The Mistress of Spices (7 page)

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.

But she told us, one day.

“Look well Mistresses. Once in a great while a Mistress, grown rebellious and self-indulgent, fails her duty and must be recalled. Warning is sent to her, and she has three days only to settle her affairs. Then Shampati’s fire blazes for her once more. But this time entering she feels it fully, scorch and sear, the razors of flame cutting her flesh to strips. Screaming, she smells her bones shatter, skin bubble and burst.”

“And then?”

The Old One had shrugged, spread those palms with the lines melted out of them, and seeing them I had wondered once again,
How?
“The spices decide. Some Mistresses are allowed to return to the island, learn and labor again. For some it is the end, crumbled charcoal, a last cry dangling in the air like a broken cobweb.”

I remembered all this as I watched my sister-Mistresses. One by one they walked into the fire, and when they reached its center they disappeared. Watching the empty air flicker where a moment earlier they had been, I was struck by a sorrow deeper than I had thought I could feel. Always I had kept my distance,
all these years on the island, knowing this day was to come. And yet when had they slipped into my heart, these girl-women glowing translucent, chaste as alabaster, the last ones in the world to know who I was, and how it felt to be that.

When it was my turn I closed my eyes. Was I afraid? I believed what the Old One had told us: “You will not burn you will not feel pain. You will wake in your new body as though it has been yours forever.” There had been no agony on the faces of my sisters before they vanished. Still it was a hard thing, to confront for the third time in my brief existence the extinguishing of all I knew life to be.

And so far. So far. I had not thought this before. Between the island and America, a galaxy of nights.

On my elbow, a touch like petals.

“Wait Tilo.”

Behind a veil of smoke, that shimmering in her eyes. Was it tears. And the stinging in my heart, what was that.

Almost I said it.
Mother take back the power. Let me stay here with you. What satisfaction can be greater than to serve the one I love
.

But the years and days, the moments that had pushed me to this place, inexorable, and made me who I was, would not let me.

“Tilo my daughter,” said the Old One, and by her face I knew she felt my struggle in her own heart, “most gifted most troublesome most loved, Tilo traveling to America eager as an arrow, I have here something for you.”

And from the folds of her clothing she removed it and placed it on my tongue, a slice of gingerroot, wild island
ada
to give my heart steadfastness, to keep me strong in my vows.

Hot prick of ginger, you were the last taste on my tongue
when I stepped into the heart of Shampati’s fire. Flametongues licked like a dream at my melting skin, flamefingers pushed down my eyelids.

And when I woke in America on a bed of ash, an age later or was it only a breath, the store already hardening its protective shell around me, the spices on their shelves meticulous and waiting, you were the first taste, ginger, gritty and golden in my throat.