Probing through the thick, green leaves of a 15-foot-tall tree, 63-year-old Safiya Sulaiman plucked a reddish orb with a prickly rind. As she cut around its equator, what popped out was a snow-white segment that is highly coveted for its sweetness.
“This fruit is making quite a splash,” she said, savouring the succulence that has assimilated itself lately into the eating habits of Keralites; the rambutan.
For this woman farmer from Erumely, a village on the eastern high-ranges of Kottayam, every harvest season in her farm is a vindication of a decision to ‘grow out of ordinary’. It was exactly a decade ago that Sulaiman, her late husband, had decided to get rid of the overhang of natural rubber on their one-acre farm.
