The Mistress of Spices (17 page)

“Ms. Bannerjee, there’s a person to see you. A woman. Yes, I think she’s Indian. No, I’m quite sure she isn’t representing anyone. She’s—uh—different. No, she didn’t give a name. Okay, if you’re sure.” Then she turns to me. “Fourth floor, ask someone when you get off, elevator’s to your left.” Her eyes are saying, Just go.

“You didn’t ask,” I say to her gently as I gather my belongings.

“What?” The word startled out of her.

“For my name. And I do represent someone. Why else do you think I’m here.”

Geeta’s office is a tiny square and windowless, the kind given to newcomers who should be too busy to look out anyway. A metal table stacked with files and blueprints takes up all the space.

Sitting behind the table she is writing a business report but not really, because the pad is filled with doodles. From where I stand they look like roses with huge thorns. She seems thinner. Or is it just the severity of the dark pantsuit she is wearing today, the lapels slanting hard and angled across her chest, the inkblue cloth pulling the color out of her face. Its grown-upness only making her look more young.

The last time she came to my store she wore blue jeans. A red T-shirt that said
¡Uxmal!
Her hair in a thick braid down her back, wavy as water as she laughed at something her mother said. Together they were picking out raisins and almonds and sweet white
elachdana
to make desserts for Bengali New Year.

Today her eyes are faintly puzzled as she tries to place me. And dark with disappointment. She was expecting someone else, perhaps her mother come like a miracle to say
I forgive
. She presses her lips together, trying to make them not tremble. There is a small mole on her chin and it too is trembling. I wish I could tell her how beautiful it—she—is.

“Please sit down,” she says finally, straining at politeness, “This is a surprise. You look different.”

And then because she can’t hold it in anymore, “How did
you know where I work? Did someone ask you to come see me?” I nod.

“My mother.”

When I shake my head no she says, “Not Dad?” Her voice is high with hoping.

O Geeta my songbird, how I wish I could say yes, wish I could pluck the thorn bleeding in your rose-heart. But I must shake my head again.

Her shoulders crumple. “I didn’t think so.”

“It was your grandfather actually.”

“Oh, him.” Her voice is acid now. I can hear the thoughts, gnawing and corrosive in her brain.
He’s the one who turned them against me with all that shit about good women and family shame. They never would have behaved so prehistorically otherwise. Dad, especially. If only
he’
d stayed in India none of this would’ve
—

“Your grandfather loves you a lot,” I say, to stop the poison eating at her heart.

“Love, hah.” She spits out the sound like a sickness. “He doesn’t know what the word means. For him it’s all control. Control my parents, control me. And whenever he doesn’t get his way it’s
O Ramu send me back better I die alone in India
.”

Her imitation of the heavy oldman accent is exact, vicious. It shocks me. Still, better hate spoken than hate silent.

“If it weren’t for his medieval ideas about arranged marriages I wouldn’t have had to tell Mom and Dad about Juan like this. I would’ve introduced him to them slowly; they would’ve gotten a chance to see him as a person, not as a—”

Her voice stumbles.

I know what I should say. The Old One taught it to us many times.
Your fate is born with you, stitched into your birth stars. Who can you blame for it?

But that is not what she needs to hear, Geeta for whom the old words no longer fit her song.

Spices, I know I have no right to ask but spices guide me.

A hot sand wind rubs at my words, eroding them. The minutes fall around us like drops of lead.

What shall I do now.

Then she says, “What the hell did he think you could do, anyway?” She is staring at me, her brow wrinkled as though trying to recall. But her eyes are no longer crusted over with hate.

“Nothing really,” I say hurriedly. “Just let you know that angry words like buzzing bees hide the honey underneath. Just see you so I can go back and tell them Don’t worry so much she’s well.”

“I don’t know about that.” Her sigh shakes her whole body. “I’m taking pills every night and still I can’t sleep. Diana’s been getting real concerned. She thinks I should get some help, go see a shrink, maybe.”

“Diana?”

“Oh, I didn’t move in with Juan. I couldn’t do that to Mom and Dad. Besides, I knew it would be really bad for our relationship, what with me being so stressed and everything. So I called Diana, she’s my best friend from college, and she said, Sure, you can stay with me for as long as you need.”

Thankfulness loosens my clenched lungs so I can breathe again. “Geeta,” I say, “you are a very intelligent girl.”

She tries to hide her smile but I can tell she is pleased. “Would you like to see his photo?” she says and wipes the pewter
frame sitting on her desk carefully on her blue sleeve. Hands it to me.

Earnest eyes, dark wings of neat-combed hair, a mouth that has learned kindness from growing up with too little. His arm around her a bit awkward as though he isn’t yet used to so much luck.

“He looks very intelligent too,” I say.

Now she is openly smiling. “He’s a lot smarter than me. Can you believe, he came out of the barrio, went to college on a scholarship, graduated with a 4.0. And so modest you’d never learn any of it from him.
I know
if Dad just talks to him he’ll see what a wonderful guy he is.”

“Maybe you will bring him to the store one time so I can meet him?”

“Sure. He’d like that. He’s real interested in Indian culture and especially our food. I cook it every once in a while at his apartment. You know Mexicans cook with a lot of the same spices that we—”

Suddenly she stops, Geeta who is nobody’s fool. Looks straight at me, her eyes black as lakes and in them my face floating.

“Now I remember. Grandpa said once that you knew spells.”

“Simply oldman talk,” I say quickly.

“O I don’t know,” she says. “Grandpa can be pretty smart about some things.” She examines me some more. “It’s okay, I don’t mind. I have a good feeling about you. I’ll bring Juan to you sometime soon, maybe even next week. They have them in his culture too,
curanderas
I believe they’re called.”

“Next week then,” I say rising, my work almost done for
now, though ahead it will surely be rocks and stumbling. “Here, I brought you something.”

I take it from its wrappings, bottle of mango pickled in mustard oil into which I’ve added
methi
for healing breaks and
ada
for the deeper courage which knows when to say no, and also
amchur
for deciding right.

She holds it up to the light, its thick redgold glow. “Thanks! It’s my favorite kind. But of course you know that.” Her eyes glint, mischievous. “Did you say some magic over it?”

“The magic is in your heart,” I say.

“But seriously, thank you for coming. I feel so much better. Listen, why don’t I walk you down.”

In the lobby she gives me a hug, Geeta come down from her glitter-black tower, her arms light as wings around me. Slips something into my hand.

“Maybe you could show them this, you know, if they come to the store or something, and you could maybe tell them also we’re not living together?” Her mouth is a hot rose blooming for a moment on my cheek. “And here’s my number, in case—well, just in case.”

A plan stirs inside me, a rustle like wings. I will give them to her grandfather when next he comes, the phone number and photo both, tell him what to do.

All the way back in the bus my shoulders glow and burn where she touched them. The skin of my face, scorched where she breathed the unsaid words of her wish:
The people I love most, make them love each other
. My eyes too scorching as I stare at the photograph, the two lovers so young, smiling up with wrenching faith as though I could fix it all, I Tilo who is myself in more trouble than ever they could be.

She is sitting by my head when I wake, the store dark except for a radium-green glow coming from I can’t tell where, and the smell of the hibiscus oil she would sometimes let us rub into her hair. The Old One sitting cross-legged, her spine curving inward as though something is too heavy for it to hold up, my life or hers, I do not know which. The scars on her hands glow like firelines against that seared-white skin. I start flinching away but then I don’t, because on her face is not the anger I imagined but sadness. Such deep sadness it is like a monsoon cloud, like the bottom of the sea. And inside myself someone is twisting and twisting a wet cloth until the last drops are wrung from it.

“First Mother,” I say and put out my hand, but there is nothing to hold. She is spirit-traveling, as I should have known. I am sorry again, for I remember how after such journeys she would lie on a pallet in the healing hut a little longer each time, her breath shallow, the flesh under her eyes loose and purple as with bruising.

“First Mother is it that bad, what I did?”

“Tilo.” Her voice is small and echoing as if caught inside an underwater cave. “Tilo daughter you should not have.”

“But Mother how else could I have helped Geeta, how else helped her grandfather who came to me asking for the first time in his life.”

“Daughter the help you try to give outside these protected
walls turns on itself, don’t you know that? Even in here you have seen how all does not work the way you want it to.”

“Jagjit,” I whisper, my voice bowed in failure.

“Yes. And there’ll be others. Don’t you remember the last lesson?”

I try to think but inside my skull is a jumble of broken parts, thought shards whose ends do not fit each other.

“Ultimately the Mistresses are without power, hollow reeds only for the wind’s singing. It is the spice that decides, and the person to whom it is given. You must accept what they together choose and even with failure be at peace.”

“First Mother, I—”

“But when you lean out past what is allowed and touch what is not, when you step beyond the old rules, you increase the chance of failing a hundredfold. The old rules which keep the world in its frail balance, which have been there forever, before me, before the other Old Ones, before even the Grandmother.”

Her voice fades in and out as though buffeted by a sea storm.

I want to ask so much. I who in my naivete had thought it had always been her since the beginning.
Who were the other Old Ones who was the Grandmother
. And that question formed of dark curiosity and perhaps a darker desire, which I cannot bring myself to speak.

Who when you are gone
.

Then I forget because she is saying, “Don’t let America seduce you into calamities you cannot imagine. Dreaming of love, don’t rouse the spices’ hate.”

My voice is a stunned whisper. “You know?”

She doesn’t answer. Already her image is growing dim, the phosphorous glow fading from the walls of the store. “Wait, First Mother—”

“Child I had to fight with all my heart’s strength to bring you this warning,” she says faintly through lips blue as air. “Next time I will not be able.”

“Mother since you know my heart, answer this question before you go. What if a Mistress wants her life back. What will the spices—”

But she is gone. The walls are cold and cobweb-dim again, not even a brief waver of wind to tell she was here. No sigh of sound, no smell of her hibiscus-hair drifting like incense. Only the spices watching, the spices stronger than I ever thought, their dark power clenched in their core. The spices sucking all the store’s air into themselves until none is left for me, letting me know this was no dream.

Letting me know they heard it all.

Time passes, time passes. Sun rises, the color of turmeric, falls in a scatter of
sindur
vermilion. On the naked tree outside, fennel-beaked birds cry their sorrow. Sky presses down so clouds black as
kalo jire
scrape the top of a downtown tower I once traveled to. I think of Haroun I think of Ahuja’s wife I think of Geeta and her Juan. I dust the shelves of the store and pile packets up neatly and wonder why they do not come. Cars gun their en
gines racing by. There are shots there are screams then the keening of the ambulance and lastly the stains hosed off the pavement.
Jagjit Jagjit
I cry inside my heart. But I remember the Old One’s face, I remember her warning and do not step even to the window to look.