There Is No Fear In Love

        I will tell you  about a moment in my life that I think, has  a very profound effect on me  and somehow alters  my  world .

        This is a story happened more than 12 years ago involving me and my mother. When we were living in Terengganu, we had a fruit orchard about 10 kilometres  from our home. You see ,my father and mother were very fond of gardening and planting fruit trees such as durian , langsat , dokong , orange and  rambutan just to name a few. We usually made trip to the orchard during the weekends and sometimes spent a night there. We had a small wooden house built just for the purpose and also as a temporary place to gather and store fruits. Have I mentioned that the orchard was on a piece of land cleared from a forest and the surrounding area was well, pretty much still an untouched jungle?

         On that eventful day, my mother asked me to go to the orchard with her as she wanted to check on her fruit trees as it was the starting of the fruit season . My father had to skip the ‘fun’ as he had an emergency  work meeting. I agreed as I had nothing else to do anyway although I wasn’t just  that  into all these kind of activities. My other siblings stayed home and off we went just the two of us. On a motorcycle.Usually we went with our trusty suzuki jeep.

        Make no mistake, she is good if not great a driver. She is the only female driver among her many siblings and due to work she frequently drives long distance with her car. But that day, we overlooked one thing, it rained last night and the gravel and red soil path leaving the tarred road going into the cleared forest was wet and slippery. We were going slightly downhill on that road when the motorcycle’s tyres lost traction. We fell down quite dramatically. I hit my head quite hard on the road and the ‘thump’ sound produced seemed to be a testimony to that. My mother slid a bit more downhill with the motorcycle. She had lacerations just below her eyes from her broken eyeglasses. Luckily we both had helmets on and there were bruises here and there on us. As we were already very close to the orchard, we walked to the wooden house, leaving the motorcycle at the side of the road.

        I didn’t think we would be able to ride back out after what happened. Moreover, my mother looked a bit shocked and shaken. I was scared and that was an understatement. But at that time, there was only one thing that lingered in my mind, my mother safety , so I  gathered up courage to use a shortcut through the forest and abandoned rubber plantation to the tarred road in effort to get help from my father’s friend who lived in that area.

        Fear as they say, is about the unknown. It was creepily dark because of all the big trees and I couldn’t help but notice all the sounds that the forest had to offer. The insects somehow started to perform their own ‘orchestra’  along with singing from birds and continuous vague shouting of some unidentified mammals from a distance. I swore I could hear someone calling my name in the distance at that time.

     I managed to get through, luckily with my sanity intact and I had to walk for a few hundred metres on the tarred road before I met a boy who offered to give me a ride on his bicycle to the house belonged to my father’s friend ,not far from there. I told father’s friend what happened and we went to get my mother with his car. My father arrived about half an hour later after I rang him.

      Thankfully, we had no serious injury or anything, just a bit shocked and bruises. Even the motorcycle was functioning normally. It looked very serious to me so that had led me to make the decision to use that shortcut through the forest. I was 10 and  that possibly the best I could do .However it made me realized that I would not let anything happen to my mother even if I didn’t notice that before. I conquered my fear because of love to my mother.

A memory in the orchard