Cashew nuts have become so expensive that the common folk can hardly afford them. But that was not the case till a few years ago in my village, where almost every house had at least one cashew tree in its compound. We also had one with its branches spread all around, even extending to the paddy field next to our property.
My siblings and I used to wait eagerly for the cashew season and our joy was boundless when the first of the flowers appeared on the tree. Soon it would be laden with reddish cashew apples dangling from the branches with grey nuts at the end. Since we were prohibited from climbing the tree, we had fine-tuned our skill of throwing stones and foot-long heavy sticks accurately even at the highest branches that would bring fruits thudding down. Though we never got tired of the sweet juice of the cashew apples, we were equally interested in collecting the nuts. There used to be a guy moving from house to house buying the nuts and later selling them to the cashew factories.
Crows and squirrels were not behind us in enjoying nature’s bounty. Unmindful of the stones and sticks that came their way from below, they would keep themselves busy and drop half-eaten fruits with nuts when they could no longer hold on to them.
Bats had the monopoly at night and one could hear the sound of cashew apples, sucked dry, with the nuts at the end, hitting the ground at regular intervals. We would compete with one another to get up early and collect as many nuts as possible.
Late evenings we would collect dry twigs, build a fire under the tree and sit around it roasting cashew nuts. Once the shells were fully burnt out, the nuts would be removed from the fire and broken open with stones and the warm kernels would be eaten to our heart’s content.
Like all good things in life, our golden era with the cashew tree also came to an end abruptly. One morning we were shocked to find the tree wilting. We did not know how it happened but it was widely believed that the new owner of the paddy field, who was not happy with the branches of the tree over his field, had done it with some chemicals. Our only consolation was that it happened before the onset of the cashew season.
Sivan Pillai
Email: pillaikss@yahoo.in