The Mistress of Spices (9 page)

I want it, though. I want him to know. And I want him, knowing, to be amused. How long it has been since someone looked at me except in ignorance. Or awe. As I think this, loneliness fills my chest, a new dull aching weight, like drowning water. It is a surprise. I did not know that Mistresses could feel so lonely.

American I too am looking. I thought all my looking was done when I found the spices but then I saw you and now I no longer know.

I want to tell him this. I want to believe he’ll understand.

In my head an echo like a song of stone.
A Mistress must carve her own wanting out of her chest, must fill the hollow left behind with the needs of those she serves
.

It is my own voice, out of a time and place that seems so distant I want to call it not-real. To turn my back on it. But.

“You are welcome to look,” I tell the American, my tone all business. “I must be getting ready to close the shop.” To give myself something to do I restack packets of
papads
, pour
rawa
into paper sacks and label them carefully, push a bin of
atta
to the other side of the doorway.

“Here, let me help you.”

And before I have stopped thinking that his voice is like gold-roasted
besan
all mixed with sugar, his hand is on the rim of the bin, touching mine.

What words can I choose to describe it, this touch that goes through me like a blade of fire, yet so sweet that I want the hurting to never stop. I snatch my hand away obedient to the Mistress laws, but the sensation stays.

And this thought: no one ever wanted to help me before.

“A great place you have here. I love the feel of it,” says my American.

Yes I know it is a liberty I take, to call him mine. To smile my response when I should be saying
Please go, it is much too late, good-bye good night
.

Instead I pick up a packet. “This is
dhania,”
I say. “Coriander seed, sphere-shaped like the earth, for clearing your sight. When you soak it and drink, the water purges you of old guilts.”

Why am I telling him this. Tilo stop.

But that silk cloud pulls my words out of me. And into him.

He nods and touches the tiny globes through the plastic covering, courteous and unsurprised, as though what I am saying is most natural.

“And this”—I open a lid and sift the fine powder through my fingers—“is
amchur
. Made from black salt and mangoes dried and pounded, to heal the taste buds, to bring back love of life.”

Tilo don’t babble like a girl.

“Ah.” He bends his head to sniff, lifts his eyes to smile approval. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever smelled before—but I like it.”

Then he moves away.

And says in a voice grown formal, “I’ve kept you too long already. You should be closing up.”

Tilottama. Fool who should know better. To think he’d be interested.

At the door he raises his hand, in salute or good-bye or maybe just to wave away the hovering moths. I feel a great sorrow because he is leaving empty-handed, because I couldn’t find what he was looking for. Because something is twisting inside, telling me I am losing him, the one man whose heart I could not read.

And then.

“I’ll be seeing you,” says the lonely American, and smiles a rhinestone smile. As though he really means it. As though he too will be waiting.

After the lonely American leaves, I wander the store, aimless-sad. Dissatisfaction, that old poison I thought I’d been cured of, bubbles up thick and viscous in me. I cannot bear to lock up. Barring the door would be to admit that he is really gone. Outside, streetlights blink on. Men and women turn up the collars of their coats and disappear underground into the dim clank and clatter of
the subway. A yellow fog fills the deserted streets, and in the distance sirens begin to wail, reminding us how fugitive happiness is. But of course no one listens. I am looking for a spice for him.

“Different spices may help us with different troubles,” the Old One told us after she had taught us the common cures. “But for each person there is one special spice. No, not for you—the Mistresses must never use the spices for their own ends—but for all who come to you it exists. It is called
mahamul
, the root spice, and for each person it is different.
Mahamul
to enhance fortune, to bring success or joy, to avert ill luck. When you do not know how else to help someone, you must go deep into your being and search out the
mahamul
.”

Lonely American, how shall I begin, I who have always prided myself on the quick remedy?

I roam the shelves.
Kalo jire? Ajwain?
Powder of mango-gingerroot?
Choon
, the burning white lime that is wrapped in betel leaves? Nothing seems suitable. Nothing feels right. Perhaps the fault is in me, in my distracted soul. I Tilo who cannot stop thinking about those eyes dark as a tropical night, as deep, as filled with peril.

And why do I persist in calling him lonely? Perhaps even now, even as I stalk discontented down the aisle of lentils, as I plunge restive arms elbow-deep in a bin of
rajma
and let the cool red pods roll over my skin, he is turning a key. The door opens, and a woman with hair like gold mist rises from the couch to take him in her—

No. It isn’t so. I will not let it be so.

He enters and turns on a light, flips a switch, and the sound of a
sarod
fills the empty room. He leans back against a Jaipuri
cushion—for he loves all things Indian—and thinks about what he has seen today, a store smelling of all the world, a woman whose ageless eyes pull at him like-Idle wishing. Idle, riskful wishing.

“When you begin to weave your own desires into your vision,” the Old One told us, “the true seeing is taken from you. You grow confused, and the spices no longer obey you.”

Back Tilo, before it’s too late.

I force my mind to emptiness. I will trust only my hands, my hands with their singing bones to know what the lonely American needs.

The store stands unbarred, lucent crystal vial under the poised boot-heel of night. The doorway swarms gray with mothwings. But I cannot tend to it now.

I enter the inner room and close my eyes. In the dark my hands glow like lanterns. I trail my fingers along the dusty shelves.

Phosphorous fingers coral fingers, I wait for you to tell me what I must do.

In his bedroom the lonely American kicks off his shoes, turns down the silk covers of his bed. He shrugs off his shirt and lets it fall to the floor. Candlelight plays liquid on his shoulders, his back, the hard, muscled swell of his buttocks as he lets his pants fall too and stands straight, lithe, made of ivory. In a moment he will turn—

Fluid fills my mouth in a hot sweet rush. In all my lives before, fortune-teller and pirate queen and apprentice of spices, I have never seen a naked man, never desired to see it. Then my hands shudder to a stop.

Not now, hands, not now. Give me just a moment more.

But they are immovable, adamantine. Mine and not mine. Fisted around something hard and grainy, a pulsing lump whose acrid smell cuts through my vision.

The images crumble, dust or dreaming, and are gone.

Sighing, I open unwilling eyes.

In my hand, a nugget of asafetida.

A crash in the other room, like something breaking. Or is it the night throwing itself against the store’s windowpanes?

Spark-hard rock of Mars, urging the receiver to glory and fame, away from Venus’s seductions. Baleful yellow asafetida to leach away softness and leave a man all sinew and bone.

A gust of wind blows in the smell of wet overcoats. The floor is a floe of ice under my stumbling. I force myself to the door. In my hands the bar feels deadly heavy. Almost I cannot lift it. I must use all my strength to push it shaking into place before it is too late.

Asafetida
hing
, which is the antidote to love.

I lean against the door, spent, knowing what is expected of me, Mistress of Spices, but also their handmaid.

I feel them watching, like a held breath.

Even the air is like iron.

When I can move again, I go to the handicrafts case. I push aside batik scarves and mirrored cushion covers and brass paper knives and terra-cotta goddesses, let them all tumble to the floor until I find it, a small smooth ebony box lined with velvet like a blackbird’s wing. I open it and drop in the asafetida, and in the precise, angled island script the Old One taught us I write,
For the lonely American
.

Around me rises a soft relieved humming. A breeze caresses
my cheek, a gentle exhalation, moist with approval. Or is it tears—I who have never cried before?

I avert my face from the store, from the million spice eyes, tiny, bright, everywhere. Steel points like nails for me to step on. For the first time since I became a Mistress, I pull a covering around my inmost thoughts.

I am not sure it will work, my deception.

But it seems to. Or is it only the spices humoring me?

I slide the box to the back of the shelf under the cash register, to wait in the dust until he comes. I lie down. Around me the spices calm, settle into the rhythms of the night. Their love winds around me heavy as the sevenfold gold Benarasi that women must wear at their wedding.

So much love, how will I breathe?

When the store is lulled into sleep, I uncover the secret chamber of my being and look in. And am not surprised at what I find.

I will not give it to him, heart-hardening asafetida to my lonely American.

No matter what the spices want.
Not yet, or never?

I do not know the answer to that.

But deep inside I feel the first tremor, warning of earthquakes to come.

The rich Indians descend from hills that twinkle brighter than stars, so bright that it is easy to forget it is only electricity. Their cars gleam like waxed apples, glide like swans over the potholes outside my store.

The car stops, the uniformed chauffeur jumps out to hold open the gold-handled door, and a foot in a gold sandal steps down. Soft and arched and almost white. Rosepetal toes curling in disdain away from what lines the street, wadded paper, rotting peels, dog shit, shucked-off condoms thrown from the back windows of cars.

The rich Indians rarely speak, as if too much money has clogged their throats. Inside the store which they have entered only because friends said “O it’s so quaint, you
must
go see at least once,” they point. And the chauffeur springs to fetch. Basmati rice, extra-long grain, aged in jute sacking to make it sweet. The finest flour, genuine Elephant brand. Mustard oil in a costly glass bottle, even though sitting right beside are the economy tins. The chauffeur staggers beneath the load. But there’s more. Fresh
lauki
flown in from the Philippines, and emerald-leafed
methi saag
that I have grown in a box on the back windowsill A whole box of saffron like shavings of flame and, by the pound, tiny shelled pistas—the most expensive kind—green as mango buds.

“If you wait one week,” I say, “they will go on sale.”

The rich Indians look at me with heavy eyes that are almost no color at all. They nod at the chauffeur and he picks up another two pounds.

I hide my smile.

The rich Indians crane their necks and lift their chins high because they have to be more always than other people, taller, handsomer, better dressed. Or at least richer. They heave their
bodies like moneybags out the door and into their satin cars, leaving the crumbly odor of old banknotes behind.

Other rich people send lists instead, because being a rich person is a busy job. Golf cruises charity luncheons in the Cornelian Room shopping for new Lamborghinis and cigar cases inlaid with lapis lazuli.

Still others have forgotten to be Indian and eat caviar only.

For all of them in the evening I burn
tulsi
, basil which is the plant of humility, curber of ego. The sweet smoke of basil whose taste I know on my own tongue, for many times the Old One has burned it for me too. Basil sacred to Sri Ram, which slakes the craving for power, which turns the thoughts inward, away from worldliness.