The Mistress of Spices (10 page)

Because inward even rich people are people only.

I must tell this to myself over and over. And also what the Old One taught us: “Not for you to pick and choose your compassion. The ones who anger you most, you must bend most to help.”

There is something else that I must tell you.

When I look deep into the lives of rich people, sometimes I am forced to humility, to say Who would have thought. For instance. Anant Soni who at the end of a day of corporate video conferences sits by his mother’s bedside to rub her arthritic hands. And Dr. Lalchandani’s wife who stares unseeing out the bedroom window of her designer home because across town her husband is in bed with another woman. And Prameela Vijh who sells million-dollar houses and sends money to her sister in a battered women’s shelter. And Rajesh whose company went public the same day the doctor pushed the biopsy report across the table at him and said
chemo
.

And right now in front of me a woman in oversize Bill Blass
jeans and Gucci shoes is buying stacks and stacks of Naans for a party tonight, is drumming rubyflash fingers on the counter as I ring up the flat brown bread, is saying shrill as tin “Come
on
I’m in a hurry.” But inside she is thinking of her teenage son. He’s been acting so strange lately, hanging out with boys who frighten her with their razor earrings and biker jackets and heavy boots as though for war, their cold, cold eyes and slits of mouths that are becoming
his
eyes,
his
mouth. Could he be taking—. Her mind shudders away from the word she cannot say even inside her clamped lips, and under the layers, foundation and concealer and rouge and thick fuchsia eyeshadow, her face grows bruised with love.

Rich woman I thank you for reminding me. Beneath the shiniest armor, gold-plated or diamond, the beat of the vulnerable flesh.

Into a corner of her matching Gucci purse I place hartuki, shriveled seed in the shape of a womb, which has no American name.
Hartuki
to help mothers bear the pain that starts with the birthing and continues forever, the pain and joy both, tangled dark and blue as an umbilical cord around an infant’s throat.

Saturday comes upon me like the unexpected flash of rainbow under a bird’s black wing, like the swirl-spread skirt of a
kathak
dancer, fast and then faster. Saturday is drums bursting from the stereos of the young men who drive by dangerous-slow, and what are they looking for. Saturday takes my breath. For Saturday I put
up signs: FRESH-FRESH METHI. HOME GROWN; DIWALI SALE LOWEST PRICES; LATEST MOVIES BEST ACTORS, JUHI CHAWLA-AMIR KHAN, RENT 2 DAYS FOR COST OF ONE. And even, daringly, ASK IF YOU CANNOT FIND.

So many people on Saturday, it seems the walls must take a deep breath just to hold them in. All those voices, Hindi Oriya Assamese Urdu Tamil English, layered one on the other like notes from a
tanpura
, all those voices asking for more than their words, asking for happiness except no one seems to know where. And so I must listen to the spaces between, must weigh them in my coral-boned hands. Must whisper chants over packets and sacks even as I weigh and measure and ring up, even as I call out in my pretend-strict voice “Please no touching
mithais”
and “If bottle breaks you must pay.”

All who come to my store on Saturday, I love them.

You must not think that only the unhappy visit my store. The others come too, and they are many. A father carrying his daughter on his shoulders, picking up
laddus
on the way to the zoo. A retired couple, she holding his elbow as he leans on his cane. Two wives out for an afternoon of shopping and talk. A young computer scientist planning to impress his visiting parents with his new cooking skills. They step through my doors lightly, and as they move from aisle to aisle, choosing, the faintest of radiances flickers around them.

See, hunches of
podina
leaves green as the forests of our childhood. Hold them up and smell how fresh and pungent, isn’t this cause enough for gladness. Tear open a packet of chili-cashews and cram a handful into the mouth. Chew. That hot taste, that crumble and crunch against your
cheeks, the delicious tears that rise to your eyes. Here’s
kumkum
powder red as the heart of a hibiscus flower to put on our foreheads for married luck. And look, look, Mysore sandalwood soap with its calm bright fragrance, the same brand you used to buy me in India so many years ago when we were newlyweds. Ah life, how fine it is
.

I send a blessing behind them as they leave, a whisper of thanks that they have let me share their joy. But already they are fading from my mind, already I am turning from them to the others. The ones whom I need because they need me.

Manu who is seventeen, in a 49ers jacket so shiny red it’s like a yell, running in impatient to pick up a sack of
bajra atta
for his mother before he goes to shoot some hoops at school. Angry Manu who is a senior at Ridgefield High, thinking Not fair not fair. Because when he said “prom” his father shouted “All that drinking whiskey-beer and dancing pressed up against cheap American girls in miniskirts, what are you thinking of.” Manu poised tiptoe inside furious fluorescent Nike shoes that he bought with money saved up cleaning bathrooms in his uncle’s motel, ready to take off if only he knew where he would land.

Manu I give you a slab of sesame candy made with sweet molasses,
gur
to slow you down just enough to hear the frightened love in your father’s voice losing you to America.

And Daksha who comes in with her white nurse’s uniform starched and shiny, even her shoes even her smile.

“Daksha what do you need today?”

“Aunty today is
ekadasi
you know, eleventh day of the moon, and my mother-in-law being a widow must not eat rice. So I thought maybe some cracked wheat to make a
dalia
pudding for her and as long as I was here, might as well pick up some of your
methi
, my husband is so fond of
methi parathas
.”

As she sifts through the bittergreen leaves I watch her face. Under the edges where the shine has rubbed off, the smile pulls down. Every night coming home from the hospital to cook, rolling out
chapatis
hot hot with ghee because her mother-in-law says old food from the fridge is good only for servants or dogs. Boiling frying seasoning ladling serving wiping up while everyone sits saying “Good,” saying “Yes, more,” even her husband, because after all isn’t the kitchen the woman’s place.

In answer to my asking she says “Yes Aunty it’s hard but what to do. After all we must take care of our old. It makes too much trouble in the house if I say I can’t do all this work. But sometimes I wish—”

She stops. Daksha to whom no one listens so she has forgotten how to say. And inside her, pushing up against her palate enormous and silent, the horror of what she sees all day. In the AIDS ward those young, young men grown light as children in their eroding bones. Their fragile bruised skin, their enormous waiting eyes.

Daksha here is seed of black pepper to be boiled whole and drunk to loosen your throat so you can learn to say No, that word so hard for Indian women. No and
Hear me now
.

And Daksha before you go, here is
amla
for a different resistance. Amla which I too would like to take somedays to help bear the pain that cannot be changed, pain growing slow and huge like a monsoon cloud which if you let it will blot out the sun.

Now Vinod sidles in, Vinod who owns India Market on the other side of the bay and comes sometimes to check out the competition, who hefts a five-pound packet of
dal
with practiced hands to see if it’s just a little less, like in his store. Who thinks
fool
when it isn’t. Vinod who jumps when I say “How’s business Vinod-bhai.” because he has always thought I don’t know who he is. I give him a packet filled with green-brown-black and say “Compliments of management” and hide my laugh behind my hand while he sniffs at it suspiciously.

“Ah kari patti” he says finally. Inside he is thinking
Crazy woman
, is thinking $2.49
profit
, as he slips it into his pocket, astringent leaf dried dark on the stem to reduce mistrust and avarice.

Saturday when the store is throbbing bloodbeat and desire, sometimes the future-sight comes to me. I do not control it. Nor do I trust it fully. It shows me people who will visit the store, but whether in a day or a year or a lifetime it does not say. The faces are hazy and shapeless, seen thickly as through Coke-bottle glass. I pay them scant attention. I am too busy, and happy to let time bring me what it will.

But today the light is pink-tinted like just-bloomed
karabi
flowers, and the Indian radio channel spills out a song about a slim-waisted girl who wears silver anklets, and I am hungry for the sight. There is a smell like seabirds in the air. It makes me long to open windows. I pace the front aisle looking out, though there is nothing except a bag lady shuffling behind a grocery cart and a group of boys lounging lazy against the graffitied walls of Myisha’s Hair Salon Braiding Done. An impatient voice calls me back to the register. A long low aquamarine Cadillac with shark fins cruises by. A customer complains because I have rung up a purchase twice. I apologize. But inside I am trying to remember, did the lonely American come in a car.

Yes I admit it, he’s the reason. And yes I want to see him again. And yes I’m disappointed when the sight falls on me like fever, and shuddering I look among the faces to come and do not see his. He
promised
, I tell myself, and am angrier because he didn’t really. Suddenly I want to sweep the
mithais
from their case to the floor,
laddus
and
rasogollahs
sent rolling in dust, syrup and splintered glass sticking to shoe soles. And the shock in the eyes of the customers whose desires I’m tired of.

It’s
my
desire I want to fulfill, for once.

It would be so easy. A
tola
of lotus root burned in evening with
prishniparni
, a few words spoken, and he would not be able to keep away. Yes it would be
him
standing across from me and not this fat man in round-rimmed glasses who is telling me I’m all out of
chana besan
. If I wanted, he would see not this old body but what I wished, curve of mango breast to cup in one’s palm, long lean line of eucalyptus thigh. I would call on the others,
abhrak
and
amlaki
to remove wrinkles and blacken hair and firm the sagging flesh. And king of all,
maharadwaj
rejuvenator whom the Ashwini Kumars, twin physicians of the gods, gave to their disciple Dhanwantari to make him foremost among healers.
Makaradwaj
which must always be used with greatest care for even one measure too much can bring death, but I am not afraid, I Tilo who was most brilliant of all the Old One’s apprentices.

The fat man is saying something, his tongue moving thick and pink in his open mouth. But I do not hear him.

The Old One, the Old One. What would she say to this wanting? I close my eyes in knowing guilt.

“I worry most about you,” she told me the day I left.

We stood on the highest ridge of the volcano, only sky above us. Shampati’s fire was not yet lit. Against the dark silhouette
of the pyre the evening was violet-gray and soft as moths. Far below us the waves crashed white and silent as in a dream.

Like tendrils of fog, her distress around me.

I wanted to pull her close and place a comfort-kiss on the velvet corrugation of her cheek. As though I were the elder and not she. But I did not dare the intimacy.

So I accused.

“Always you are without faith in me, First Mother.”

“Because I see your nature, Tilo shining but flawed, diamond with a crack running through it, which thrown into the cauldron of America may shatter asunder.”

“What crack?”

“Life-lust, that craving to taste all things, sweet as well as bitter, on your own tongue.”

“Mother you worry needlessly. Before the moon crosses the sky will I not be walking into Shampati’s fire that burns up all desire?”

She had sighed. “I pray it does for you.” And had gestured a blessing sign in the dim air.

“
Chana besan,
” says the fat man now, smelling of garlic pickle and too-large lunches. “Didn’t you hear me say I want some
chana besan
.”

My skull is hot and dry. There is a high buzzing inside, like bees.

Fat man I could take a fistful of mustard seed and say a word, and for a month a fever would burn in your stomach, making you vomit up whatever you ate.

Tilo, is this what you have come to.

Inside my head, a sound like rain. Or is it the tears of the spices.

I bite down on my lip till the blood comes. The pain cleanses me, starts to release the poison from my clenched body.

“So sorry,” I tell the man. “I have big sack of
besan
inside.”

I measure out a packet and trace on it with my finger a rune for self-control. For him and for me.