It was a warm and breezy autumn evening in Karachi and my daughters were running around the garden at their great-grandmother’s house. The garden has a variety of flowering plants, ornamental vines, aromatic herbs and trees with ripened fruit. From a distance, I could see them chasing butterflies and running over the lush, green grass.

Suddenly, both of them stopped and seemed to be picking up something from the ground. Initially, I thought it could be a champa [frangipani] flower growing on the side wall or an attractive stone. Both of them were curiously debating the identification of the object in question.

My elder daughter thought it was an acorn, like the one the sabre-toothed squirrel Scrat famously chases in the Ice Age films. I pointed out to them that what they had found was not an acorn but an underdeveloped coconut, which had fallen from the decades-old coconut tree above their heads. Within minutes, the girls had collected over two dozen of these baby coconuts spread around the tree, with plans to use them for any potential school project.

It was good that they did so because around half of the fallen baby coconuts decay within three........

© Dawn (Magazines)