The Mistress of Spices (12 page)

He takes it, thanks me meekly.

“Still, I am not sure it will be enough. For the medicine to work true, Geeta herself must come to me.’

“But she will never.” His words are a dry, hopeless sound. Geeta’s grandfather slump-shouldered and shrunken. Overnight his clothes hang on him like a scarecrow’s flapping suit.

Silence pools around us thick as oil. Until finally he coughs it away.

“Perhaps you could go to her?” His voice has learned new tones. Hesitation, apology. “I can tell you the way.”

“Impossible. It is not allowed.”

He says nothing more. Only looks at me with his hurt-animal eyes.

And suddenly, for no reason at all, I think of my American.

Geeta, like you I too am learning how love like a rope of ground glass can snake around your heart and pull you, bleeding, away from all you should. And so I tell your grandfather, “O very well, just this once, how much harm can it do.”

That night I dream of the island.

I have dreamed the island often, but this is different.

The sky is black and smoky. No. There is no sky, and no sea either. The island floats in a dark void, bereft of life.

But I look closer and there we are sitting under a banyan, the Old One questioning us on lessons learned.

“What is a Mistress’s foremost duty?”

I raise my hand but she nods at someone else. “To aid all who come to her in distress or seeking.”

“How must she feel toward those who come to her?”

I raise my hand again, am ignored again.

Another novice gives the answer. “Equal love to all, particular to none.”

“And what distance must she keep?” I wave my arm.

Someone else says, “Not too far nor too near, in calm kindness poised.”

I rise to my knees in anger. Can she not see, or is her ignoring of me a purposed punishment?

“Ah Tilo,” she says, “Tilo ever too confident, well suited to answer this next question, what happens when a Mistress grows disobedient, when she seeks her own pleasure?”

Shampati’s fire, I start to say, but she interrupts.

“Not to her. To the people around.”

First Mother, you never taught us that.

I open my mouth to say this but no sound comes.

“Yes, for I hoped you would not need to know. But you have proved me wrong. Listen well, because now I will teach it.”

As through a telescope her face turns toward me, grows large and looming. Around it all else fades. And then I see.

It is blank. Devoid of nose and eye, lip and cheek. Only a blackness opening where a mouth should be.

“When a Mistress uses her power for herself, when she breaks the age-old rules—”

Her voice grows harsh and hollow, echo of chains clanking on prison stone.
“—she tears through the delicate fabric of the balanced world, and—”

“And what, Mother?”

She does not answer. The black mouth stretches—grimace of sorrow, or a grin? The island begins to rock, the ground grows hot. And then I hear the roaring. It is the volcano, spewing ash and lava.

The Old One is gone now. The other novices also. Only I. Alone on the island that tilts like a plate someone wants to scrape clean. Pellets of scorching rock strike me like shot. I try to hold on, but the ground is smooth as burning glass. I am sliding off its edge into the jaw of nothing.

It is more terrifying than anything I have undergone.

Then I wake up.

And hear myself finishing what the Old One left unsaid.
—and to all whom she has loved as she should not, chaos comes
.

Ahuja’s wife hasn’t been to the store for months.

Earlier I would have spared it no more than a shrug. “What will be, will be,” the Old One told us. “Your duty is to give the spice only, not to anguish yourself over the consequence.”

But something began to change in me when the American came into the store. The hard husk of a grain removed, a seed moistened, turning soft. The hopes and sorrows of humans slipping under my skin like a razor.

I am not sure it is a good thing.

Now at night, I find myself worrying. Has she perhaps not used the turmeric, maybe she has not been cooking Indian food, maybe she is still using a store of old spices bought elsewhere. I imagine the packet slipping from her hand as she goes to pour, the spilled yellow rising in the kitchen air fine as gold dust, lost, lost. The other possibility I push away with all my strength for surely it cannot be, the spice failing which is a failing of my life also.

Instead I remember how at the door when she left, a shaft of sunlight fell on her face, held carefully blank but for that giveaway bruise.

“God be with you,” I had said. And she not answering had inclined her head in thanks, but under the dark glasses was a look that said, After months and months of unanswered prayers, how can I any longer believe.

Recently I catch myself trying to use the sight, to train it like a searchlight on the dark bedroom where she turns her back to the thick sleeping breath of her husband and lets the tears fall cold as pearl onto her pillow. Or are they hot and salt-searing, acid runnels that eat away at her until soon there will be nothing left?

It is forbidden, what I am doing.

“Open yourself to the sight,” the Old One told us, “and it will show you what you need to know. But never attempt to bend it to your will. Never pry into a particular life that has been brought to your care. That is to break trust.”

Was it me that she looked at as she spoke, her eyes flecked with sad knowing.

“Most important, don’t get too close. You’ll want to. Even though you’ve taken the oath to treat all alike, there’ll be the special ones whom you’ll want to warm at your heart’s heat, to whom you’ll want to be whatever they lack in life. Mother, friend, lover. But you cannot. When you chose the spices you gave up that right.

“One step too close and the cords of light connecting a Mistress to the one she helps can turn to webs, tar and steel, enmeshing, miring, pulling you both to destruction.”

I believe this. Have I not already approached the edge, felt it begin to crumble underfoot?

And so I repeat to myself the Old One’s words at night as I wrench my attention from that apartment across town where a man’s voice cracks across a room sudden as a slap, that apartment like a black hole waiting to implode, into which I, raging, could so easily disappear.

Spices I know you will keep her from harm.

Is it doubt I hear beneath my words? The faintest trace, like a whiff of something burning at once whisked away by a stronger wind? Do the spices hear it too?

So when she comes into the store this morning, a little thinner and with deeper circles under her eyes, but well enough, and even a timid, ready-to-take-flight smile quirking up the corner of her mouth as she says
“Namaste,”
relief wells in me. Relief and a slow pleasure like honey, so I must step from behind the counter. Must say, “How are you,
beti
, I was worried, you didn’t come for so long.” Must put my hand—
no, Tilo
—on her arm.

Yes spices I must admit it, this is no accident like the other touchings. I Tilo initiated this joining of skin and blood and bone.

Where my hand meets her, a pulsing. Cold fire, hot ice, all her terrors shooting up my own veins. Light dims as though a giant fist is squeezing the sun. A thick milky gray like cataracts covers my eyes.

This dizzy pain, is this what it is to be mortal human, unpowered by magic?

And Ahuja’s wife. What is she feeling?

I hear the spices crying to me, a sound like hot hands pressed over the ears.
Pull away pull away Tilo, before you’re welded down
.

I tighten my muscles to snatch me back to safety.

Then she says in a broken voice, “O
mataji
, I’m so unhappy I don’t know what to do.”

Her lips are pale as pressed rose petals, her eyes like broken glass. She sways a little and puts out her other hand. And what can I do except take it in spite of the smell that rises ominous through the floorboards, charred and ashy, take it and hold it tight and say, as mothers have done through time, “Hush, child, hush. Everything will be all right.”

“Mataji
, maybe some of it was my fault.”

Sitting in my little kitchen in the back of the store where I should never have brought her, Ahuja’s wife tells me this.

My fault my fault
. A refrain so many women the world over have been taught to sing.

“Why do you say that,
beti?
”

“I didn’t really want to get married. I had a good life, my sewing, my women friends I would go to the movies with and then to eat
pani-puri
, even my own bank account, enough so I didn’t have to ask my father for spending money. Still, when my parents asked, I said, All right, if you want. Because in our community it is a shame if a grown girl sits in the house not married and I did not want to shame them. But till the last moment I was hoping. Maybe something will happen, maybe the marriage plans will break.

“Ah, if only I had been so lucky.”

“But when you met your husband,” I ask as I hand her a stainless-steel glass full of tea, very hot and sweet with a slice of ginger steeped in it for courage, “what did you think then?”

She takes a sip. “He arrived from America only three days before the wedding. That was when I met him. I had seen a picture, of course …”

She pauses and I wonder if he had sent someone else’s photo. I have known it to happen.

“But when I saw him I realized the picture had been taken
many years before.” For a moment her voice sparks with an old anger. Then her shoulders slump under their own weight, as they must have at that first encounter. “It was too late to cancel the wedding. All the invitations sent, already out-of-town relatives arriving, even a news announcement put in the paper. Ah, how much money my poor father had spent because I was his oldest. And if I said no, my sisters would get a bad name too. Everyone would say, O those headstrong Chowdhary girls, better not to arrange a match with that family.

So I married him. But inside I was furious. Inside I was calling him all kinds of insults—liar cheater son-of-a-pig. That first night lying in bed I wouldn’t talk to him. When he said sweet words, I turned my face. He tried to put his arm around me; I pushed it away.”