Dear Reader,

My father cut down four trees today. He had planted these trees, 10 to 11 years ago and three of the four were mature fruit-bearing trees. One was a pomegranate tree and it hadn’t grown too big because when my father was planting trees, he did not leave enough room for them and there just wasn’t enough space, nutrients and sunlight for them to grow to full size. This tree did bear fruit but very small ones that couldn’t be eaten.

One tree was a persimmon tree. These can get really big. I remember when I was a child, there was a persimmon tree near our house where I used to play ‘soldier’ with my friend, and it was pretty huge. We would run around carrying sticks and imagine them to be guns and ourselves to be soldiers. We would hide behind knolls and fire at our imaginary enemy. I wasn’t a big fan of persimmon so I don’t remember eating a lot of them from that tree, but I do remember throwing stones to break a few, and that the tree was so high that we struggled to get many fruits.

The tree my father cut down today wasn’t that big, because of lack of space, as I mentioned, but it did bear some fruit. Birds used to come to eat the fruit and my father would throw stones at the birds to scare them away. When he saw that he couldn’t stand there all day to protect his persimmons, and the birds were gnawing on them anyway, he plucked them while they were still raw and hoped that they would ripen off the tree. I don’t know if this is a standard farming technique but fruits ripened off the tree definitely don’t taste as good. I still don’t like persimmon much and all that fruit he saved from the birds, ripened into a strange sort of jelly and went to waste.

Two trees were lemon trees and they bore fruit almost all year. They gave us so many lemons that we didn’t know what to do with them. My mother used them as much as she could in the kitchen and we also gave them to friends and relatives and neighbors and still there were many that would fall to the ground and shrivel into little brown balls right there. I liked the lemon trees because I’ve always liked the smell of the leaves. When we were kids, we would put some sugar in lemon tree leaves and eat them like a paan.

The sparrows also loved these lemon trees. For some reason, they loved sleeping in it when they weren’t nesting somewhere. They would also fight over this prime property in the mornings and make quite a racket. I like to think that it was the thorns of the lemon tree that made them feel safe. My father threw stones at the sparrows as well, even though they don’t eat any of the fruits. Still they slept in the lemon trees. Now those trees have been cut down and the sparrows must be wondering where their prime real estate went. Maybe they saw my father cut down the trees. Maybe they looked at each other in horror and wondered what was wrong with this human being.

You might be wondering the same thing about my father. Why did he cut down these trees? At first, he told my mother that it was because you’re not supposed to have trees with thorns right in front of the house entrance. This was just an excuse because later he cut down the persimmon tree as well and it didn’t have any thorns. Then he said that he wants to grow some other trees and there’s just no space left. If you think that that’s the stupidest thing you’ve ever heard, you won’t be wrong.

There’s a famous quote that says that stupidity is just as bad as evil. I think it’s worse. I believe that there aren’t that many genuinely evil people in the world. Sure, we all can be evil from time to time, but genuinely evil people, like serial killers and psychopaths, are rare. But the reason there’s so much evil in the world is because it’s full of stupid people. To be clear, I’m not saying this as if I’m better than everyone else. I’m pretty stupid in many ways as well. All of us are mostly stupid with limited intelligence in a few areas.

Cutting down four healthy trees for no good reason is evil. Whether you do it out of evil intentions or because of stupidity, doesn’t really matter that much.

I apologize if this letter makes you sad or angry, but I’ve been feeling this way since morning and it’s hard for me to write about anything else when I’m feeling something so strongly. I almost decided to skip this week’s letter because I didn’t want to write something depressing. But that’s life, I think. Not every story has a happy or positive ending.

So thanks for reading, I guess.

Rudya Aditya