> The fruit came from a nearby orchard. Tan asked whether he could have a branch to graft onto one of his trees, but the woman shooed away the idea. So that evening he returned with a villager armed with a rifle. At Tan’s instructions, and for pay, the man pruned a footlong branch with a well-placed shot.
The ending to the story, describing the younger Tans' paranoia of rivals poisoning and stealing his durian trees, suggests that maybe sometime in the future, we might get an epic story akin to "The Orchid Thief", but about durian thievery and conflict:
> On the cusp of the peak durian harvest, which starts each June, he often sleeps in a hammock on the family plantations, guarding ripening fruits from thieves. Durian farming is a cutthroat business. Rivals are suspected of poisoning some of his experimental durian trees. His biggest fear, however, is that someone steals a branch from one of his new hybrid trees, just like his father did so many years earlier.
> The fruit came from a nearby orchard. Tan asked whether he could have a branch to graft onto one of his trees, but the woman shooed away the idea. So that evening he returned with a villager armed with a rifle. At Tan’s instructions, and for pay, the man pruned a footlong branch with a well-placed shot.