The cashew tree
By: K S S Pillai
During my last visit home, I had become nostalgic to see that the old cashew tree in the southeast corner of our residential plot was not there. I learnt that it had dried up and was cut. Our neighbours told me in hushed tones later that the tree was ‘killed’ by the man who cultivated the paddy field in front of our house by using some chemicals.
My association with the tree stretched back to my childhood. It was under that tree my siblings and I had spent most of our time when our school was closed for the summer. The dry leaves that fell from it were collected every morning by the womenfolk and used as fuel in the hearth.
New bunches of flowers would start appearing on its branches in the month of February. Honeybees, butterflies, and some other insects would hover over these flowers and land on them often. As the fruits became bigger, they would attract the attention of squirrels, crows, and the children.
Green nuts at the end of small apples would appear a few days later. Women would pluck matured green nuts to make dishes using the kernels. The cashew apples would slowly grow in size and their colour would change to red while the nuts became grey.
Squirrels would start nibbling at the apples when they became sweet. Crows would join them soon, flying to nearby coconut trees with the plucked fruits and eat them undisturbed. Sometimes the fruits would slip from the crows’ hold and drop to the ground. Children would later pick them up, throw away the remnants of the apple and pocket the nuts.
Bats would monopolize the tree at night. They would suck the apples dry and drop them to the ground with the nuts at the end. The sound of their moving among the branches and that of the dropping fruits would be heard by us. Though each of the siblings would resolve to be ‘the early bird that catches the largest number of worms’, most would oversleep and the alert ones would collect the nuts in the light of kerosene lamps. Sometimes children from the neighbourhood would sneak onto the compound before us, leaving no nuts behind.
As the tree was infested with aggressive red ants, our parents prohibited us from climbing it. The only way left was to bring down the fruits even from high branches by throwing stones and logs about two feet long at them. We would suck the apples, and put the nuts in our pockets.
Vendors carrying large baskets on their heads would visit each house with cashew trees in the compound and buy the nuts. By the end of the season, each child will have a large sum of money. The vendors would later sell the nuts to cashew factories located in the nearby town of Kollam. These factories provided employment to several women in the neighbourood. After sorting out the kernels, they would send them in attractive packets to different parts of the country and abroad. The broken kernels would be sold in the factory outlets at a cheap rate.
At night the children would gather around bonfires made with the dry twigs and leaves of the cashew tree and parch the nuts in it. When the outer shell was fully burnt out, the kernel would be eaten after removing the shell by striking at it with a stone.
There was a field beyond the path in front of our house, growing paddy twice a year. One Gopalan and his father were given its charge by the owner.
They would build a thorny fence around the field to prevent trespassing. They had asked us several times to cut down the branches of the cashew tree above the field, but it was never done. When fruits fell in the field, children would race to pick them up, breaching the fence and damaging the paddy crop. I could not blame them if they wanted to eliminate the tree.
(The author is a retired professor of English. A regular contributor to ‘The Kashmir Vision’, his articles and short stories have appeared in numerous national and international publications)
