of his vocation when he was endlessly moving from severe authenticity towards an increasingly trial sort of fiction. The short story begins with the storyteller who is enchanted with his new garments going to his first day of school, as he runs along close to his father. All things considered, in spite of the energy, the boy feels some sort of changes which make him apprehensive. Once in a while, he goes to look his mother in the window of their home, quietly speaking to her for assist. He dislikes going to class.
When he resentfully inquires his father for what good reason he is being rebuffed by being sent to school, his father chuckles that school is not at all a discipline, however rather school is a processing factory that makes helpful men out of young men. He has pushed his child through the school door in spite of the boy's aversion and dread, his father vows to be there when the boy leaves the school. The boy takes a gander at different school children; he does not know anybody there. One of the boys questions him who carried him to school. When the storyteller replies it was his father, the other boy responds that his own father is passed away.
On the first day of the school, a decent appearing lady sorts the children into positions and examples, revealing to them the school are their new home, where there is everything that is charming and useful to intelligence and religion. The storyteller acknowledges her words. Before long, he warms up to certain young boys and becomes hopelessly enamored with certain young girls; the school trains the students in geology, language, religion, music, and physical action.
The delineation of what they are realizing is meager and intended to not be considered actually, yet as an analogy for what an individual would experience while transitioning. Simultaneously, life there is not constantly smooth. The storyteller faces surprising cataclysmic events, contentions with peers that turn vicious, and the once in the past merciful lady who arranged the children currently regularly rebuffs and harms them. The boys understand that they cannot go home again. Before long, the storyteller and his friends are never again permitted to adjust their perspectives on their convictions.
At long last, the chime rings to declare the end of the workday, and the school children race to the entryways to leave the school. The storyteller bids farewell to his companions and sentimental interests, however his father is not waiting for him as he had guaranteed. In the wake of sticking around for quite a while, the storyteller chooses to walk home without anyone else. When he strolls, he runs into a moderately aged man whom he grasps well. He inquires after the man; the man replies that he is not doing such well.
In the street that he used to roam leisurely is out of nowhere, he is presently frightened by the progressions. Rather than a road fixed with gardens, there are presently vehicles, high structures, swarms of humankind, upsetting commotions and slopes of decline which are all proof of the progressions that modernization and urbanization have made during the storyteller's day at school or rather, his whole lifetime.
Now he can see the street is out of nowhere; it is loaded up with uproarious and impervious traffic like taxis, a circus march, and a fire motor with its alarm booming, and trucks loaded up with fighters. As the storyteller considers how the entirety of this could have happened into equal parts a day, between early morning and dusk, he simply needs to be home with his father.
Be that as it may, he cannot go across the road in the upheaval. Subsequent to standing quite a while, the storyteller is helped across by a little boy who works at the ironing shop on the corner of the street. When the boy holds out his hand and addresses him as Grandpa and then the storyteller understands that he has now become old. He realized that a half-day at school was his entire life which passed quickly.
