Tree of joy
An old rambutan tree that bore the sweetest fruits, holds endless sweet memories for this writer.
DEVELOPMENT had reached our village, right into the compound of Mother’s old house.
A portion of the compound was to be taken by the authorities to widen the road just beside the house. Mother would literally be sleeping by the roadside with the noise of passing cars, lorries and buses just a few metres away on the main North- South trunk road.
Mother’s garden had many beautiful mature trees, planted with love over the years. There were rambutan, mango, guava, jackfruit and coconut trees. Many of these trees had to be sacrificed to make way for the road.
There were many rambutan trees: red, not so red, yellow and not so yellow. But there was one particular tree that was everybody’s favourite.
This special tree was planted by Father many years ago near the fence beside the old road. Each year it produced big, yellow and sweeter than sweet fruits. Its taste lingered in the mouth. Everyone who had eaten the fruit said it was the best rambutan they had ever tasted.
During the fruit season, the tree turned gold in colour. It was laden with fruit, from the top of the tree right down to the lower branches. The lower branches touched the ground, heavy with fruit. Long poles were needed to get the fruit at the top. As for the lower branches, we only had to bend down to pluck the fruits.
Later, the tree grew so huge that its branches went beyond the fence around the old house. It became the spot under which schoolchildren gathered before going to school.
When in season, the children feasted on the fruits, leaving the skins on the ground and making that side of the tree barren of fruit. The rest of the tree which was inside the fence, remained in its golden yellow splendour.
When my siblings and I were young, we were almost always hungry. We were delighted to see even a shadow of yellow in the fruits, because we knew that the fruits were now palatable as compared to the green ones which were bitter. The fruits never had a chance to ripen fully.
Mother always scolded us for picking the fruits with our bare hands. She had a peculiar thing about picking the fruits; you shouldn’t break the stem with your fingers, and you had to use a special secateur. Using your hands to break the stem would damage the tree, she said. She had read that somewhere. We didn’t argue with her; after all, it was her tree.
As we grew older, we were not as hungry as before. Mature fruits were left on the tree until they became blackish red and turned bad, and fell to the ground. There were just too many fruits. In the day time, birds flocked to the tree and had a great feast. At night bats flew in and had a party.
On Sundays, when she was not working, Mother ordered us to collect the fruits and made them into rambutan jam. We peeled the skin off, baskets and baskets of them, cut them into small pieces ( electrical blenders were unheard of in those days), added lots of sugar and cooked the mixture in a huge wok for hours till it became dry and sticky.
By then we would complain to Mother that our hands were tired of turning the jam. The rambutan jam was eaten for breakfast with bread bought from a Punjabi bread vendor who did the evening rounds in our village.
Sometimes we ran out of bread, but it did not matter, the jam was even more delicious when scooped out and licked, spoon after spoon, sometimes with our bare fingers.
At the end of each fruit season, Mother got someone from the village to trim all the now barren branches, in time for the tree to grow new shoots which would bear fruit in the next season.
Mother’s grandchildren, too, loved this tree. During family gatherings and festive celebrations, the children loved to play under this tree. Its huge gnarled branches, a sign of old age, were low. It crawled on the ground like a fat python that had just eaten a heavy meal, bent and twisted and lazy. You could just sit on it like an easy chair. This was where we always found the children to call them in for dinner. Even the adults loved to sit under the old tree. It was shady and cool, its large foliage blocking the heat from the sun.
When all of us moved out of the house and had our own families, the tree still bore lots of fruit. Mother was now too old to turn the fruit into jam. She would wait for someone to come home from Kuala Lumpur and then she would pick all the ripe fruits and put them in different plastic bags to be distributed to the rest of us, as most of us had settled down in Kuala Lumpur.
The old tree is gone now, cut down to pieces. Its dried branches are kept under the old house, to be turned into firewood. We can see the view of the new road with its traffic straight from the house. The old tree had acted as a screen from the road and had given us some privacy.
The spot where it used to be is now clear and sunny. New grass has grown there, but whenever I look at that empty spot, the tree is still there, prostrating on the ground with its yellow bunches of fruits. I can even hear the laughter and happy shrieks of the little children playing under that old rambutan tree.