It was getting late and I hadn't had dinner. I thought I'd get something from the hospital cafeteria before going home, but nothing looked appealing. Not that there was anything wrong with the food, it was me. I had lost my appetite.

Still, I should eat something, so I decided to get a plate of cut fruits. I made a selection of papaya, pineapple and chiku, not for any rational reason, but for their bold colours.

Chiku is a tropical fruit, whose proper name is sapodilla. It's the size of a kiwifruit with woody brown flesh that feels a little grainy to the tongue, but when pushed against your teeth, it melts into a very sweet, fragrant puree.

I've always loved chikus, not least because there was a chiku tree in the garden of the first house where I grew up. That was 301 Clemenceau Avenue, where we lived for the first 10 years of my life. It was a townhouse with a forecourt, separated from the road by a low wall, in the centre of which was an iron gate.

To the right of the iron gate (looking towards the house from the road) just 1.5 metres inside of the low wall was the chiku tree; there was another tree to the left, but no one can remember what it was. The chiku tree had been planted by an itinerant gardener on the instruction of my grandmother around 1933, based on the memory of my father, who was 12 at the time. It flowered and fruited soon after and every year since.

The chiku thus became our home fruit. Yet it demanded constant watchfulness, for barely a hundred metres up the road was Chao Yang School. The schoolboys would, walking by, notice the fruit on the tree, clamber over the low wall into the forecourt or up the tree to pick them. If the fruit was hanging too high to reach, they'd throw sticks at it until it fell to the ground.

My grandmother had her hands full chasing the boys away whenever she spotted them. But she had bound feet, and so couldn't have been taken too seriously by any teenager out to prove a thing or two.

My father swears that the marauders were successfully dispelled and that we had the luxury of home-grown chikus. I'm sure we did, but perhaps not as frequently as we might have imagined, for personally, I have a vague memory of chikus being brought back from the market. There they were, mediocre ones passing off as our very own sweet darlings. And there was me, a 4-year-old flicking his eyes suspiciously from chiku to father, thinking to myself, "I'm too old to be fooled."

"No, no," my father still averred the other night, "the chikus came from our own tree." Fifty years on, father will still not admit to son that the family had lost out to schoolboys.

Today the tree and the house are no more. Where they stood, the ground is asphalt: the Central Expressway. Where I once toddled after butterflies, where teenage schoolboys once gave each other a lift up the boundary wall, laughing all the way, where the roots of the chiku tree once hugged the moist earth, now every 2 seconds a speeding vehicle takes a brutal swipe at that sacred patch of ground.

* * * * *

I've always loved chikus. What I had on the plate that evening were the best of the best. They were just perfect: soft, ripe and extremely sweet. Or rather, they would have been perfect if I was 10 years old. Nothing is ever too sugary for a child's palate, but that evening, I thought it they were just too sweet for me.

Instinctively, I pushed them away after the second slice, then caught myself doing that, and thinking, "Whoa, this has never happened before. I have never refused chiku, certainly not account of their being too sweet."

And that's when I realised I wasn't a child anymore.

* * * * *

The reason I was in the hospital cafeteria was because I had been visiting a friend. He had been diagnosed with lymphoma late last year after he was admitted for a collapsed lung. It must have started in the lymph nodes under the armpit and pushed its way towards the chest.

He was immediately given a course of chemotherapy but 5 months later, the cancer was still there. I am told the main tumour had in fact grown larger and it had spread. A second, much stronger, course of chemotherapy was now advised, but even so, the chances weren't good. There were varying estimates about survival probabilities, but none were encouraging.

"I'm not sure", my friend told me, "that it'll be worth the even greater side effects of the second round of chemo."

There was also the option of an auto bone marrow transplant, but that's a very complicated and costly procedure. It provided better chances than chemo, but I don't recall being told any figures.

All in all, I left the ward depressed. Partly, it was because while I knew I had to keep his spirits up and say encouraging things, I didn't think I succeeded. What can one say in circumstances like that that doesn't sound trite or forced? What wand do I wave to give others the will to fight?

He was 33, going on 34.

* * * * *

Two days later, after dinner with some of my regular buddies, I asked one of them, Sam, "If you knew you only had a few more months to live, would you be at peace?"

He thought for a moment, then said, "Yes, I would."

"Before Rahesh," he explained, "I don't think I'd be giving you this answer, but now... yes."

Rahesh is the love of his life. Love has completed Sam, not so much the comfort of receiving it, but the joy of giving it. Beyond this experience, there is little more that compares in adding meaning to life.

* * * * *

Marlowe turned 40 last year. This year, he decided to free himself from his business and start a charity in Indochina to help children of the poorest families. He's still conceptualising the project and working out how to raise funds for it. But he knows he wants to do it; business no longer gives him any sense of fulfillment.

"My father provided well for his family," he told me. "He was a very private man, but a hardworking one, and we all grew up in comfort."

"But he did no more than that, and he died early. His memory lives on in my mother, me and my sister... but that's it. He left no trace except what we remember.

"When my mother is gone, when my sister and I are gone, then even the memory of him will be gone. His life will be extinguished, as if it never existed."

Kind of like the chiku tree, the memory of whose existence will disappear when the people who once ate its fruit fade from the scene.

"I don't want that to happen to me," said Marlowe. "I need to start now to give meaning to my life, to do something that will outlive me."

Perhaps he was too harsh on his father. Do we really need things to survive us? In any case, are not love and altruism two sides of the same coin? Aren't they both reflections of the same timeless truth: that nothing completes us as much as the giving of ourselves?

© Yawning Bread