The Beloved Rambutan

The hairy fruit (photo from www.rambutan.com)

There is a rambutan tree (Nephelium lappaceum) in front of our house. Mak Ngah gave us the sapling years ago when she was working with the Ministry of Agriculture. It bears fruit all year long, so we don't give much attention to it. We never mind that on Fridays people often just pluck the rambutans off the tree on their way home after the prayer, but sometimes my parents still like to yell at the school children; LOL.

Driving home from a cousin's wedding at Tanjung Karang on Saturday, I was so pissed at the people in a car in front of us. They were eating rambutan, and were throwing the skins and seeds out of their vehicle onto the road along the way. I’m pretty sure that littering counts as antisocial behavior; why can’t these people keep the rubbish in a bag and throw it away properly later? It reminds me of a reader-submitted cartoon in a newspaper recently about a father teaching his son “not to litter… near the house” as he dumped a bag of trash onto the roadside from a moving car. Talk about having a third world mentality, the lack of appreciation towards the environment is one thing, selfishness and lack of respect for others is another.

It just follows that I really hate smokers. They care little that the rest of us non-smokers suffocate in the vile smoke, and treat the world like one giant ashtray. An ustaz at the department, now a fellow colleague, never tires to tell us that smoking is as haram as liquor. We had an interesting discussion on the subject in Fiqh class. Smokers have no respect for others, thus deserve no respect in return.

Back to the hairy fruit, it’s not fun at all to be swarmed and bitten by the kerengga or weaver ants (Ocoephylla smaragdina) that ‘guard’ the tree every time my parents ask me to fetch them the rambutan.