The Mistress of Spices (22 page)

Disguise, I think. Prevarication. Perhaps he is right. Desperate trickery for a desperate situation.

I search the shelves till I find the package tight-wrapped in tree bark, and next to it the silver-tipped pincers. Gingerly I unroll it, taking care not to touch. And watch it bristling to life,
kantakari
the thorn herb with its hair-thin black needles whose sting can be poison.

With the pincers I break off three hairs and drop them on the grinding stone. I measure out ghee and honey to cut the sting, pound them all together, fill a small bottle with it.

Geeta’s grandfather is standing military-straight at the counter, drumming his fingers on the glass, when I reenter.

“Ah,
didi
, you are taking a long time. No, no, I am not minding, not impatient slightest even, actually quite the opposite. I am thinking it is a good sign, you are finding something just-right to help us.”

“You said you would do anything for Geeta, to bring her back into the family. Are you sure?”

He nods.

“Here then, mix this into your rice at dinnertime, eat it slowly. It will burn your throat going down, and later it will give you the cramps, maybe for days. But for one hour you will have the golden tongue.”

“What this means?” says Geeta’s grandfather, but already in his eyes, hope and fear mixed, I see he has heard the old stories.

“Whatever you say this hour, people must believe. Whatever you ask, they must obey. Listen now.”

And I tell him what he is to do.

At the door I say, “Use the gift with care. It is yours once only. And remember, the cramps will be bad.”

He squares his shoulders, lifts his head, Geeta’s grandfather, and I see that he is a small man, has always been so behind his bluster-words. But today there is a bigness in his eye.

“The worst cramp I am happy to suffer,” he says very simply and closes the door behind him with gentleness.

I wait until all the customers have left, until moths float around the doorlight and I hear the soft thump of their bodies against the hot domed glass. Until the puppet moon dangles in the center of my window from its invisible string, and rush-hour sounds are swallowed by a terrible night stillness, and it is long past closing time. And then I can no longer hide from it, the fear that has been lying cold and coiled all this time in the center of my chest: Haroun will not come. Not now. Not perhaps ever.

How then to make amends. How help him past the dark which is reaching for him with its hungry hand.

The answer comes so quickly and with such sureness it surprises me, shows me I am no longer the Tilo who left the island.

You must go to him. Yes, out one more time into America
. But the Old One?

The voice knows my weak places.
Will you sit here, your hands folded in your lap, and let him be destroyed
, it says.
Is that what the Old One in your place would have done, would have wanted
.

I see her face, deep lines creasing the forehead, corner of the mouth, laughter and frowning both. The eyes sometimes dark and still, sometimes sparking irony. At once kind and stern. “Eyes that could in anger scald your skin,” said the older Mistresses when they were story-talking to us.

I cannot tell what she would have wanted, but I know what she would have done. What I too should.

I think for a long moment before I choose the other path, which hurts through my whole body like bones wrenched from sockets.

If you were to ask me why I am doing so, I couldn’t answer. Only this: I who have held Haroun’s hands in mine and felt the hope pulsing wild through them, cannot let night cast her ink-net over him without a fight. Is it rebellion, is it compassion? Perhaps you know better than me, for to me they sit side by side, their edges bleeding into each other till all becomes one color.

But now I am faced with a more immediate problem: I must find Haroun. I have no address, and when I send out a calling thought, it is slammed back into my skull as though I were ringed with a well of impassable stone. My head throbs with the impact of it, with the question that I cannot push away.
Tilo are your powers leaving you
.

But slowly out of the throbbing comes a word:
telephone
. An image forms behind my eyelids, and though I have never seen one in real life, I know what it is: a pay phone enclosed in its tiny crystal cubicle, the rectangular box glowing faintly in the fitful streetlight, the steel cord looped and glinting like the thin ridged body of some prehistoric reptile, the hard black bulbous head. Whose memory is this? I have no idea. But I know to pick the correct coins to feed the machine’s slit mouth.

I search out my Sears plastic bag and lift from it a sheet with a number (for I must call Geeta also). I steel myself for the spices’ stare and lock the door behind me. (But why are there no reproving glances, why does the door not hold itself back stubbornly
from my hands?) I am not surprised to find my feet following without falter all the twists and turns of alleyways that will lead me to the phone call.

I make the easy call first. To Geeta, the number she had given me that day hoping, high in her glitter-black tower. And when I get the replica of her voice spooling thin and metallic from the machine, I know what it is. I know to wait for the beep and then to tell her clearly, slowly, to come to the store, alone, day after tomorrow at seven, evening hour when the light of sun and moon fall mixed upon our longings, and all is perhaps possible.

Now it is Haroun’s turn. But I have no number for him, no inkling of where he lives. Once I could have divined it with ease. But today when I start to chant the song of finding I stutter, come to a halt. I Tilo of whom the Old One once said that the parrot, bird of memory, must live in my throat. Too late I begin to see the price I have unknowingly paid for each step I took into America. Inside me a voice cries
What else is lost
.

No time now to worry this thought, no time now to mourn. I must grope for the fat metal-bound book that hangs from the booth wall and sift its pages, praying.

He is not there.

The booth is full of crumbling desires, the countless desperations of all those who lifted this receiver trying to connect across miles of humming wire. I lean my head into its wall. I would weep if I believed weeping could help.

Tilo weakened in magic through your willfulness, who can you blame but yourself
.

No time for blame either. Inside me the minutes are swooping wild, colliding against the walls of my chest, falling back stunned.

You must use what you have, your own frail mortal wits, your imperfect remembering. Your heart’s pain.

I focus back to that first night at the store, Haroun reciting the tales of friends I had helped. I squeeze shut my eyes till I smell it plain, the sandalwood dust in his palm. Feel the press of his just-ripe lips in my hand’s hollow. Ah it hurts to look in his face, to see it blazing with trust, Haroun who stands on a stage built of dreams, under a spotlight about to be extinguished.

Out of the pain a name comes finally:
Najib Mokhtar
. I hold on to it as though it is a raft in drowning water, or perhaps it is a blade of grass only. I hope I have not conjured it out of my desperate wanting.

But see, here it is in the phone book, the letters small and black as the skeletons of ants pressed into the page, but plain enough. I swallow down the questions crowding my mouth, What if it’s the wrong Najib what if he doesn’t know where Haroun lives what if he won’t tell, what if what if what if, and punch in the numbers.

Ringing, ringing, ripples of rings echoing out with me at the center, and when I’ve almost given up hope, a woman’s voice.

“Hello.” Pronounced the Indian way, the word hangs in the air, hesitant, questioning.

“I’m looking for Haroun. Do you know where I can find him.”

As soon as I say the sentences I know their wrongness. I feel
her suspicion course like electricity through the wires. Her fear.
Immigration? creditors? old-country enemies following his ocean trail?
Her fingers tighten around the receiver, ready to slam it down. “I’m a friend,” I say quickly.

She is unconvinced, I hear it in her cut-short sentences. “I am not knowing any Haroun-maroun. No one of that name living here.”

“Wait, don’t hang up. I’m from the Indian grocery, you know, the Spice Bazaar, next to the burned-down hotel on Esperanza Street. I helped your husband one time long ago.”

Only the sound of her listening, her held-in, half-believing breath.

“Now you must help me. I have something I must give Haroun, something to protect him from—” I search for a phrase out of her understanding, a story she would have been told as a girl “—the jinn’s breath.”

“The jinn’s breath,” she whispers. She knows it, black ice which can suck away your name your life.

“Yes. That’s why you must tell me where he is.”

She considers. In her head I hear her husband warn, “Woman, open your mouth and let out one word of this even, and I’ll make you sorry you were born.”

“Please. No harm will ever come to him from me.”

We both wait. Between us the moment stretches taut as steel.

Then she says, “I will tell you. He has no phone, but I will tell you how to get to his house and when to find him there.”

She gives me names of streets and parks which I jot down
on the back of the small square sheet stamped with Geeta’s employer’s name. Neighborhood schools, gas stations, Quik-Stops, police headquarters. Take this bus and then this one, turn right here, then left twice, pass the massage parlor and the lot full of junk cars, climb up the rickety steps to the topmost apartment. Go early, eight A.M. latest. He leaves home right after morning
namaaz
and comes home only ten minutes at sundown for it again. Then back to his taxi, sometimes all night because that’s when the best tips are.

“Shukriyah
,” I say, “heartfelt gratitude. I will go tomorrow morning itself early-early before the store opens.”

Walking home through the smoky air I dodge shadows and worse than shadows and keep my eyes on the moon, white as a polished jawbone. I rehearse all I will say to Haroun, apology and affection and warning of the nightmare which is the back-side of his immigrant dream. Ah, we will argue, I know it. He will stomp up and down and wave his hands in angry spirals, but at the end he will say, “Okay Ladyjaan, just to make you happy I am doing as you say.”

I am smiling with the thought of it already as I lean to unlock the shop door.

Then I see it, a small rectangle white as the sari of a widow or an ascetic, caught in the crack as though someone closed the door too quickly.

My throat so tight I cannot breathe.
First Mother?
I start to cry out.

Then I see it is a note only.

I open it and when my hands have stopped shaking I read the large, looping letters.

My Raven, I think, and like any woman in love I lay my cheek where his hand rested on the paper. “Yes,” I whisper, “yes. Tomorrow will be our pleasure day.” Already I can smell the bracing salt air of the City, long-imagined, feel under my feet the roll of its hills.

But then the thoughts come. What of the censuring curious eyes, when they see my handsome American with this sag-skinned brown woman?

And (O foolish woman-thought) I have nothing to wear.

What
of Haroun
says the thorn-voice.

I put the directions for safekeeping into a small leather bag which I borrow from the gift cabinet. “I will not neglect him,” I reply. If doubts lurk somewhere within, I choose not to pamper them with attention. “Do I not know my duty as well as I do my pleasure? First thing tomorrow I will ask Raven to take me to him.”