By Marcia Lynx Qualey
Fatty, fatty, two by four (can’t fit through the kitchen door). That’s what I call my son, Isaac, although I try to restrict the name-calling to within our apartment walls. Calling him fat – and he is, 14.3 pounds at two months – is bad luck around here*.

At his two-month checkup, when we discovered he’d doubled his birth weight of 7+ pounds, we asked the doctor – repeatedly – "Is our son fat?" Certainly, as Americans, we meant it in a negative way. Is he overweight? Are we feeding him too much? Should we put him on a SlimFast diet to rid him of those unsightly folds around his elbows and wrists? When the doctor shrugged and said, well, he certainly is gaining weight rather quickly, four pounds in a month, my husband asked, "Shouldn’t you say ‘masha’Allah’ (to ward off bad luck and envy)?"

Oh, the doctor told us, if you were Egyptians, I would never admit he’s a bit on the heavy side. Perhaps if you were very educated, he said. I would inch around the subject.

Good or bad, the less said about babies, the better.|** If you say something good about your baby – or if someone else compliments him – that could stir up envy, and then, well…bad things happen. In fact, many Egyptians will tell a new mother that her baby is ugly. And they mean that in the nicest possible way.

When my husband showed Isaac to the owner of a bakery we frequent – and noted how fat he is – the owner’s face fell, and he quickly looked around for a wooden surface to rap with his knuckles. The shift manager of our favorite Ethiopian restaurant suggested we hang something peacock blue on his car seat. That color will protect him from envy, he said.

When the middle-class Egyptians we know explain this – the pervasive fear of envy, often called the "evil eye" – they always attribute it to someone else. It’s the way uneducated people think, or people in the countryside, or old people. But they, too, knock wood. Just in case.

On the other hand, Sherine, the woman who cleans my apartment, often compliments little Isaac. And Ahmed, who works the 7-7 shift in the security kiosk outside our apartment, will both compliment and razz him. "Oh, he has beautiful eyes, his mother’s eyes. He has a lovely little nose, his mother’s nose. Gorgeous little hands, his mother’s hands. But those ears. They’re a bit big, don’t you think? They must come from his father." And then he laughs maniacally. But you have to forgive him the wild laughter. He just became a father seven days ago.

*My son, husband and I live in Cairo, Egypt.
**Of course, if there were something wrong with a baby, Dr. Shaltout wouldn’t hesitate to mention it.