#11 Figs

Bhopal - 28th September 2021

Siddhartha was walking along the road, picking up everything that caught his attention.

Shiny stones, broken pieces of ceramic, some nuts and bolts that may have fallen from the rattling trucks that frequented the village roads. He didn't know why he was collecting them, but his pockets were full, and at this point, quite noisy.

Once in a while, he came across a particularly impressive piece of stone that he liked better, and he had to decide which one to throw away - because he couldn't keep all of them.

A low flying crow distracted him, and his eyes followed the flight of the crow.

He spotted at some distance, his friend, Ravi looking up at a fig tree.

Ravi has been contemplating getting some fig, but he was not sure how to get to them. He didn't know how to climb a tree, and there were no low hanging ones that he could just jump and reach. Seeing Siddhartha approaching, he smiled, knowing that his friend had a sharp aim, and could easily down some figs from the tree - he looked around to see if there were any stones lying nearby.

Siddhartha asked, "What are you looking for?"

"I'm looking for some stones, I want to eat some figs, you could easily get some for both of us by targeting them with stones!"

"There's no need for that. I have a pocket full of them"

And before Ravi could say anything, Siddhartha drew a small stone from his pocket, aimed at one of the figs and launched it. Both of them watched the fig come falling down, hitting the ground with a soft thud.

By the end of the hour, they had collected quite a few of them, and they sat in the shade eating figs.

"How did you end up with your pocket full of stones?" Ravi asked.

"I liked how some of them looked, so I started to collect them. I don't know why I felt like picking them up, it's a funny coincidence that all of it turned out to be quite useful... Be careful, there may be some dead wasps inside." Siddhartha warned Ravi.

"Oh yes, I've noticed that, I've always wondered how did they get inside"

"That's an interesting story! These are actually not fruits, they are a special kind of adaptation where are insides of these figs are really just a bunch of flowers, and since they are on the inside, they can only be pollinated by only a special kind of wasp which can enter the fig through the small hole at the bottom. The wasp lays its eggs inside the fig, while also pollinating the flowers. That's why when you open an unripe fig, you might find it crawling with larvae. They have co-evolved, both of them have just the mechanism that the other one needs and they can't survive without each other. The wasps and the figs shows up just at the right time and place when they need each other"

"Quite like our story isn't it?" Ravi smirked.

"Quite so", Siddhartha said, biting into a ripe fig.