I'm not so crazy about pomegranate, but after a few minutes it was on my palm I changed my mind. The richness color of its skin, red as syrup, it felt heavy in my hand. I closed my hand over it, the tips of my fingers only got to halves of it. the top halves stared back at me. My mind wrapped around my memory when I was five years old girl. I saw a girl with a long braided hair, sitting on the front polished, gray cement stairs of my grandmother's house in Penang.
Abang, a year older than me, sitting next to me, enjoying the pomegranate as it was the most delicate fruit in the world. Pomegranate was the only fruit could hold our 100% attention while we were eating it. We picked each of red ruby-like seed carefully, turned it around between the thumb and forefinger and slowly popped it in our mouth. We chewed it slowly as we were afraid there would be a bone in each seed. If we dropped it, we would picked it up, brushed away the dirt and ate it. No single seed wasted.
Every time we ate pomegranate, we were hoping to find a ruby among the hundreds of red shining seeds. We were told long time ago, there was a young girl while eating a pomegranate, she heard a sound of crack in her mouth. She spat it out thinking it was a chip of her tooh.
It was not the chip of her tooth, but the red pomegranate seed. She showed it to her mother. It turned out a ruby.
We bought the story. So, it was red ruby we were hoping to find hidden between the red seeds of pomegranate.
Long after I outgrown of pomegranate/ruby story, I figured it out the reson the old folks came up with their tales. I don't think the little girl really existed. It was one of many ways the old folks wanted us the kids to do what they wanted us to do. They never told us exactly what's behind the sacred word DON'T. They didn't say, "Look, pomegranate is hard to come by, it is expensive, don't waste it." Instead they twisted, twirled, rolled, flipped and turned the words between their tongues and teeths, like...........
A girl shouldn't be singing in a kitchen while she is cooking. She will endup getting an old man as a hushand.
I sang, I howled out of tune in the old days when I was in the kitchen. I married a man four years my junior. He became my ex. And men I've dated were 4-6 years younger than me .
The truth is, your singing might be distract you from your cooking . Your family probably be eating burnt fish curry, or you'd probably cooked your sayur kangkung to death.
Twenty something years later I asked my mother about the story of the girl who found the ruby in her pomergranate. She said when she was a kid, she was told the same thing.
Why did they ever come up with the ruby story? "Look, you might choke on the seed if you don't sit and eat it if carefully." Was it so hard to tell the kids the truth? How do the adults expect the children to be honest with them, when the adults turn, twist, fold and tear the truth?
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