Bombyx mori is a cute little silkworm, a moderately gray looking caterpillar that produces silk. But it also bears another form of significance to those acquainted with the works of Robert Galbraith. It's an exciting plot point around which a detective novel named The Silkworm featuring Cormoran Blue Strike revolves around. I won't spoil it for anyone if they are up and about reading it. And this too is not about the book.
So, I started reading it last week and finished it in one sitting. Usually, in such books, I can tell who the perpetrator is within the first few chapters. Nevertheless, however much I tried with this one, I couldn't break through to who might've been behind the killings. For some reason, to me, that is more appealing, getting there before the protagonist does. So, to enhance and stimulate my neurons a little, I ate everything that is tagged as brain food available to me.
My brother is an avid gardener, and he has collected quite a few rousing ferns and sprouts in his collection over the years. Some are even poisonous, but if used in controlled and redacted dosage for medicinal purposes, it helps with sleep. In his collection, there is this orange tree you see below. These fruits, too, are supposed to be brain food. In that hope, I ingested quite a few even tho it's soo pungent yet couldn't guess who the murderer was until Cormoran did the big reveal.
But, me failing at reasoning at something is not fabulous blog material now, is it? So, let's put it up on the shelves for another time and let me tell you a story about how a Chinese orange tree found its way to a tree vase a staggering 1897 Kilometers away.
It's been over a year since the last time I got to meet with my cousin. A tall, dark, and slick looking guy with a very intriguing feature, that is, along with his hair, even his beard is curly. As the youngest kid from both of our families, I had this irreplicable bond with him. For year after year, we two would step on adventures that could only be read in books. That is because we would try to mimic what we read in adventure paperbacks like The Treasure Island or Robinson Crusoe.
We were in the same class from grade one through to middle schools. Among the two of us, he was the more popular one which had made me into his cringy sidekick.
Last year, when my sister died, he booked the first flight available from China to Bangladesh, hoping that he would get to see her for the last time. It's not in our culture to keep our dead above ground for long as It only tends to increase trauma for the elders. It took 51 hours for him to land, boarding procedures included, and he missed her funeral.
Among all of my cousins, he was the closest to her. Even more so than me in some ways, as my sister had taken care of us for a sizeable portion of our life. Only so that he got the proper education, she took him in and admitted him to a college near her house after he graduated from high school. For a couple of years, she was her guardian until he got a scholarship in a Chinese engineering school. He took it and after that, he didn't return for three years, hoping that he would complete his graduation, secure a job and then come back to his homeland. But maktub had a diffrent say in it, in his plan.
Maktub means "It is written" in Arabic. Or, in other words, Destiny/Fate.
He stayed for a week, and in that duration, his only priority was how he could comfort my grieving family. He had wasted a big chunk of his TA salary to buy knickknacks- because, in his opinion, gifts cure grief. And as a joke, for me, he had brought a whole bunch of Chinese sour oranges. One bite and even your intestines would curl up. The tinier the fruit, the more pungent it is supposed to be
In Chinese local legends, tea made with this fruit is supposedly an aphrodisiac and brain food. It is supposed to enhance skills in bed, both before and after the light is turned off.
So, he had thrown a dare at me to cheer my moods up. That being, if I could eat a total of four oranges, he would buy me any of one of anything from a predetermined store, no matter how pricey it was, but on one condition- that I have to chew and eat them whole, skin and all. I took him on his bet, and I lost. Or more so, I got disqualified because I cheated. When it seemed he was looking the other way, I tried to sneak one out of the bucket and put it in the table's drawer, but I got caught. Still, he bought me a headphone that left a big dent in his pocket.
He left a week later, only after my coping mechanism started working without any farther help.
The anniversary of her death this year was July seventh. Naturally I was lost in nostalgia, in hindsight throughout the day, and memory of that dare came back. A little chuckle came out when I retained back the memories of how I got caught, but couldn't get back to what I did with the orange that I skulked away. While searching, I opened up that drawer, which usually remains shut as it never gets used. And lo and behold: to my surprise, that dried up orange was still sitting right there.
Once a big yellowish golf ball-like fruit that then looked like an Egyptian cats nutsack. So I threw it out. But, somehow, the dried-up orange had miraculously grown into a small tree. Rain might've something to do with that as this is the season of monsoon and the peak of downpour,
It's funny how seldom the unexpected keeps befalling for better or worse. I mean, what are the chances that it would grow even after a year and in a quite different soil composition thousand miles away in a foreign place. One in a billion? A question the answer to which remains composed in Maktub.