Of Apples That Would Not Die

 There are moments when a trivial domestic oversight opens a crack through which an entire age may be examined. This is one such moment.

Recently, we had been away for a month to the USA ( from Singapore) . A long journey, the sort that dislocates routine and dulls memory. In the haste of departure, an apple was forgotten on the dining table—set down casually, without ceremony, as one sets down a pen or a book, assuming time will do what it has always done.

The house was locked. Outside, the tropics performed their familiar labour. The air grew heavy and wet. Days ripened into weeks beneath a sun that tolerates nothing unchanged. In such conditions, fruit does not merely rot; it is claimed. Skin gives way, sweetness turns acrid, and life—fungus, flies, worms—arrives to complete the cycle.

When we returned, I approached the table with the mild dread reserved for such discoveries. One expects a darkened stain on the wood, the collapse of form, perhaps the restless evidence of decay. Instead, the apple lay where it had been left. Its skin unbroken. Its colour undimmed. It possessed the calm obstinacy of an object that had not noticed time passing.

I lifted it. There was no softness, no yielding. It was neither offensive nor fragrant. With a knife, I cut it open, expecting at least some small confession of nature—a tunnel, a blemish, a sign of life’s intervention.

There was none.

No worm. No mould. No beginning of return to the soil. It was as though the apple had been embalmed.

I threw it away at once. But the question it raised did not follow it into the bin.

The Silence Inside the Fruit

Such an apple would have been unthinkable not very long ago. Twenty years past, the cutting of a tomato or an okra—vendakkai—was an act performed with a certain attentiveness. One sliced, one inspected. Sometimes there was disappointment; sometimes mild disgust; often, a quiet acceptance. A worm was no scandal. It was proof that the vegetable had lived a negotiable life, one that insects found persuasive.

What are the chances today?

Slice a tomato now. Split open an okra. The interior is pristine, vacant, almost architectural in its neatness. The worm has vanished, not because it no longer exists, but because it has been taught—by chemistry, by saturation, by force—that this is no longer food.

This change has been welcomed as improvement. Productivity, Cleanliness, we are told. Advancement. Better farming. Yet one must ask: by what standard? The worm is not a creature of taste or preference. It is governed by instinct refined over millions of years. Its refusal is not aesthetic; it is biological.

When the worm withdraws, it does so for reasons older and more reliable than marketing.

What Has Been Altered

The fields have not merely been cultivated; they have been subdued. Plants are now raised in an atmosphere of constant defence—sprayed, coated, fortified, corrected. The soil is instructed rather than consulted. Every other form of life is treated as an enemy to be eradicated, not a participant to be endured.

The result is produce that appears flawless and yet exists in a peculiar isolation. It resists insects. It resists bacteria. It resists decay. And in doing so, it resists its own destiny.

Food once belonged to a visible cycle: growth, ripeness, consumption, return. To interrupt that cycle was considered unnatural. Today, interruption is the very objective.

The Cost Deferred

It would be comforting if such food announced its danger loudly. But it does not. It enters the body quietly, day after day, asking not to nourish but merely to pass through. The body, accustomed to conversation with living matter, finds itself confronted with substances that persist without participating.

The consequences do not appear at once. They arrive as accumulations: fatigue without cause, disorders without precedent, children who grow quickly but not sturdily, appetites that are never satisfied. Medicine responds earnestly, but always downstream, where the damage has already learned to hide.

A Closing Unease

The apple that would not rot is not a marvel; it is a metaphor. It speaks of a civilisation increasingly at odds with the conditions that produced it. When food no longer returns willingly to the earth, one wonders how willingly it can become part of us.

That even worms—nature’s most indiscriminate custodians—refuse our fruits should give us pause. For the judgement of worms is not moral, nor political, nor nostalgic. It is simply accurate.

And accuracy, once ignored for long enough, has a way of becoming fate.