Mr and Mrs Landlord were lotussed on the ground with their traditional extra wide flat baskets, full of roasted cashews.  It’s that season.  It looks like bloody tedious work too.  You roast them, peel off the outer skin, and repeat a few thousand times.

It’s going on all over town.  At the bookshop, at the garage, all over.  Anybody who owns anything, also owns some land, and somewhere on that land cashews are raining down and not to be wasted.  By tomorrow they’ll all be in little plastic bags to be sold all along the main road, in every shop, whether a hairdresser or a fishmonger the rest of the time.

There is something a bit toxic about that outer layer of the cashew, and that’s why you shouldn’t eat them raw.  It’s a bit like poison ivy.  I never knew this.  I reached for a bag on a grocery shelf and the lady looked alarmed and grabbed it out of my hand.  “You want for cooking?” I shook my head. “You want for eating?” I nodded my head.  She put the pale ones back, and handed me a darker lot that had been roasted.  It was the look on her face that told me that is something to take seriously.

The cashew apple is a gooey sweet pear-shaped thing that usually gets chucked away.  I finally tried one, but it wasn’t very good.  Mrs. L laughed, “Too young.”  Very gooey and liquidy, like a syrupy watermelon, very drippy.   I can imagine they are sweet, at their best, but their best lasts about an hour and that’s a narrow window.  If people collect the sloppy messy old things, they get thrown together and boiled down to distill into a sort of moonshine which scares most people.

Cashew trees really suck up the water from the ground.  I’m told this is why other forms of gardening don’t really work, near cashew and coconut trees.  They are hungry thirty things that grabs all the nutrients, and don’t leave much for others.

So I’m told.

I went to the bookshop and the entire family was elbow-deep in roasted peely cashews.  The young boy scooped up a pile and proudly stuffed them into my hand.  We ate, mom peeled.

It’s cashew season.