The Mistress of Spices Read online

  Ah how naive I was to think I could keep my heart hidden from the Old One, she who would later teach me to look into the hearts of others.

  “You’ve been nothing but trouble ever since you came, rule-breaker. I should have thrown you out at our first meeting itself.”

  I wonder still that she was not angrier that day, the First Mother. Did she see mirrored, in my headstrong self, her own girlhood?

  The roots hanging like dreadlocks from the branches of banyan trees rustled in the breeze. Or was it her, sighing?

  “This name, do you know what it means?”

  It is a question I expected. I have the answer ready.

  “Yes, First Mother. Til is the sesame seed, under the sway of planet Venus, gold-brown as though just touched by flame. The flower of which is so small and straight and pointed that mothers pray for their girlchildren to have noses shaped like it. Til which ground into paste with sandalwood cures diseases of heart and liver, til which fried in its own oil restores luster when one has lost interest in life. I will be Tilottama, the essence of til, life-giver, restorer of health and hope.”

  Her laugh is the sound of dry leaves snapping underfoot.

  “It is certainly not confidence you lack, girl. To take on the name of the most beautiful apsara of Rain-god Indra’s court. Tilottama most elegant of dancers, crest-jewel among women. Or had you not known?”

  I hang my head. For a moment again I am the ignorant youngster of my first day on the island, sea-wet, naked, stumbling on the sharp slippery stones. Always she can shame me this way. For this I could hate her if I did not love her so, she who was truly first mother to me, who had given up all hope of being mothered.

  Her fingertips, light as breath in my hair.

  “Ah, child, you’ve set your heart on it, have you not? But remember: When Brahma made Tilottama to be chief dancer in Indra’s court, he warned her never to give her love to man—only to the dance.”

  “Yes Mother.” I am laughing with success, with relief, with triumph at this battle fought and won, pressing my lips to the Old One’s papery palms. “Do I not know the rules? Have I not made the vows?”

  And now she writes my new name on my forehead. My Mistress name, finally and forever, after so many changes in who I am. My true-name that I am never to tell to any but the sisterhood. Her finger is cool and moves smooth as oil. The air fills with the clean, astringent fragrance of til seeds.

  “Remember this too: Tilottama, disobedient at the last, fell. And was banished to earth to live as a mortal for seven lives. Seven mortal lives of illness and age, of people turning in disgust from her twisted, leprous limbs.”

  “But I will not fall, Mother.”

  No hint of shaking in my voice. My heart is filled with passion for the spices, my ears with the music of our dance together. My blood with our shared power.

  I need no pitiful mortal man to love.

  I believe this. Wholly.

  Give me your hand. Open, then shut. Feel.

  Pebble-hard fenugreek lies tight and closed in the center of your palm, color of sand at the bottom of an old creek. But put it in water and it will bloom free.

  Bite the swollen kernels between your teeth and taste its bitter sweetness. Taste of waterweeds in a wild place, the cry of gray geese. Fenugreek Tuesday’s spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain. Spice for days when I want to huddle into a quilt stitched with peepul leaves and tell stories like on the island. Except here who would I tell them to.

  Fenugreek, I asked your help when Ratna came to me burning from the poison in her womb, legacy of her husband’s roving. And when Ramaswamy turned from his wife of twenty years to a newer pleasure.

  Listen to fenugreek’s song: I am fresh as river wind to the tongue, planting desire in a plot turned barren.

  Yes I called to you when Alok who loves men showed me the lesions opening avid as mouths on his skin and said “I guess this is it.” When Binita raised to me her face like a singed flower. Binita with a lump like a nugget of lead in her breast and the doctors saying cut, and the look in her husband’s eyes as he paced and paced the store saying “What shall I do, please.”

  I fenugreek who renders the body sweet again, ready for loving.

  Fenugreek methi, speckled seed first sown by Shabari, oldest woman in the world. The young scorn you, thinking they will never need. But one day. Sooner than they think.

  All of them, yes. Even the bougainvillea girls.

  The bougainvillea girls enter in a flock, like dragonflies at noon. Their sudden laughter peals over me. Warm salt waves that take the breath and pull you to drowning. They float through the musty dark of the store, glistery dustmotes on a ray of light. And for the first time I am ashamed and wish everything shiny and new.

  The bougainvillea girls have hair polished as ebony, coiled in agile braids. Or rippling like mountain water around upturned faces so confident you know nothing bad has ever happened to them.

  They wear jangly bangles in rainbow colors and earrings that swing against the smooth sides of their necks. Their feet arched high in thin glittery heels, their long swaying legs. Their painted nails like purple bougainvillea flowers. Their lips also.

  Not for them the dullness of rice-flour-beans-cumin-coriander. They want pistachios for pulao, and poppy seeds for rogan josh, which they will prepare looking at a book.

  The bougainvillea girls don’t see me, not even when they raise their voices to ask “Where’s the amchur,” and “Is the rasmalai fresh, are you sure.” Blackbird voices pitched high as for the deaf, or the feeble-minded.

  For a moment I am angry. Fools, I think. Blind fluttering mascara eyes. My hand curls in a fist around the bay leaves they have thrown so carelessly onto the counter.

  I could make them empresses. Oceans of oil and honey to bathe in, sparkling palaces of rock-sugar. Leaf of water-hyacinth laid on the palm to turn their touch to gold. Unguent of lotus root touched to the nipples for men to lie enslaved at their feet. If I wished.

  Or I could—

  They think themselves so special. Fortune’s daughters whom she holds high above harm’s touch. But one drop of walnut juice in mandragora, with their names whispered over it. And.

  Dust of crushed bay leaf falls from my fist like smoke. A desire leaps clawed like a tiger from its hidden place in me.

  I will boil petal of rose with camphor, grind in peacock feathers. Say the words of making and be rid of this disguise I put on when I left the island. This disguise falling like old snakeskin around my feet, and I rising red and new and wet-gleaming. Draped in a veil of diamonds. Tilottama most beautiful, to whom these girls will be like mud scraped from the feet before one crosses the threshold.

  My nails cut into my palms. With the blood comes pain. And shame.

  “You’ll be tempted,” said the Old One before I left. “You especially with your lava hands that want so much from the world. Your lava heart flying too easily to hate, to envy, to love-passion. Remember why you were given your power.”

  Pardon, First Mother.

  I wipe contrite hands against my sari. My sari old and patched and stained to guard me against this vanity that presses hot at the walls of my skull, swollen like steam. I breathe it out, red mist. And when I breathe in, I hold on to the smell of the spices. Clean, sharp, sane. Letting me see again.

  And so I bless them, my bougainvillea girls. Bless the round bones of their elbows, the glide of hips beneath their silky salwaars, their Calvin Klein jeans. With the fervor of repentance I bless the curve of their moist palms against the bottles of lime pickles they are holding up to the light, the cans of patra leaf they will fry tonight for bridegrooms or lovers, for they are always newly wed, the bougainvillea girls, or not at all.

  I crinkle my eyes and see them in evening: the lights turned low, silk cushions the color of midnight embroidered with tiny mirrors. Perhaps a little music in the distance, sitar or saxophone.

  They are serving their men biriyani fragrant with ghee, c
ool bowls of raita, patra seasoned with fenugreek. And for dessert, dripping with gold honey, gulab-jamuns the color of dark roses.

  The men’s eyes too darken, like roses under a storm sky.

  Later the women’s mouths, moist red O’s opening as they had for the jamuns, the men’s breathing hot and uneven, rising and plunging and rising again into a cry.

  I see it all. So beautiful, so brief, so therefore sad.

  I let the envy drain out. They are only following their natures, the bougainvillea girls. As I against every advice followed mine.

  Envy like green pus, gone now. All of it. Almost.

  I breathe a good thought over each purchase as I ring it up. The bay leaves, a new packet, their brown edges crisp and whole, I put in for free.

  For my bougainvillea girls, whose bodies glow saffron in bed, whose mouths smell of my fenugreek, my elach, my paan paraag. Whom I have made. Musky. Fecund. Irresistible.

  I sleep with a knife under my mattress. Have done it for so long that the little bump its hilt makes just below my left shoulder blade feels as familiar as a lover’s hand pressing.

  Tilo you’re a great one to be talking of lovers.

  I love the knife (I cannot call it mine) because it was given to me by the Old One.

  I remember the day, muted orange of butterfly wings, and a sadness already in the air. She was handing each Mistress a going-away gift. Some received flutes, some incense burners, some looms. A few were given pens.

  Only I received a knife.

  “To keep you chaste,” she said, speaking for my ears only as she put it in my palm. The knife cold as ocean-water, supple-edged as the yucca leaf that grows high on the sides of the volcano. The knife humming its metal knifesong against my lips when I bent to kiss the blade.

  “To keep you from dreaming.”

  Knife to cut my moorings from the past, the future. To keep me always rocking at sea.

  Each night I slip it under when I unroll my bedding, each morning lift it out and wrap it in its bindings with a thanking thought. Put it in the pouch I wear at my waist, for the knife has other uses also.

  All of them dangerous.

  You are thinking, what does it look like, such a knife.

  Most ordinary, for that is the nature of deepest magic. Deepest magic which lies at the heart of our everyday lives, flickering fire, if only we had eyes to see.

  And so. My knife could be a knife bought at any store, Thrifty or Pay Less or Safeway, the wood handle faded smooth with sweat, the flat dark blade with no shine left to it.

  But O, how it cuts.

  If you ask me how long I lived on the island, I cannot tell you, for time took on a different meaning in that place. We lived our days without hurry, and yet each moment was urgent, a spinning petal borne seaward by a swift river. If we did not grasp it, did not learn its lesson, it would pass beyond our reach forever.

  The lessons we learned on the island might surprise you, you who think our Mistress-lives to be full of the exotic, mystery and drama and danger. Those were there, yes, for the spice-power we were learning to bend to our purposes could have destroyed us in a moment if wrongly invoked. But much of our time was spent in common things, sweeping and stitching and rolling wicks for lamps, gathering wild spinach and roasting chapatis and braiding each other’s hair. We learned to be neat and industrious and to work together, to protect one another when we could from the Old One’s anger, her tongue that could lash like lightning. (But thinking back I grow unsure. Was it real, that anger, or a disguise put on to teach us fellowship?) Most of all we learned to feel without words the sorrows of our sisters, and without words to console them. In this way our lives were not so different from those of the girls we had left behind in our home villages. And though then I chafed and considered such work a waste of my time (I who despised all things ordinary and felt I was born for better), now I sometimes wonder if it might not have been the most worthwhile of the skills I learned on the island.

  One day after we had been on the island a long time, the Old One took us up into the core of the sleeping volcano and said, “Mistresses, I have taught you all I could. Some of you have learned much, and some little. And some have learned little but think you have learned much.”

  Here her eyes rested on me. But I merely smiled, thinking it another of her barbed jokes. For was I not the most skillful among Mistresses.

  “There is no more I can do for you,” she said, watching me smile. “You must now decide where you are to go.”

  Night wind wrapped us in its dark secret smells. Black lava dust sifted soft as powder between our toes. The ridges of the volcano rose spiraled around us. We sat in silence wondering what was to come.

  The Old One took the branches she had given us earlier to carry and wove them into a lattice fan. What branches they were we did not know. There was still much she chose to keep from us. She waved the fan into the air till its swirling became a fog around us.

  “Look,” she said.

  Cleaving through the milk-thick fog the images piled one on another, their edges hard and glinting.

  Skyscrapers of silver glass by a lake wide as ocean, furcoated men and women, white like the snow that lines the pavements, crossing the street to avoid dark skin. Brown-sugar girls in flimsy bright dresses, leaning lipsticked on shantytown porches, waiting for customers. Marble mansion walls embedded with glass shards to tear a man’s palms to strips. Pothole road lined with beggars whose skin can’t hold in their jagged bones. A woman watching through her barred window a world beyond her reach, while on her forehead the marriage sindur presses down like a coin of blood. Narrow cobble streets, shuttered houses, men in fez caps eating medjool dates and spitting out infidel dog as an Indian passes.

  All around us, overpowering like singed flesh, the odor of hate which is also the odor of fear.

  “Toronto,” said the Old One. “Calcutta Rawalpindi Kuala Lumpur Dar es Salaam.”

  Burned-out streetlamps, grilled storefronts, brick-lined alleywalls slashed with letters dripping blackness. Wedding canopy, wail of shehnais, a girlbride in a sharara seeing for the first time the stooped, wrinkled man her father sold her to. Turbaned coolies drinking daru and playing cards by open drains. Garment factories smelling of starch and sweat and immigration raids, women handcuffed and piled crying into vans. Children coughing and struggling blind out of sleep into lung-burning gas. Bloody bugger Hindoostani. Fucking Dothead, Paki go home. Black men in dusty dashikis stalking hot streets, staring through plate-glass windows at air-conditioned Indian shops. Jostling chanting crowd carrying an elephant-headed god down to an ocean made slick with poisons.

  “London Dhaka Hasnapur Bhopal Bombay Lagos.”

  The lost brown faces looked out at us, unseeing, unknowing, calling. We looked back, silent with shock.

  We had known it would be hard to leave this island of women where on our skin the warm rain fell like pomegranate seeds, where we woke to birdcall and slept to the First Mother’s singing, where we swam naked without shame in lakes of blue lotus. To exchange it for the human world whose harshness we remembered. But this?

  “Los Angeles New Jersey Hong Kong.”

  “Colombo Singapore Johannesburg.”

  The images loomed smoking at their edges, searing themselves into our eyeballs.

  Eventually the Mistresses began, their voices low and filled with misgiving, pointing at pictures that danced on the acrid air. For what else was left for them to do.

  “Perhaps I will go here, First Mother.”

  “And I here.”

  “First Mother, I am too frightened, you choose for me.”

  And she inclining her head, assigning to each Mistress what she desired, what she should have desired: the place where she would spend the rest of her life, the place toward which her nature pointed her.

  Dubai Asansol Vancouver Islamabad.

  Patna Detroit Port of Spain.

  Only a few images left now to waver in the night’s-end air.


  Still I said nothing. I waited, not knowing for what.

  Then I saw it. Waves of eucalyptus and ponderosa pine, dry grass the color of lionskin, gleam of glass and polished redwood, the villas of the California rich poised precariously on restless hills. Even as I watched, the images changed to sooty-tenements stacked like crushed cereal boxes, sooty children chasing one another among a crumble of concrete and barbed wire. Now night dropped like a net, and men in torn overcoats huddled around trashcan fires. Beyond, water crested and ebbed dark as mockery, and on the tops of the bridges burned the beautiful, unreachable lights.

  And under it all, earth waited with her lead-filled veins, impatient to shrug herself clean.

  Even before she spoke I knew its name, Oakland, the other city by the Bay. Mine.

  “O Tilo,” she said, “I must give you what you ask for, but consider, consider. Better you should choose an Indian settlement, an African market town. Any other place in the world, Qatar Paris Sydney Kingston Town Chaguanas.”

  “Why, First Mother?”

  She sighed and looked away, for the first time not meeting my eyes.

  But I waited until she said, “I have a feeling.”

  The Old One seeing more than she told, her spine bent and tired under the weight of it. And I stubborn with youth, with wanting to walk the cliff edge like the lion’s tooth. Telling her “It is the only place for me First Mother,” and holding her eye until she said “Go then, I cannot stop you.”

  I Tilo thinking through a wild wave of joy, I won I won.

  In the last hours of the night we piled wood in the center of the volcano, in readiness. We danced around it singing of Shampati, bird of myth and memory who dived into conflagration and rose new from ash, as we were to do. I was last in line, and as we circled the pyre I watched the faces of my sister-Mistresses. They did not flinch too much when at a word from the Old One the wood burst ablaze.

  The fire of Shampati. Ever since we came to the island we had heard the whispers, seen stamped on the lintels and doorposts of the motherhouse the runes of the bird rising, its flame-beak angled toward sky. In one rune only, on the door to the chamber where the Old One slept, forbidden to Mistresses, the rune was reversed, the bird forever plunging into the fierce heart of a blaze. We did not dare ask what it meant.