When I was a child, I firmly believed that if you swallowed a watermelon seed, a watermelon would grow in your stomach. I'm a forty-one-year-old taxi driver in Cairo, and I can laugh about it now, but at the time it terrified me.
The belief came from my older brother, Karim. One summer, when I was about six, we were eating watermelon on the roof of our building, and I swallowed a seed by accident. He told me, with a completely serious face, that a plant would start growing inside me and eventually come out of my ears. My mother wasn't there to correct him, so I spent the whole evening crying and refusing to drink water, because I thought water would help it grow.
I stopped believing it gradually. A few days passed and nothing happened, which made me suspicious. Then at school our science teacher explained how digestion works, using a diagram of the stomach, and I finally understood that seeds simply pass through the body. I remember feeling furious with Karim, but also slightly disappointed, because part of me had found the idea exciting.
Now I feel quite amused and a little nostalgic. It's a reminder of how much children trust older family members and how easily they accept stories. Karim and I still joke about it, and he's told the same story to his own kids, although I always correct him quickly. It also taught me something useful. When my daughter believes something odd that she's heard from a friend, I don't laugh at her; I explain things calmly, because I remember how real those fears felt.