The Mistress of Spices Read online

  I should have not allowed it. But how could I pull away.

  All those things you warned me against, First Mother, I wanted them. His grateful lips innocent and ardent in the center of my palm, his sorrows shimmering like fireflies alighted in my hair.

  At the same time inside me something twisted in fear. A little for me, but for him more. I cannot see the future, true. But that desperate pulsing in his wrists, the blood flowing too fast as if it knew it had only a little time—

  He stepped jauntily into the dangerous dark outside the store, Haroun unafraid because hadn’t I promised. I who can make it all happen, green cards and promotions and girls with lotus eyes.

  I Tilo architect of the immigrant dream.

  O Haroun, I sent up a plea for you into the crackling air you left behind. Sandalwood keep safe the brightness in his eye. But there was a sudden explosion outside, a bus backfiring or maybe a gunshot. It drowned out my prayer.

  Today I admit gladly that I had been mistaken. For now it is three months and Haroun, smiling with sunshine teeth and new American words, says “Lady you not gonna believe this. I quit my job with that Kapadia memsaab.”

  I wait for him to explain.

  “All these rich people, they think they’re still in India. Treat you like janwaars, animals. Order this, order that, no end to it, and after you wear out your soles running around for them, not even a nod in thanks.”

  “What now, Haroun?”

  “Listen, listen. Last night I’m sitting at McDonald’s, next to Thrifty Laundromat on Fourth Street, when someone puts his hand on my shoulder. I jump because you remember, how last month there was a shooting, someone asking money and not getting enough. I’m praying to Allah as I turn but it is only being Mujibar from my uncle’s village up near Pahalgaon. Mujibar that I didn’t even know was in America. He’s done good too, owns a couple of taxis already and is looking for driver. Good pay, he is telling me, special for a fellow Kashmiri and maybe even a chance to buy later on. And think, nothing like being your own master. So I say yes and go and tell memsaab I’m leaving. Lady I tell you, her face turned purple like a brinjal. So from tomorrow I am driving a cab black and yellow like sunflowers.”

  “A cab,” I repeat foolishly. There is a feeling like clenched ice in my belly, but why.

  “Lady I must thank you, it’s all your keramat, and now come look at my taxi, it’s just outside. Come come, the store is being fine without you for a minute.”

  O Haroun, in your entreating eyes I see that a joy does not become real until you share it with someone dear, and in this far country who else do you have. So I must step onto the forbidden concrete floor of America, leaving behind the store as I am never supposed to do.

  Behind me a hiss like a shocked, indrawn breath, or is it only steam rising from an underground grate.

  The taxi is there as Haroun promised in its sculpted butter shell, smooth and sweet but sending a chill into me even before Haroun says “Touch” and I put out my hand.

  The vision explodes against my eyelids like fireworks gone wrong. Dark of evening, the car doors swinging crazily open and the glove compartment also, and someone slumped against the steering wheel, is it man or woman? And the curls are they black and sweat-shiny as fear, is it a once-sunshine mouth, and the skin is it broken-bruised, or only a shadow falling?

  It passes.

  “Lady are you okay, your face is gray like old newspapers, running that big store all by yourself is too much. How many times I said you should put an ad in India West for a helper.”

  “I’m fine Haroun. It’s a beautiful car. But be careful.”

  O Ladyjaan you are worrying too much, just like my old nani back home. Okay tell you what, you make me a magic packet and next time I come I’ll put it in the car for luck. Got to run now. I am promising the boys to meet them at Akbar’s and buy them special khana.”

  He needs he needs—

  But before I can think the spicename he’s gone. Only the rifle-sharp crack of the car door shutting, the engine’s happy hum, the faint smell of gas floating in the air like a promise of adventure.

  Tilo don’t be fanciful.

  In the store the spices’ displeasure waits for me. I must beg pardon. But I cannot stop thinking of Haroun yet. In the burnt-brown air my tongue tastes like copper, like a nightmare you escape for a moment, struggling, because if you sleep you will fall into it again, but your eyes are too heavy and force themselves closed.

  Maybe I am mistaken this time too. Why can I not believe it?

  Kalo jire, I think, just before the vision comes upon me again, blood and shattered bone and a thin cry like a red thread strangling the night. I must get kalo jire, spice of the dark planet Ketu, protector against the evil eye. Spice that is blueblack and glistening like the forest Sundarban where it was first found. Kalo jire shaped like a teardrop, smelling raw and wild like tigers, to cover over what fate has written for Haroun.

  You may have guessed this already. It is the hands that call power out of the spices. Hater gun, they call it.

  Therefore the first thing the Old One examines when the girls come to the island are the hands.

  This is what she says.

  “A good hand is not too light, nor too heavy. Light hands are the wind’s creatures, flung this way and that at its whim. Heavy hands, pulled downward by their own weight, have no spirit. They are only slabs of meat for the maggots waiting underground.

  “A good hand is not palm-splotched with brown, the mark of a wicked temper. When you cup it tight and hold it up against the sun, between the fingers are no gaps for spells and spices to slip through.

  “Not cold and dry as the snake’s belly, for a Mistress of spices must feel the other’s pain.

  “Not warm and damp as the breath of a waiting lover against the windowpane, for a Mistress must leave her own passions behind.

  “In the center of the good hand is imprinted an invisible lily, flower of cool virtue, glowing pearl at midnight.” Do your hands fit this litany? Nor did mine. How then, you ask, did I become a Mistress. Wait, I will tell you.

  From the moment the oldest serpent told me the way, I drove my pirates day and night, relentless, till they dropped on the deck exhausted, not daring to ask why or where. Then one evening we saw it on the horizon, a smudge like smoke or seacloud. But I knew what it was. Anchor, I ordered, and would not say more. And while the tired crew slept as though tranced, I dived into the midnight ocean.

  The island was far, but I was confident. I sang a chant for weightlessness, and pushed through the waves easy as air. But while the island was still small as a fist pushing up into the sky, the chant died in my throat. My arms and legs grew heavy and would not obey. In these waters charmed by a greater sorceress, my power was nothing. I struggled and thrashed and swallowed brine like any other clumsy mortal until at last I dragged myself onto the sand and collapsed into a dizzy whorl of dreams.

  The dreams I do not remember, but the voice that woke me from them I will never forget. Cool and grainy with a hint of a mocking laugh in it, yet deep, deep, a voice to plunge your heart into.

  “What has the god of the sea belched up on our shore this morning?”

  The Old One, surrounded by her novices, and the sun a halo behind her head and shimmering many-colored in her lashes. So that I scrambling to my knees felt impelled to lower my own sand-caked ones.

  It was then I saw that I was naked. The sea had stripped me of all, clothes and magic and for the moment arrogance even. Had thrown me at her feet bereft of all but this dark, ugly body.

  In shame I pulled at my salt-stiff hair to cover me. In shame I crossed my arms over my chest and bent my head.

  But already she was removing her shawl, placing it around my shoulders. Soft and gray as a dove’s throat, and the spice-smell rising from it like a mystery I longed to learn. And her hands. Soft, but with the skin burned pink-white and puckered to the elbows as though she had plunged them into a long-ago blaze.

  “
Who are you, child?”

  Who was I? I could not say. Already my name had faded in the rising island sun, like a star from a night that has passed away. Only much later when she would teach us the herbs of memory would I recollect it—and my past life—again.

  “What do you want of me?”

  Dumbly I stared at her, she who seemed at once oldest and most beautiful of women with her silver wrinkles, though later I would see that she was not beautiful in the way men use the word. Her voice, which I would later learn in all its tones—anger and mockery and sadness—was sweet as the wind in the cinnamon trees behind her. A yearning to belong to her buffeted me like the waves I had fought all night.

  I think she read my heart, the Old One. Or perhaps it was merely that all who came to her were drawn by the same desire.

  She gave a small sigh. The weight of adoration is hard to bear, I know that now.

  “Let me see.” And she took my hands in hers that had passed through fire, who knows where.

  Too light, too hot, too damp. My hands freckled as the back of a golden plover. Palms where at midnight thorn-purple blood-wort would burst into bloom.

  The Old One had taken a step back, letting go.

  “No.”

  Each year a thousand girls are sent back from the island because they do not have the right hands. It does not count if they have the second sight, or if they can leave their bodies to travel the sky. The Old One is adamant.

  Each year a thousand girls whose hands have failed them throw themselves into the sea as they sail home. Because death is easier to bear than the ordinary life, cooking and washing clothes and bathing in the women’s lake and bearing children who will one day leave you, and all the while remembering her, on whom you had set your heart.

  They become water wraiths, spirits of mist and salt, crying in the voices of gulls.

  I too would have been one of them, but for the bones.

  They were why the Old One could not resist taking my hands in hers again. Why she let me stay on the island though all wisdom must have shouted no.

  Most important in a good hand are the bones. They must be smooth as water-polished stone and pliant to the Old One’s touch when she holds your palm between hers, when she places the spices in its center. They must know to sing to the spices.

  “I should have made you go,” the Old One would tell me later, shaking her head ruefully. “They were volcano hands, simmering with risk, waiting to explode. But I couldn’t.”

  “Why not, First Mother?”

  “You were the only one in whose hands the spices sang back.”

  Let me tell you about chilies.

  The dry chili, lanka, is the most potent of spices. In its blister-red skin, the most beautiful. Its other name is danger.

  The chili sings in the voice of a hawk circling sun-bleached hills where nothing grows: I lanka was horn of Agni, god of fire. I dripped from his fingertips to bring taste to this Wand earth.

  Lanka, I think I am most in love with you.

  The chili grows in the very center of the island, in the core of a sleeping volcano. Until we reach the third level of apprenticeship, we are not allowed to approach it.

  Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.

  Lanka, lanka. Sometimes I roll your name over my tongue. Taste the enticing sting of it.

  So many times the Old One has warned us against your powers.

  “Daughters, use it only as the last remedy. It is easy to start a flame. But to put it out?”

  That is why I hold on, lanka, whose name the ten-headed Ravana took for his enchanted kingdom. City of a million jewels turned at the last to ash. Though more than once I have been tempted.

  As when Jagjit comes to the store.

  In the inner room of the store, on the topmost shelf, sits a sealed jar filled with red fingers of light. One day I will open it and the chilies will flicker to the ground. And blaze.

  Lanka, fire-child, cleanser of evil. For when there is no other way.

  Jagjit comes to the store with his mother. Stands partly behind her, his fingers touching her dupatta although he is ten and a half already and tall as wild bamboo.

  “Oi Jaggi don’t hang on me like a girl, go get me a packet of sabu papads.”

  Jagjit with his thin, frightened wrists who has trouble in school because he knows only Punjabi still. Jagjit whom the teacher has put in the last row next to the drooling boy with milk-blue eyes. Jagjit who has learned his first English word. Idiot. Idiot. Idiot.

  I walk to the back where he stares in confusion at the shelves of papads, the packets stamped with hieroglyphs of Hindi and English.

  I hand him the sabu papads. I tell him “They’re the bumpy white ones, see. Next time you’ll know.”

  Shy-eyed Jagjit in your green turban that the kids at school make fun of, do you know your name means world-conqueror?

  But already his mother is shouting “What’s taking you so long Jaggi, can’t find the papads, are you blind, the hairs on my head will go white waiting waiting by the time you get back.”

  In the playground they try to pull it off his head, green turban the color of a parrot’s breast. They dangle the cloth from their fingertips and laugh at his long, uncut hair. And push him down.

  Asshole, his second English word. And his knees bleeding from the gravel.

  Jagjit who bites down on his lip so the cry will not out. Who picks up his muddy turban and ties it on slowly and goes inside.

  “Jaggi how come you’re always dirtying your school clothes, here is a button gone and look at this big tear on your shirt, you badmash, you think I’m made of money.”

  At night he lies with his eyes open, staring until the stars begin to flicker like fireflies in his grandmother’s kheti outside Jullunder. She is singing as she gathers for dinner bunches of saag green as his turban. Punjabi words that sound like rain.

  Jagjit, do they come back when you at last must close your eyes because what else can you do. The jeering voices, the spitting mouths, the hands. The hands that pull your pants down in the playground and the girls looking.

  “Chhodo mainu”

  “Talk English sonofabitch. Speak up nigger wetback asshole.”

  “Jaggi what you meaning you don’t want to go to school, what for your father is killing himself working working at the factory, two slaps will make you go.”

  “Chhodo”

  At the checkstand I say, “Here’s some burfi for you, no no madam, no cost for children.” I see him bite eager into the brown sweet flavored with clove and cardamom and cinnamon. He smiles a small smile to answer mine.

  Crushed clove and cardamom, Jagjit, to make your breath fragrant. Cardamom which I will scatter tonight on the wind for you. North wind carrying them to open your teacher’s unseeing. And also sweet pungent clove, lavang, spice of compassion. So your mother of a sudden looking up from the washboard, pushing tired hair from her face, “Jaggi beta, tell me what happened,” will hold you in her soapsud arms.

  And here is cinnamon, hollow dark bone that I tuck unseen in your turban just before you go. Cinnamon friend-maker, cinnamon dalchini warm-brown as skin, to find you someone who will take you by the hand, who will run with you and laugh with you and say See this is America, it’s not so bad.

  And for the others with the pebble-hard eyes, cinnamon destroyer of enemies to give you strength, strength which grows in your legs and arms and mostly mouth till one day you shout no loud enough to make them, shocked, stop.

  When we had passed the ceremony of purification, when we were ready to leave the island and meet our separate destinies, the Old One said, “Daughters it is time for me to give you your new names. For when you came to this island you left your old names behind, and have remained nameless since.

  “But let me ask you one last time. Are you certain you wish to become Mistresses? It is not too late to choos
e an easier life.

  “Are you ready to give up your young bodies, to take on age and ugliness and unending service? Ready never to step out of the places where you are set down, store or school or healing house?

  “Are you ready never to love any but the spices again?”

  Around me my sister-novices, their garments still wet from the seawater she had poured on them, stood silent, shivering a little. And it seemed to me the prettiest ones kept their eyes lowered longest.

  Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved.

  But on that day I who was the Old One’s brightest pupil, quick to master every spell and chant, quick to speak with the spices, even the most dangerous, quick to arrogance and impatience as often I was, had thrown them a glance, half pity and half derision. I had looked the Old One boldly in the eye and said, “I am.”

  I who was not beautiful and thought therefore I had little to lose.

  The Old One’s stare stung me like the thorn-herb. But she said only “Very well.” And called us to approach her, each alone.

  Through sea mist the island cast its pearl light around us. In the sky rainbows arced like wings. Each girl knelt, and the Old One bending traced on her forehead her new name. As she spoke it seemed the girls’ features shifted like water, and something new came into every face.

  “You shall be called Aparajita after the flower whose juice, smeared on eyelids, leads one to victory.”

  “You shall be Pia after the pal tree whose ashes rubbed on limbs bring vigor.”

  “And you—”

  But I had chosen already.

  “First Mother, my name will be Tilo.”

  “Tilo?” Displeasure echoed in her voice, and the other novices looked up fearfully.

  “Yes,” I said, and though I too was afraid, I forced my voice not to reveal it. “Tilo short for Tilottama.”