Strange fruit

When we were kids, my younger brother once dared me to take a roll on deodorant –the kind that applied antiperspirant with a plastic ball- and use it on my tongue.
As a stupid child, I did it and then dared him to do it too. My mother returned to the car where she’d left us for only a few moments to find us manically spreading deodorant on our tongues and then going “ewwww!” and screwing our faces up.
I was reminded of this moment, buried in my memory for 20 years, when someone gave me a cashew fruit to eat.
I love cashew nuts, but I’d never seen the fruit before. At first I thought it was rotten, the stalk was green and when I took it in my hand I could feel the wet pulpy centre under the waxy skin. But looking closer I recognised the green sprig at the top. It wasn’t a stalk, it was the nut itself. Underneath the curled green nugget, the drupe, was a pear shaped fruit, bright yellow. It looked like a capsicum pepper.
“Be careful!” said Abdullahi. I weighed the peduncle in my hand and looked at him. What ever for? “The juice, it will stain your clothes”, said Abubakar.
“It will stain your stomach!” laughed Abdullahi before chomping into the bottom of the pseudofruit. Clear liquid dripped from the bite and he sucked as he gnawed through the flesh. They were eating them with their heads tipped forward so all the juice dripped on the floor.
Nigeria grows hundreds of thousands of tons of cashews every year. Not only is the nut and the fruit edible, but the nut’s shell has a range of industrial uses. Distilled, the liquid from the shell is a chemical waterproofing agent used in resins to make flooring, and the crushed shells are used in car brake linings.
The oil in the seed is caustic and an irritant, similar to poison ivy. A friend of mine once worked in a mango farm in Australia. She said if they snipped the branches too close to the fruit, the trees caustic sap might drip on the skin and spoil it. By the end of the day their hands would be covered in sap, which caused nasty broken rashes. I supposed the Cashew tree might be the same. I was always taught in biology lessons the point of having fruit was so that someone could take it and deposit the seed somewhere else. It seems rather churlish for the cashew or mango tree to want to give someone a chemical burn for spreading its seed. Or maybe the tree knows just how much everyone likes its seeds? Would the cashew taste as sweet as the mango?
So I copied the others, taking a big bite from the bottom of the fruit and sucking at the juice like eating a tomato on a picnic. It was sweet, but there was something else. As my teeth got to grips with the sticky, stringy flesh they started squeaking. It felt like the fruit was actually drying my mouth as I swallowed the juice. There was a bitter aftertaste. I looked at the flesh, I’d had to tear it out to get it in my mouth. Memories of that day in my mother’s car came floating up.
“How do you like it?” Abdullahi asked.
“It’s… interesting.” I said, and took another bite just to make sure. The bitterness spread to my jaw and gums, making them ache slightly. The sweet juice salved it, in a way. My mouth felt dry and raspy, I could feel the edges of my tongue. I rubbed the ridges on the top of my mouth. There was no mistaking it –the effect of the hydrophobic juice was exactly the same as rolling a deodorant stick on your tongue. I hadn’t thought about that for years, how could something I’d never laid eyes on before like the cashew fruit, make me remember my childhood?
I stood there, juice dripping from my jutted out chin, my eyes switching from side to side, as I took memories and mixed them with tastes, all the time opening and closing my mouth trying to get the saliva flowing again. The others laughed and slapped their sides.