harvest day

It was durian season up at the kebun, and I had decided I was an expert.

The kebun is the orchard on the slope behind the houses, where the big old durian trees are. In season the durians come down on their own, mostly in the night, and in the morning you go up the hill and gather the ones that fell. There is a knack to finding them fast, before the heat and the squirrels get to them, and over the years I had watched it and I had, I believed, completely worked it out. I had the knack. And a person with a knack has a duty to teach it to people who do not.

So I opened a durian school.

"I am going to teach you all to gather durians," I told the gang, up at the kebun in the early light, the great trees over us, the grass still wet. "By the end of this morning you will be experts. Like me."

Divya looked at me. Divya is my best friend, and she is right about things, which is the hardest thing a best friend can be. She had her arms folded already, which is how Divya listens to me, braced, like a wall that has seen weather before and knows more is coming.

I had a whole school ready. The durians had fallen in the night and were lying somewhere out there in the long grass and the leaves, all across the slope, and the job was to find them. So I made it a search. I split the slope into squares. I gave everybody a square. I had signals, hand signals, so we could call a find across the orchard without everybody trampling over to look. I drew a map of the squares in the dirt. A real search needs a map.

A real search needs rules too, so I gave it some. Rule one: when you find a durian you signal it, you do not shout it, so nobody loses his square in the rush. Rule two: nobody opens a durian in the field. A durian opened in the field is a durian eaten in the field, and we had come to gather, not to feast. Ah Wei agreed to rule two with his whole face and did not mean one word of it. I could already see him deciding which durian would be the one he was forced, tragically, to rescue from going to waste.

I put Hana on the top square, because Hana takes a job exactly as given, and a top square stays searched. She searched her square. Then she searched it again. Then, having found nothing and not been told to move, she searched it a third time, slower, on her knees, because I had said search your square and she was going to search that square until somebody released her from it.

I put Kavi on signals. Kavi only knows loud, so naturally I made him the one who calls a find with a quiet hand signal. Kavi cannot do a quiet anything. He found a beetle and signalled it. He found a stick and signalled it. He signalled so many non-durians, at the top of his voice while waving the silent hand signal, that we all came running across our squares about nine times for a beetle.

Aiman set up a stall at the bottom of the slope and started selling the durians we had not found yet, in advance, to people walking past, which is a very Aiman thing to do, selling a thing he has not got to a person who cannot see it.

And the orchard would not cooperate, the way the orchard never does. The squirrels had been up before us, in the dark, and they are better at this than any school. We found a durian with a neat round hole in the side, emptied out, and a squirrel sitting a branch up looking like it had filed the paperwork. We found the smell of durian everywhere and the durian itself nowhere. Kavi signalled, with the silent hand signal and a very loud voice, a snail.

Atok came partway up the slope. Atok will climb for the kebun when he will climb for nothing else. He stood and watched my whole school searching its squares with great seriousness, and he said three words, which were, "Not up there." Then he sat down on a root to watch us not listen to him.

And then Divya said the thing.

"You do not need squares and signals and a map," Divya said, arms folded. "Durians are round. The slope goes downhill. Everything round on a hill rolls to the bottom. They are all in the dip at the bottom of the slope, in a pile, where they rolled in the night. You do not search a hill. You go to the dip."

It was good. It was, in fact, the entire correct answer, the whole of it, said by a girl with her arms folded who had not even raised her voice. So I ignored it, because I had squares, and squares are more impressive than walking downhill, and a teacher with a map and signals does not want to hear that the answer is to stop searching and stroll to the bottom.

We searched the squares for a long time. We found three leaves that felt promising and were not durians, one beetle nine times, and a chicken that had opinions about being inside square four. The slope had a great many places a durian could be and almost no durians in any of them, because the durians were not on the slope. The durians had spent the whole night doing the one thing round heavy things do on a hill.

Divya walked down to the dip.

She did not search. She did not run. She walked to the bottom of the slope, to the dip where the ground flattens out, and there they were. All of them. The whole night's fall, a pile of fat ripe durians sitting in the low spot exactly where she had said, having rolled there in the dark while my school searched the squares they had rolled out of.

She picked up the top one and turned around and looked at me, holding the durian my whole school had failed to find, having found the lot by simply knowing which way down is.

Here is what I did. I did not say the squares had helped really. I did not say the search found them in the end. I put my own plan down, out loud, in front of the whole school, and I said Divya was right. The durians roll to the dip. You do not search a hill, you go to the bottom of it. I said I should listen to her more, because she is almost always right and I almost never do.

Divya went a bit pink. The want she never says out loud, the only thing she really wants, is for somebody to listen to her once and let it count. So I said it loud, at the bottom of the slope, with the durian sitting in her arms where everyone could see it.

And Ah Wei finally got his durian, the one he had been tragically prepared to rescue from waste all morning. Divya, now head of the school, declared that the one with the squirrel's neat hole in the side could not be sold by Aiman and could not be carried down to Nenek, and therefore had to be eaten right there, for the good of the school, by the person most qualified. Ah Wei accepted the duty with enormous dignity and his whole face, which is the only way Ah Wei accepts anything.

Then I made her the head of the durian school. We carried the whole pile down between us, the whole gang, and we did not search one more square, because the school had a new first rule now, and the rule was Divya's: everything round on a hill is already at the bottom, waiting for you to be sensible enough to go and get it.