Malesh: English doesn’t have a precise equivalent for this word, which would be sighed with eyes lifted heavenwards, a fatalistic shrug of the shoulders, or slow spreading of the hands. The term implies weariness and acceptance, but no bitterness, rather a certain degree of voluptuous surrender to fate. It’s an Arabic word, but it also perpetuates an orientalist stereotype, because it’s associated with languor and drift. It’s not tant pis, which carries a tinge of devil-may-care and sour grapes; even the English versions of tant pis – ‘never mind’, ‘oh well’, ‘that’s how it goes’, ‘more’s the pity’ – have an awkward, even fustian feel, close to ‘alas!’ – the latter’s use in English, always in invisible quotation marks, often sounds like archaic hyperbole, too extreme to be truly meant. Malesh has ironic overtones too – sometimes speakers are only pretending that all lies in the lap of the gods, and that they have no control over events or their outcome.

It’s almost interchangeable with inshallah but inshallah is more trusting and pious and expresses a hope for better things. Both terms echo the Italian uses of magari, but malesh implies more despondency and less defiance (it invokes no kindly god), as if any expression of optimism might ricochet on the speaker. Like magari, malesh is also trying to keep jealous fate from noticing and taking revenge and is often uttered to avert disaster. Its meanings shift between a casual shrugging off – as in ‘never mind’, ‘it can’t be helped’ and ‘no worries’ – an expression of sympathy, ‘I’m sorry to hear that’, and a deeper sigh over the vagaries of fate. It can also convey an apology. My mother used to say that malesh caught the Egyptians’ strong sense of fatality, that nothing could be done to change anything – malesh, ‘that’s how it goes’, ‘there we are’, ‘don’t kick against the pricks’, ‘dream on’.

Yet its resignation can be used to comfort someone, shading from ‘let’s hope’ towards ‘never mind’ and ‘there there’. Like magari, it can be another way of crossing fingers that nothing worse can happen. Such terms are shifting and they’re rich in implicatures, as when a speaker attributes an eventuality or behaviour to someone in the hope that this will bring about the desired outcome. They’re filled with far more power and magic than mere sighs or cries or empty interjections such as ‘like, you know’. Malesh, like magari, belongs to the subjunctive mood, to wishful thinking, to fatalism in retrospect and superstitious hopefulness for the future. Both words are left over from a time of pervasive apocalypticism that used speech acts to withstand danger, like guardian monsters at the entrance to a home.

Malesh is one word of Arabic that I never forgot. There are a few others: habibti – darling, sweetie; and mish-mish – which means apricot but is often used for a pussy cat. Several words have migrated and partly settled in English, like meze and lokum, pasha and khedive, hookah and narghile, tarbush and fez, babouches, galabiyya, houris and hashish, divan and sofa, trailing a feeling of a world where human beings lie back and let life and its complexities flow over them. Sofa: of course, this had to be borrowed; of course, there had never been sofas before the West went east. Pews and settles, couches and benches, yes, straight-backed and hard, but daybeds and sofas, divans and ottomans awaited discovery. They had to be imported (and they became the sites of pornographic imaginings, invoked by titles of eighteenth-century littérature galante, and its orientalising mockery).

When I was a child in Cairo, and learning from the grown-ups around me, I’d say it if I broke a toy or dropped honey from a cake down my front, and I remembered the word – and went on using it with my mother – when the rest of my knowledge of the language had fallen away.