The Mistress of Spices (25 page)

“What would I have decided? I don’t know. Over and over and over I’ve repainted the scene in my mind, trying to see past what happened to what might have.”

He pauses to look at me with a sudden hope in his eyes. But I do not know how to look into the realm of lost possibilities and must with regret shake my head.

His breath falls between us, heavy, solid. “I keep telling myself, it’s the past, let go of it. But you know how it is. It’s a lot
easier to be wise up here—” he taps his head “—than in here.” He puts his hand on his chest and rubs it absently, as though to ease an old injury.

Raven, tonight I will lay on my windowsill
amritanjan
, ointment that is like cold fire, hot ice. Which makes you sweat away the pain and what is sometimes worse, the memory of pain that we humans cannot seem to stop clutching to ourselves.

“In the moment of my deciding,” he says, “this is what happened. From the back of the room my mother said, soft but urgent, in the special voice she kept for when I was about to do something really dangerous, No. It is possible that she had not meant to speak, for when I turned to look she had clapped a hand over her mouth. Still the harm was done.

“Hearing her tone I’d drawn back instinctively. It was a small movement, but it was enough. The bird gave a great cry and rose in the air. I could feel the rush of wind as it beat its wings. It rose straight up. I was terrified it would crash into the ceiling and injure itself, but it went through it like it was water and disappeared. Only a feather floated down and landed in my hands. I touched it and it was the softest thing. Then it melted into my palm and was gone.

“When I looked up my great-grandfather had slumped forward. A couple of men ran up, then shook their heads and laid him on his back. A wailing came from the others crowding around his bed, but I was mute with guilt. And loss as I remembered the kindness in his face, and that feather, like silk, like eyelashes in my palm.

“My mother was pulling me toward the door, saying, Come on, let’s go, we’ve got to go. I pulled back. Frightened as I was—
for surely it was I who’d killed him—I felt I had to get to the old man’s side, to lay my hands in his one last time. But I had no chance against my mother’s adult strength.”

Raven looks at me blindly. “That was the first time,” he says, “that I really hated my mother.”

I see the memory of it in his eyes. It is a strange emotion, not the wild and stormy hatred one would expect a child to feel, but as though he had been pushed into a frozen lake and now, having emerged, saw all things with a changed, deliberate, icy vision.

“I didn’t struggle anymore—I could see it was no use. Instead I reached out and yanked at her necklace. It broke with a snap so loud I expected people to turn to look, but of course the loudness was only in my head. My mother drew in a sharp, shocked breath and raised her hand to her throat. Pearls flew in every direction, hitting the floor and walls with small, hard sounds.

“You made me hurt my great-grandfather, I said. He’s dead because of what we did. And then I turned and walked to the door. There were pearls under my shoes, smooth, slippery bumps. I trod heavily, wanting to crush them, but they skittered away, and when I looked back, the dark floor seemed to be strewn with tears of ice.

“A shivering had passed over my mother’s face at my words, and when it resettled, I saw that it was different, looser, as though the muscles had suddenly grown tired of trying. A part of me, horrified, wanted to stop, but the new, hating part made me go on.

“He was going to give me something really special, I said, and you took me away from it.

“Sometimes I wonder. If I hadn’t spoken those words, would my mother have said something different,
I didn’t mean to cry out like that, baby, it just happened
. But maybe not. Anger is always easier than apology, isn’t it?”

“Yes,” I say. “Yes—for us all.”

“This is what she said, in a voice so clear and reasonable that only I, who knew her so well, could catch the edge of fury beneath it: He was dying anyway. We had nothing to do with it. I’m just sorry that you ended up being there when it happened.
That
was my mistake. I never should have let that idiot talk me into coming back. And as for something special, don’t let all the mumbo-jumbo in that room fool you.

“By now we were out on the porch, where more people had gathered. Thick-necked men wearing dirt-stiff jeans, some drinking out of bottles, a few eating chunks of fried dough dipped in gravy from paper plates. The women sat like pillars, heavy in hip and thigh. If they thought anything of us, a slender, pearl-buttoned woman and a boy in a suit, if they heard the words we hurled at each other, they hid it behind their blank faces. As we passed, one of the women lifted the edge of her dress to wipe a child’s nose.

“My mother stopped. This,
this
, is what I’m taking you away from, she said, and I didn’t know if she was referring to the entire scene, or to that unshaven woman-leg exposed so carelessly, the ugly folds of flesh and fat.

“Look carefully, said my mother, the disgust clear in her voice. Don’t forget it. This is what your life would be if you—or I—had done what he wanted.

“And then we were in the car.”

Now the sun hangs low over the Pacific, a giant burnt-orange
gulabjamun
for the waves to lick at. Raven and I pack the remnants of our picnic. I watch his back as he throws the last pieces of the bread to the gulls, the stiffness he holds in his shoulders and hips, for it has been hard for him, dredging up this story from where he had buried it, giving it, through words, life and power again. I wish to tell him so much: how his story has filled me with sorrow and amazement, how I am honored that he has given it to me, how in the listening I have taken a part of the pain into my own heart, to hold and understand, and I hope to heal. But I feel he is not ready for me to say these things. Besides, the story is not over yet.

Now Raven turns to me with a determined smile. “Enough of the past,” he says, as though he has wrested it back into its lawful place, away from now. As though such a thing were possible. “Shall we head to the beach? There’s just enough time for a stroll along the ocean before we return. If you want.”

“Yes,” I say. “I want.” And deep in me, under the sorrow and the longing to console—for such is the paradox of the heart—a selfish hope I am half ashamed of stirs: Perhaps if I look out. If I call. The snakes.

Hope not built on reason brings disappointment only
. That is what the First Mother would say.

But I cannot resist. There is something in the air, a sense of benediction, undeserved gifts floating down on thick dust-gold sunbeams. If ever the snakes were to come back to me, it would be today.

At the very end. I will call to them just before we go back.

We walk on the cold speckled sand, feel the give of it under our weight, the way it wells up to mold itself around our ankles.

Ah ocean it has been so long. Every footstep is a memory, like walking on broken bones. Like that old tale, the girl who wanted to become the best dancer in the world. Yes, said the sorceress, but each time you set your foot on earth will be like knives slashing. If you can stand the pain, you will be granted your desire.

First Mother, who would have thought the taste of salt-spray on my lips as I walk beside the man I must not love would bring this longing for that simpler time when you made all decisions for me.

“There are moments in our lives,” says Raven, “you of all people surely know them. A few rare moments when we are given a chance to repair what we damaged in unthinking rage. Such a moment came to me once, and I threw it away.”

We are walking back up the beach, retracing our steps. The sea air is like a drug that fires my senses. I am aware of everything with knife-keen precision: the way drops of water hang for a moment in the air when a wave explodes against the cliff, the tiny pink flowers growing from crevices in sea-rocks where one would expect nothing to grow, and most of all the rasp of regret in Raven’s voice as he lets himself be taken by the undertow of memory.

“A few minutes into our journey home that day, the car stopped at a red light. My mother took her hands off the wheel to rub tiredly at her eyes. I watched the long, bent line of her neck,
and her throat, so naked and fragile, and a thought came to me:
Throw your arms around her, call her by that magic childhood name
, Mommy,
which once made everything right. There will be no need for further words, apology or blame. Let skin speak to skin as you press your face into her neck, that fragrance you have known forever
.

“But something kept me in my seat, immovable, stubborn as a stone. Maybe it was that sense that comes to us all at some point in the growing-up process, that we are separate from our parents and must suffer our own lives, with our own sorrows. Or maybe it was something simpler, a childish spite,
Let her hurt like I’m hurting
. And then the light changed and she started driving again.”

I see them in the car, mother and son, tied together in the bond of blood which is closest and perhaps most painful. I feel in the back of my throat the aching force of the words dammed up in theirs. I know how with every mile it will be harder to say them. Because with every mile they are moving farther from each other, farther from that moment of grace offered to them briefly. Even as their breaths mingle, even as her elbow grazes his when she reaches to change gears. Until the distance that stretches between them grows too vast for human traversing.

“After that day,” says Raven, “I became a different person. My world was like a bag turned upside down, with all the certainties shaken out of it.

“We’d be doing something ordinary—maybe my mother would be driving me to the dentist’s, or we’d be at the store picking out clothes for school. I’d look up to make a remark, and suddenly the memory of that dark room would drop like a film
over my eyes, changing everything I looked at. I’d stare stupidly at the Levi’s I’d been wanting for months, or the sign on the dentist’s wall that said YOU DON’T HAVE TO BRUSH ALL YOUR TEETH—JUST THE ONES YOU WANT TO KEEP, which I’d found so funny the last time I was there. But now they meant nothing.”

Fear breaks over me like a black wave as I listen to Raven. If a single brush with the life of power could leave him so bereft, what would happen to me. I Tilo who have given up all to be Mistress. How would I bear it if the spices ever left me.

And Tilo, by doing what you have done today, are you not pushing them toward such a leaving.

I want to stop Raven. To say, Enough, take me back to my store. But I am in it too deep now, his story. And beyond, Haroun waits.

Tomorrow, I say to the spices, trying to believe my promise. From tomorrow I will be obedient.

Overhead, the gulls’ call is like raucous laughter.

“My mother too had become a different person. Something went out of her that day in the car, some core of resolution, some drive, which perhaps she’d used up when she spoke that fateful
no
. She kept on doing all the same things—our home was still meticulously clean and cared for—but not with the same intense belief. Where before she’d liked sound—the radio would always be playing in our house—now I’d come home from school to find her sitting by the window in silence, gazing out at the empty lot across the street filled with high, swaying weeds. Perhaps the journey back to where her life had begun had made her see that
in some way she hadn’t really escaped it, not in her heart, which is the only place where it counts.

“But all this I thought of much later. At that time I’d look at that brief unfocusedness in her eyes before she hurried to fix me a snack, becoming housewife and mother again, and I’d think,
guilt
. And with the cruelty that perhaps only children can feel toward their parents I would think,
Good. She deserves it
And I’d think of ways to punish her further.

“One of these was to watch her. Just sit and stare at her as she did her chores—mopping the floor, dusting the furniture—but where before in her movements I’d seen the natural grace I’d so loved her for, I would now see strained effort. The effort to be as different as she could from the women she’d left behind, greasy-haired women with a bunch of kids pulling on their faded dresses, crying. Women who’d lost control of their bodies and their lives the way she was determined never to. I’d pretend to do my homework while I watched her helping my father with the accounts, her fingers moving nimbly over the calculator. I’d sit in a corner of the room with a book and watch her pouring tea into matching cups for her church friends, passing around home-baked shortbread as if she’d done it every day of her life. And all the while I was waiting for the mask to slip, the muscles to slacken, a dullness to overcome her features. But of course it never did.

“I could tell it made her uncomfortable, though. If we were alone, she’d say, What’s wrong with you, don’t you have anything else to do? And when I shook my head, her eyes would darken—with guilt, I would think again, though now it occurs to me that perhaps it was only helplessness—and often she’d leave the room. If others were present she’d send me a silent, imploring
glance,
please go
, and when I looked blankly through it, she’d get flustered so that sometimes she added things up wrong or spilled the tea.