Mark and the Giant Watermelon

When I was about eight, on me second or third trip home to Klias in Sabah in Borneo Island, my family bought a giant watermelon. It was possibly accompanied by the persistently-popular prawn/shrimp crackers, (whose artificial flavors run universal between the fingers of children throughout the South Pacific seas) jack fruit, ramputan, and durian. These are all very tropical, very delicious fruits whose size, shape, tactile quality and scent are highly distinguishable. We probably cut up a pig back home as well. My father and his brothers' (all 74 of them...or 11, I can't remember) would go wild boar hunting when he was little. And Yong's mother, my rather ill-tempered Aunt, would have slaughtered a couple of chooks who would be served with apples placed by their necks. I remember the gentle stream of blood mixing with water as she washed them out into the drain on the side of their house, as I dashed around shooting Malvin with a newly-purchased plastic water pistol. He would have been four, and hilariously/dangerously uncouth towards my grandfather, who would have been 94 or so (he lived to be 99, but nobody's really sure, because he made up his age when he arrived in Malaysia as an indentured labourer). It was Chinese New Years, and "Gong Xi Fa Choi!" (Happy New Year!) songs was blaring out of the television, the house was decked out with bright red lanterns as well as ung-bao packets (money gifts) and firecrackers and moon cakes.

But I am meandering. The story I meant to share with you involves only the giant watermelon. Context is secondary.

The four-wheel drive (SUV) pulled up in the front driveway, a dusty grey road filled with stones that hurt when you walked barefoot but made terrific projectiles for boys to be boys with (I would later nearly blind my cousin Yong with one of them days before he flew home to live with us). We hopped out--my family, one Uncle, some cousins, possibly an Aunt, and began to carry fruits and fireworks and other Chinese New Year essentials into the house, a ramshackle two-story behemoth whose bathroom hygeine-levels scared the living daylights out of me. Being eight, I was eager to prove my physical strength to others, and this watermelon--though certainly large and difficult for my hands and stomach grasping action to control--was to be taken in by nobody else. I shooed off the others with arrogant disdain.

"I can do it! Let me do it! I can do it!" I scolded, as Dad shook his head, slightly unsure of his son's ability to carry what was to be an essential element of the Hiew family's New Year's feast that year. But, to my great surprise, he only shook his head slightly, gathered shopping bags and headed indoors. After scrapping with the watermelon for a few moments, I looked up, and found that absolutely nobody was outside. It was simply me, Mark, and a watermelon that when placed tall-side up, would have come past my chest.

Now by the left hand side of this house was a giant pit. Not like the volcanic sort that one finds in Los Angeles, but one far more artificially toxic. It's certainly a large hole, more like a steep, semi-natural valley that could have been forged by a landslide or a Japanese bomb during the War or the Hiew family's ancestors. I'm not really sure. The point is though that far too much of Malaysia's countryside is awfully polluted, and this pit was a case in point. It was absolutely filled with plastic shopping bags.They may have been multicoloured and from a variety of stores in town, but they were certainly not of any type of aesthetic appeal. Shopping bags and food scraps, I believe. And the dogs (oh the dogs!) would go rummaging around there all day, then come back inside the house, flea-ish and nasty and wiping muck all over the chairs, and nobody seemed to notice!
It was nothing but a giant eyesore; one that would constantly lead me to wonder: "Why did my extended family throw all those bags down there?" And "What sort of fun would it be for me to roll down that massive slope?"

Now on this occasion, the car was parked particularly close to the beginning of the drop-off between the front yard-ish region of the house and this gaping pit. After several anxious minutes of tugging and re-tugging, I quickly realized that this giant watermelon would not be lifted by my small arms that day. Admitting partial defeat, but far too vain to ask somebody older to take it in, I decided--rather rashly and in particularly poor judgment--to employ the "roley-poley" technique. Much like walking a chair across a room leg by leg, or more accurately, a Camusian snowball up a slope, I stooped down low and began to slowly push the oversized, sweet mother of goodness towards home. Those open front doors were my goal, and by george, that green football was going to sail through those posts, even if it did involve thick layers of filthy dust and dog poo!

Problem was, and you have likely guessed it, that large oblongish watermelons do not roll straight. They wobble. A lot. This particular one wobbled so much that it began to take a dangerous course, veering to the left of its prescribed path and then suddenly, horrifyingly, over the precipice of the gaping pit of plastic rubbish bag doom.

I literally gasped. "Mum will not like this", my mamma's boy eight-year-old mind squealed.

There was only one thing to do. I leapt down the precipice like Indiana Jones, chasing after the tumbling green orb as it bounced down the steep hill, knocking into small roots, picking up then discarding toxic blue grocery bags, and gathering pace all the time. Now I was quite quick back then, and I managed to catch it before it got down even half way down the hill.I clutched that watermelon like it was my life savings in a piggy bank during the Great Depression. And yet, after sliding along such dusty terrain, it had become incredibly slippery. My hands, to exacerbate the situation, were sweaty and kiddish. Alas, these two conditions combined meant that I dropped the watermelon just as I began hauling myself back up the hill, and this time, I did not catch it again. In fact, at one point during my second chase, I fell down. And tumbled. Like the watermelon.

And in response to the question I had up until then been asking myself: doing roley-poleys down a disgusting, trash-filled hole of colouful crap is not fun.

Nor was dragging that precious nugget of black-pipped, red-fleshed nectar all the way back to the house from the bottom of the hill.

I try to imagine the expression on my face upon delivering the watermelon back to my father, standing at the kitchen, cracking open peanuts with his siblings.There is Chinese New Year music on the television above me. Chickens are cooking, women are laughing. It's hot as all hell. I am so far from 'home', yet feel so surrounded by 'home.'

I am grinning, and it is the cheekiest, most rueful grin I have ever grinned before.