The Mistress of Spices Read online

  I think this most when I remember the pirates.

  The pirates had teeth like polished stone and scimitars with handles made from the tusks of boars. Their fingers were laden with rings, amethyst and beryl and carbuncle, and around their necks hung sapphires for luck at sea. Polished with whale oil, their skin gleamed dark as mahogany or pale as birchbark, for pirates come from many races and many lands.

  All this I knew from the stories we children were told at bedtime.

  They raided and pillaged and burned, and when they left they took the children. Boychildren to make into more pirates, and girlchildren, whispered our old maidservant, shuddering with relish as she blew out our bedside lamps, for their evil pleasures.

  She knew no more about the pirates than any of us children. No pirates had been sighted around our little river village for at least a hundred years. I doubt that she even believed in them.

  But I believed. Long after the stories were done I lay awake and thought of them with yearning. Somewhere out in the great ocean they stood, tall and resolute at the prows of their ships, arms crossed, granite faces turned toward our village, hair whipped free by the salt wind.

  That same salt wind would sweep through me. Restlessness. How tiresome my life had become, the endless praise, the songs of adulation, the mountains of gifts, my parents’ fearful deference. And these unending nights lying sleepless among a gaggle of girls who groaned out the names of boys in their dreams.

  I would turn my face into my pillow to escape the emptiness opening like a black hand inside my chest. I would focus my attention on my discontent until it glittered sharp as a hook, and then I would cast it out over the ocean in search of my pirates.

  I was using the calling thought, though only later on the island would I learn its name. The calling thought which, as the Old One told us, can draw to you whoever you desire—a lover to your side, an enemy to your feet. Which can lift a soul out of a human body and place it raw and pulsing in your palm. Which used imperfectly and without control can bring destruction beyond imagining.

  And so. Others may blame the merchant-sailors who carried tales of me to every land for the coming of the pirates. But I know better.

  They arrived at dusk. Later I would think it a fitting time, that moment when day cannot be told apart from night, truth from longing. A black mast cleaving through evening mist, a score of torches flickering their avid red over hut and grainstack and cowbarn, already smelling of charred flesh. And later, the flared eyes of villagers, mouths open to scream and only smoke billowing out.

  We had been eating when the pirates splintered the bamboo walls of my father’s house and burst upon us. Grease dripped from their blackened faces, and between curled lips, yes, their teeth were polished stone. Their eyes also. Polished and blind as they came toward me, pulled by the force of the calling thought, that gold hook I had sent so heedlessly over the waters. A foot kicked away bowls and pitchers, scattering rice and fish and palm honey, an arm curved casually through the air, driving a sword into my father’s chest. Other hands pulled tapestries from walls, dragged women into corners, piled necklaces and earrings and jeweled waistbands onto a green skirt that one of my sisters had been wearing.

  Mother, I never thought it would feel like this.

  I tried to stop them. Cried out all the charms I knew till my throat was raw, made the signs of power with shaking hands. Blew on a pot-shard to turn it into flint and aimed it at the pirate chiefs heart. But he flicked it away with a finger and motioned to his men to bind me.

  My calling thought had set in motion a juggernaut wheel whose turning even I could not arrest.

  They carried me through the burning village, I dazed by shock and shame, by this new helplessness. Smolder of rubble. Animals bellowing their terror. The pirate chiefs voice lifted above dying moans, giving me in awful irony my new name. Bhagyavati, Bringer of Luck, for so I was to be for them.

  Father, sisters, forgive me, I who had been Nayan Tara, who had wanted your love but only won your fear. Forgive me, my village, I who in boredom and disappointment did this to you.

  Their pain stung like live coals in my chest as the pirates flung me onto the deck of their ship, as we took sail, as the flaming line of my homeland disappeared over the horizon. Long after the calling thought had worked itself out and my powers came to me again, strengthened by hate as power often is, long after I overthrew the chief to become queen of the pirates (for what else I could be I did not know), that pain ate at me. Vengeance did not appease it, as I had thought it would.

  This was not the last time I would misguess the workings of my heart.

  Ah, I thought I would burn forever, scar and peel and still burn, and I welcomed the punishment.

  For a year—or was it two, or three? Time runs into itself at moments in my tale—I lived as queen, leading my pirates to fame and glory, so that bards sang their fearless exploits. I carried this secret pain that branded itself onto each chamber of my heart. This pain, the other face of which was the truth I had learned so hard: The spell is greater than the spellmaker; once unleashed, it cannot be countered.

  Nights I walked the decks alone and sleepless, I Bhagyavati, sorceress, pirate queen, bringer of luck and death, my cloak dragging in salt dust like a torn wing.

  I would have laughed, except I had no smiles left. Nor tears.

  I will never forget them, this pain and this truth, I told myself. Never.

  I did not know then that everything is forgotten. Someday.

  But now I must tell you about the snakes.

  The snakes are everywhere, yes, even in your home, in your favorite room. Under the hearthstone perhaps, or curled in a nest of insulation in the wall, or camouflaged among carpet strands. That flickering at the corner of your eye, gone when you swivel around.

  The store? The store is full of them.

  You are surprised? You have never noticed any, you say. That is because they have perfected the art of invisibility. If they do not wish, you will never see them.

  No, I do not see them either. Not anymore.

  But I know they are there. That is why each morning before the customers come I set earthen bowls of milk in the far corners of the store. Behind the extra bags of Basmati, in the thin sliver of space under the shelves of dals, near the glass case heaped with gaudy handicrafts that Indians buy only when they need to give gifts to Americans. I must do it just right, feel along the floor for the correct spot, warm as skin and throbbing. I must face the right direction, north-northwest, which is called ishan in the old language. I must whisper the words of invitation.

  Snakes. Oldest of creatures, closest to the earth mother, all sinew and glide against her breast. Always I have loved them.

  Once they loved me too.

  In the heat-cracked fields behind my father’s house, the land snakes shielded me from sun when I was tired with playing. Their hoods spread ripple-wide, their smell cool as wet earth at the bottom of banana groves. In the streams that ribboned the village, the river snakes swam with me skin to skin, arrows of gold cutting through sun-flecked water, telling stories. How after a thousand years the bones of drowned men turn to white coral, their eyes to black pearl. How deep in a cavern underwater sits the king snake, Nagraj, guarding mounds of treasure.

  And the snakes of the ocean, the sea serpents?

  They saved my life.

  Listen, I will tell you.

  When I had been queen of the pirates for some time, one night I climbed to the prow of the ship. We were in the doldrums. Around me the ocean lay dark and thick, like clotted iron. It pressed in upon me like my life. I thought of the years behind me, all the raids I’d led, all the ships I’d plundered, all the riches I’d amassed meaninglessly and meaninglessly given away. I looked into the years ahead and saw the same, wave upon inky frozen wave.

  “I want, I want,” I whispered. But what I longed for I didn’t know, except that it wasn’t this.

  Was it death? It seemed possible.

&
nbsp; And so I sent another calling thought over the water.

  Sky grew dull like the scales of a hilsa fish stranded on sand, air sparked and stung, wind keened in our masts and ripped at our sails. And then it appeared on the horizon, the great typhoon I’d called up from its sleep in the ocean troughs of the east. It came at me, and beneath it the water was boiling.

  The pirates screamed their terror in the holds below, but the sound was muffled, like an echo out of my past. When your heart is crusted over with your own pain, it is easy to feel little for others. A question rose in me like the tip of a broken mast in a storm-tossed sea. Had other voices cried to me in these tones once, long ago? But I let it fall back unanswered into the roaring.

  O exhilaration, I thought. To be lifted up through the eye of chaos, to balance breath-stopped on the edge of nothing. And the plunge that would follow, the shattering of my matchstick body to smithereens, the bones flying free as foam, the heart finally released.

  But when I saw that funnel mouth poised over me, and in it flashes of gray, like whirling knives, a heavy coldness filled my limbs. I knew I was not ready. The world was sweet as never before, suddenly, piercingly, sweet, and I wanted it with all my being.

  “Please,” I cried. But to whom I did not know. Too late Bhagyavati bringer of death. Then I heard them.

  A low sound no more than a hum, no match surely for that shrieking gale. But coming from someplace deep and slow, the center of the ocean perhaps, the ship vibrating with it and my heart also. And their heads held still above the spinning water, the calm glow from the jewel each wore on its crest. Or was it the glow from their eyes that held me so.

  I did not know when the typhoon lifted into the sky, when the waves gentled. My body was filled with their song, and weightless, and shining.

  The sea serpents who sleep all day in caves of coral, who ascend to the surface only when Dhruva, star of the north, pours its vial of milk-light over the ocean. Their skin like molten mother-of-pearl, their tongues a ripple of polished silver. Who are seldom seen by the mortal eye.

  Later I would ask, “Why did you save me, why?”

  The serpents never answered. What answer is there for love.

  It was the sea serpents who told me of the island. And doing so, saved me once again.

  Or did they? Some days I am not so sure. ‘Tell me more.”

  “The island has been there forever,” said the snakes, “the Old One also. Even we who saw the mountains grow from buds of rock on the ocean bed, who were there when Samudra Puri, the perfect city, sank in the aftermath of the great flood, do not know their beginning.”

  “And the spices?”

  “Always. Their aroma like the long curling notes of the shehnai, like the madol that speeds up the blood with its wild beat, even across an entire ocean.”

  “The island itself, what does it look like? And she?”

  “We have only seen it from far: green slumbering volcano, red sand of beaches, granite outcrops like gray teeth. Nights when the Old One climbs the highest point, she is a pillar of burning. Her hands send the thunder-writing across the sky.”

  “Haven’t you wanted to go to it?”

  “It is dangerous. On the island and also the waters that touch its roots, her power alone prevails. Once we had a brother, Ratna-nag, he with the opal eyes, the curious one. He heard the singing, ventured closer though we warned.”

  “And then?”

  “His skin floated back to us after many days, his perfect skin still supple as newborn seaweed, smelling of spice. And above it, crying wild, circling till sunset, an opal-eyed bird.”

  “The island of spice,” I said, and it seemed that I had finally found a name for my wanting.

  “Do not go,” the serpents cried. “Come with us instead. We will give you a new name, a new being. You will be Sarpa-kanya, snake maiden. We will take you over the seven seas on our backs. We will show you where under the ocean Samudra Puri sleeps, biding its time. Perhaps you will be the one to awaken it.” If only they had asked before.

  The first pale dawnlight gleamed across the water. The serpents’ skins grew transparent, took on the color of the waves. The call of the spices coursed up my veins, unstoppable. I turned my face from the serpents to where I imagined the island waiting for me.

  At once sorrowful and angry, their hissing. Their tails whipping the water white.

  “She will lose everything, foolish one. Sight, voice, name. Perhaps even self.”

  “We should never have spoken of it to her.”

  But the oldest of them said, “She would have learned some other way. See the spiceglow under her skin, sign of her destiny.”

  And before the ocean closed opaque over his head, he told me the way.

  I did not see the sea serpents again.

  They were the first among all that the spices were to take from me.

  I have heard that here too in America, in the ocean that lies beyond the red-gold bridge at the end of the bay, there are serpents.

  I have not gone to see them. It is forbidden for me to leave the store.

  No. I must tell you the real reason.

  I am afraid that they will not appear to me. That they have not forgiven me for choosing the spices over them.

  I slide the last dish into place under the case of handicrafts, straighten up with a hand pressed to my back. It tires me at moments, this old body which I put on when I came to America, along with an old body’s pains. It is as the First Mother had warned.

  I think for a moment of her other warnings which too I had not believed.

  Tomorrow I will lift out the dish, empty and licked to gleaming, and not even a sloughed-off bit of skin for me to see.

  Still, sometimes I think I will try it, stand in evening mist at land’s end in a grove of twisted cypress, among foghorns and black seals barking, and sing to them. I will put shalparni, herb of memory and persuasion, on my tongue and chant the old words. And even if they do not come, at least I would have tried.

  Maybe I will ask Haroun, who drives a Rolls for Mrs. Kapadia, Haroun whose footsteps I hear light as laughter outside the door now, to take me there on his day off.

  “Lady,” says Haroun rushing in, carrying the scent of pine wind and akhrot, the crinkled white walnut from the hills of Kashmir where he was born. “O Lady, Lady, I have news for you.”

  His feet fly over the worn linoleum, almost not touching. His mouth is an eager light.

  Always he has been like this. From the first time when he came into the shop behind haughty-hipped Mrs. K, finding and piling up and carrying and salaaming but always the rueful amusement in his eyes saying, I am playing at this only for a while. And that night he came back alone and said “Lady please to kindly read my palm,” and offered me his upturned callused hands.

  “I can’t read the future,” I told him.

  And truly I cannot. The old one did not teach it to the Mistresses. “It will keep you from hoping,” she said. “From trying your best. From trusting the spices fully.”

  “O but Ahmad told how you helped him get a green card, no no don’t shake your head, and Najib Mokhtar who was about to be fired and on third day after he came to you and you gave him special tea to boil and drink, subhanallah, his boss got transfer all the way to Cleveland and Najib was put in his place.”

  “Not me. It was the dashmul, herb of ten roots.”

  But he kept holding his hands in front of me, those hands so hardened and trusting, until finally I had to point to the coarse pads and say “How did you.”

  O that. Shoveling coals on ship when I came over, and then in car shop. Wrenches and tire irons and in between road work with jackhammers and pouring pitch.”

  “And before that?”

  A small trembling in the hands. A pause.

  “Yes, before that also. Back home we are boatmen on Dal Lake, grandfather and father and I, we row our shikara for tourists from America-Europe. One year money is so good we line the seats with red silk.”


  I did not want to hear more. I sensed his past already in the lines rising ridged and dark as thunder from his palms.

  From under the counter I took a box of chandan, powder of the sandalwood tree that relieves the pain of remembering. I sprinkled its silk fragrance onto Haroun’s hands, careful not to touch. Over the lines of his life. “Rub it in.”

  He obeyed, but absently. And as he rubbed he told me his story.

  “One day the fighting started, and tourists stopped coming. Rebels rode down from mountain passes with machine guns and eyes like black holes in their faces, yes, into the streets of Srinagar, the name which is meaning auspicious city. I am telling father Abbajan we must leave now but grandfather said ‘Toba, toba, where will we go, this is the land of our ancestors.’”

  “Hush,” I said, willing away the old lines from his palm, setting his sorrows free into the dim air of the store. His sorrows circling and circling above our heads to find a new home as all released sorrows must.

  Still he spoke them, staccato words like chipped stone.

  “One night rebels. In our lake village. Came to take the young men. Abbajan tried to stop them. Shots. Echoing over water. Blood and blood and blood. Even grandfather who was sleeping. Red silk of shikara turning redder. I wish I too I too—”

  As the last of the chandlan melted into his palms, he shuddered to a stop. Blinked dazed as though waking.

  “What I was saying?”

  “You wanted to know your fortune.”

  “O yes.” A smile taking shape so heartbreaking-slow on his lips as though he were learning it all over again.

  “It looks good, very good. Great things will happen to you in this new land, this America. Riches and happiness and maybe even love, a beautiful woman with dark lotus-flower eyes.”

  “Ah,” he said in a little sigh. And before I could stop him, he bent to kiss my hands. “Lady I am thanking you.” His curls glinted soft black, a summer sky at night. His mouth was a circle of fire, burning my skin, and his pleasure flaring along my veins, burning them too.