The Mistress of Spices (4 page)

“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.

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.