The Mistress of Spices (13 page)

She sighs.

I sigh too, feeling for a moment pity for Ahuja, balding and potbellied and knowing it, approching with guilt this girl tender as green bamboo and yet at her core a hardness. Ahuja wanting so badly (and do we all not want it too) for love to happen.

“One night, two nights,” says Ahuja’s wife, “he is patient. Then he too gets angry.”

I think how it must have been. Maybe his friends were joking and talking, like men do. “
Arre yaar
, tell us, is it sweet as jaggery.” Or, “Look look, dark circles under Ahuja
bhai’s
eyes, his wife must keep him hard at work all night.”

“And next time I push him away he grabs me and …”

She falls silent. Perhaps it is the embarrassment, telling a stranger—for after all I am no more—what good wives should never. Perhaps it is surprise that she has dared so far.

O almost Lalita whose mouth turmeric is beginning to
open like a morning flower, how can I tell you there is no shame in speaking out. How can I say I admire.

Inside her head the images, tumbling hot and sere like clothes left too long in a dryer. A hard male elbow holding her down on the mattress, a knee pushing her thighs apart. And when she tries to claw, to bite (soundlessly, for no one outside the bedroom must know this
sharam)
, a slap to the head. Not hard, but the shock of it makes her go limp so he can do what he wants. The worst are the kisses after it is over, kisses that leave their wetness on her mouth, and his slaked repentant voice in her ear, lingering.

Pyari, meri jaan
, my sweet love queen. Over and over and over. Every night until he leaves for America.

“I thought of running away, but where could I go? I knew what happened to girls that left home. They ended up on the streets, or as kept women for men far worse than him. At least with him I had honor”—her lips twist a little at the word—“because I was a wife.”

A question bursts from me, but I know its foolishness even before I have finished forming the words.

“Couldn’t you tell someone, your mother maybe. Couldn’t you ask them not to send you here to him.”

And now she bows her head, Ahuja’s wife who was earlier Chowdhary’s daughter, and her tears fall into the glass of tea, turning it salt. Until I must reach across the forbidden distance to wipe them away. Chowdhary’s daughter whose parents had brought her up in love and strictness the best they knew, to fit into her destiny, which was marriage. Who sensed her sorrow but were afraid to ask Daughter what is wrong, because what
would they do if she answered. And she seeing that fear kept her silence kept her tears, for she loved them too, and hadn’t they done the most they could for her already.

Silence and tears, silence and tears, all the way to America. Bloated sack of pain swelling inside her throat until at last today turmeric untied the knot and let it out.

An hour later, and Ahuja’s wife is still talking, the words spilling as over the broken lip of a dam.

“I knew better, but still I hoped as women do. For what else is there for us? Here in America maybe we could start again, away from those eyes, those mouths always telling us how a man should act, what is a woman’s duty. But ah the voices, we carried them all the way inside our heads.”

I see her in those early days, Ahuja’s wife trying to please her husband, sewing new curtains to make the apartment into a home, rolling
parathas
to serve hot when he came home from work. And him too, buying her a new sari, a bottle of perfume, Intimate or Chantilly, a pretty lace nightdress to wear in bed.

“Hai
mataji
, once milk has curdled can all the sugar in the world turn it sweet again?

“In bed especially I could not forget those nights in India. Even when he tried to be gentle I was stiff and not willing. Then he would lose patience and shout the American words he’d learned.
Bitch. Fucking you is like fucking a corpse
.

“And later,
You must be getting it somewhere else
.

“Recently, the rules. No going out. No talking on the phone. Every penny I spend to be accounted for. He should read my letters before he mails them.

“And the calls. All day. Sometimes every twenty minutes. To check on what I’m doing. To make sure I’m there. I pick up the phone and say hello and there is his breathing on the end of the line.”

Now Ahuja’s wife tells me in a voice which is frightening-calm, which has run out of tears, “Mataji, I used to be afraid of death. I’d hear of women who killed themselves and think how could they. Now I know.”

O almost Lalita, that is not the way out. But what can I say to help you, I who am weeping inside me as much as you have done?

“What do I have to live for? Once, more than anything in the world I wanted a baby. But is this any kind of home to bring a new life into?”

Blinded by my tears I cannot see the spice remedy. It is as the Old One warned.

Tilo too close too close
.

I breathe deep, holding the air in my lungs like she taught us on the island, until its roaring drives all other sounds from my mind. Until through the red blur a name comes to me.

Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. Waists that have given up, mouths drooping with the weight of their average lives they once dreamed would be so different. Fennel, brown as mud and bark and leaf dancing in a fall breeze, smelling of changes to come.

“Fennel,” I tell Ahuja’s wife who is plucking at her
dupatta
with restless fingers, “is a wondrous spice. Take a pinch of it, raw and whole, after every meal to freshen the breath and aid digestion and give you mental strength for what must be done.”

She looks at me despairing. Her crushed velvet eyes say Is this all the help you have to give?

“Give some to your husband as well.”

Ahuja’s wife smoothes the sleeve of her
kurta
, which she had pulled up to show me another bruise, and stands. “I need to get home. He must have called one dozen times. When he comes home tonight—”

Fear rises from her, shimmering, like heat from a cracked summer pavement. Fear and hate and disappointment that I am not doing more.

“Fennel cools the temper as well,” I say. I wish I could tell her more, but that would leach away the spice’s power.

She gives a bitter, not-believing laugh. She regrets having confided in me, witless old woman who talks as though a handful of dry seeds can help a breaking life.

“He could certainly do with that,” she says, gathering her purse. Regrets pound like blood inside her skull.

She will throw the packet I have put between us on the table in the back of a drawer, perhaps even in the trash when she thinks in shame of all she has told me.

Next time she will go to another grocery, even if it means changing buses.

I try to hold her eyes but she will not look. She has turned to leave, she is at the door already. So I must with my oldwoman shuffle catch up and touch her arm once more, though I know I should not.

Pincers of flame pierce my fingertips. She is still now, her eyes changing color, growing light like mustard oil when heated, intent as though she is seeing something beyond everyday sight.

I reach for the small bag of fennel to press into her palm, but it is not there.

Spices what—

Desperate I look around, feel Ahuja’s wife hurrying inside her head. For a moment I am afraid the spice will not give itself to me, I Tilo gone beyond boundaries.

But here is the packet on top of this stack of
India Currents
magazines, where surely I did not place it.

Spices is this a game or is it something you are telling me.

There is no time to ponder. I pick up the packet and a copy of the magazine. Give her both.

“Trust me. Do what I tell you. Every day, after every meal, some for you and some for him, and when you have finished it all come back and tell if it hasn’t helped. And here, read this. It’ll keep your mind off your troubles.”

She gives a sigh and nods. It is easier than arguing.

“Daughter, remember this, no matter what happens. You did no wrong in telling me. No man, husband or not, has the right to beat you, to force you to a bed that sickens you.”

She does not say yes or no.

“Go now. And don’t be afraid. This morning he’s been too busy to call home.”

“How do you know?”

“We old women, we sense things.”

From the door she whispers, “Pray for me. Pray that I die soon.”

“No,” I say. “You deserve happiness. You deserve dignity. I will pray for that.”

Fennel, I call when she is gone, fennel that is shaped like a half-closed eye accented with
surma
, work for me. I reach into the bin and lift up a fistful. Fennel which the sage Vashistha ate after he swallowed the demon Illwal so he would not come back to life again.

I wait for the tingling, for the song to begin.

Only silence, and the pointed ends of the spice biting my palm like thorns.

Speak to me, fennel,
mouri
, colored like the freckled house sparrow that brings amity where it nests, spice to digest sorrows and in their digestion make us strong.

When it comes, the voice is no song but a booming, a wave crashing in my skull.

Why should we, when you have done that which you should not? When you have overstepped the lines you willingly drew around yourself?

Fennel equalizer, who can take power from one and give it to the other when two people eat of you at the same time, I entreat you, help Ahuja’s wife.

Do you admit your transgression, your greed in grasping for what you promised to give up forever? Do you regret?

I think back to her fingers, light as a bird’s hold on my arm, and as trusting. I think how I wiped away the tears, the feel of her damp eyelashes, her face in my hands. That living, breathing skin. How the band of steel that clenched my chest for so long had given a little.

Ahuja’s wife, you who are almost becoming Lalita, I too know what it is to be afraid, I would lie now, if it would do either of us any good. For your life I’d give mine, if they would take it.

Around me the spices, distant and coldly courteous, wait as though they did not know the answer already.

I do not regret, I say finally, and feel the air draining away. My tongue is a slab of wood in my mouth. I have to force the words around it.

I’ll pay in whatever way is decided.

It is so silent I could be alone, whirling in a black galaxy. Whirling and burning, and no one to hear when finally I explode to nothing.

Very well
, says the voice at last.

What will it be?

You will know
. The voice is thin and far now. Appeased.
You will know at the proper time
.

In the half light of evening I am sitting at the counter slicing with the tip of my magic knife
kalo jire
seeds no bigger than a weevil bug’s egg.

It requires concentration, this task. Certain words must be said as the knifetip cuts clean into the
kalo jire’s
brittle hardness, the breath must be taken in and held until it is safe to let it go. And so I’ve had to wait till the store is shut down.

I work without stopping. By the time Haroun comes today,
as every Tuesday he does on his way to evening worship at the
masjid
, I must have his packet ready.

Why I can’t say, except nowadays whenever I think
Haroun
an ice-hand clutches at my lungs.

The knife rises and descends, rises and descends. The
kalo jire
seeds are humming bright as bees.

I must press just right, split each seed exactly halfway down the middle. I must keep the right rhythm.

Too fast, and the seeds will shatter. Too slow and the invisible chain connecting each split grain will break apart and dissipate their dark energy in the world’s air.

Perhaps that is why I do not hear him come in, why I whirl startled when he speaks. And feel on my finger the blade like a thin flame biting.

“You’re bleeding,” says the lonely American. “I’m terribly sorry. I should have knocked or something.”