The Mistress of Spices (29 page)

I sit dazed, listening to my heart, the urgent uneven stop-and-start sound of it, then realize. It is not my heart alone knocking, but someone at the door. I pull up my stiff limbs to answer and am amazed to find it evening already.

Tilo one day gone
.

Outside Geeta is waiting, worry rubbed black into the corners of her eyes like careless mascara.

“I knocked and knocked but there was no answer. Then I saw the sign and thought maybe I got the date wrong. I was about to leave.”

I take her by the hand. Burn of searing iron, prick of poison needle, I feel nothing. That is how far I have come from the first time, Ahuja’s wife, so long since I saw her—ah but I cannot think of her yet.

This change, is it good or bad. I can no longer judge.

“I am so glad you didn’t leave,” I say. I pull her into the inner room. Before I can tell her my plan I hear someone else at the door, rapping impatiently.

“Be yourself,” I whisper as I shut the door. “That is all you can do, and I.”

But inside I am praying to the spices. To the unpredictable human heart.

“He’s really sick,” says Geeta’s father. He presses his weight into the counter, hands gripped as though the pain is in him too, a plump man who at another time would be pleasant faced, with wavy humor lines around a kind mouth. A man who only wanted to be happy in his home with his father and his daughter, and is that too much to ask.

“Baba
, you know. Throwing up, doubled over with the cramps. And stubborn as ever.” He shakes his head. “Won’t let me take him to Emergency. Says Ramu, on your dead mother’s soul, I beg, don’t make me go to those
firingi
doctors, who knows what drug they are giving me, messing up my mind and body both. Go instead to the old lady at Spice Bazaar, she is good at such things, she will be knowing what to do. I don’t know why I even listened to him. He should be at the hospital right now.” He glares at me as though it were all my fault.

He does not know that in a way it is.

“I can help you,” I say, more confident in my mouth than in my mind.

He holds himself tension-tight, not ready to believe yet. “Never thought I’d be saying this, but life’s nothing but one trouble after another. If only you knew the things that have happened this last month.”

Ah Ramu, but I do.

He sighs. “I tell you, I’m sick of it.”

“I don’t blame you. I feel that way myself sometimes,” I say, I who have come to learn through my own meddling what human trouble is.

He moves restlessly. He has had enough of pleasantry. “Well, what can you give me?”

“It is in the storage room,” I say. “You will have to help me bring it out.”

“Oh, okay.” Inside he is shaking his head, thinking, What foolishness. I should be at the pharmacy instead.

“Sorry, no electric connection in there. You go first with this flashlight,” I say. “Look in the corner.”

“What does it look like?”

“You will know when you see. Really, you will.” The oval of light bobs up and down, elongates and denses, moves over floor and wall. Stops.

I hear the intake of breath sharp as icechips, him and her. I close the door.

At the counter I squeeze shut my eyes.
Tilo focus
. I hope that in his bed at home the old man too is sending his mind power to aid mine.

Kantakari
thorn with which to remove earlier thorns, what will it be? The trough of hate so easy to remain in? The mask of righteousness so easy for the face to fit to?

With shaking hands I light a stick, incense of rarest
kasturi
, the fragrance the wild deer hunts crazily through the forest, not knowing he holds it in his own navel.

Hard words to say,
I was wrong
. Almost as hard at times as
Love
.

Father and daughter in there so long, what are you doing, are you able to lean across the pain you have carved into a chasm between your two lives, to touch each other’s breath.

The flung-open door is a sound like a slap. He comes out. Alone. I hold my breath, try to see behind him.

What has he done to her.

Redrimmed, his eyes are slits. His mouth. His voice thin
and sharp, a knifeblade. “Old woman, did you think such a cheap trick would work? Is it so easy to build up the house walls an ungrateful child has kicked down?”

Incense odor, too sweet, chokes my chest. I try to push past him to the inner room but he has me in his grip.

A thought flits through my head light as seeds of grass.
Will he hurt me too
. Almost I wish it.

Then he is hugging me, laughing, and behind him in the doorway her laughing face also, wet with tears.

“Forgive me, Grandmother,” he says. “I couldn’t resist paying back the trick you played on me, you and baba both. But I am glad.”

And she: no words, but a damp cheek laid against mine saying more than pages.

My hands are still trembling, my laugh also as I say, “Don’t do this to an old woman’s heart, one more minute and you are having to take
me
to the hospital.”

“Baba
, I never knew he was such an actor.”

“The pain is real,” I say, filling a bottle with fennel water. I count in fenugreek and wild dill seed, shake it well. “Give him this once every hour until the cramps wear themselves away.”

At the door I tell them, “He did it for you, you know.”

“Yes,” says Geeta’s father, his arms around the daughter lost and found. He lowers his eyes.

“Remember this when next he angers you with his talking, I am sure it will be soon enough.”

Father and daughter smile. “We’ll remember,” says Geeta. She hangs back a moment to whisper, “We didn’t talk of Juan, I didn’t want to spoil the moment, but next week I’ll bring it up. I’ll come back and tell you how it goes.”

Through a veil of incense I wave her good-bye from the door. I do not tell her that I will no longer be here.

This morning, my second to last, I am busy. There are bins to move around, shelves to empty, sacks and canisters to drag to the front. Signs to write up. Yet over and again I find myself at the window. Standing and simply looking. The dust-choked lone tree the narrow chink of discolored sky. The graffiti-clad buildings the smog-belching buses the alleyways smelling of weed. The young men standing on corners or driving around slow, music exploding from their machines. Why suddenly is it all shaded with poignance. Why am I wrenched at the thought that it will all be here, all except me. Why when I may have power more than I dreamed, the entire island, generations of Mistresses to command. And the spices, mine more than ever before.

What is this thought swimming up from the depths of consciousness. As I watch it I realize I have been thinking it without words for a long time.

Tilo what if you refuse.

Refuse. Refuse. The words echo in my mind, ripples of opening-up sound. Circle upon circle of possibility.

Then I remember the Old One’s words. “No choice. A recalled Mistress who does not come of her will is brought back by force. Shampati’s fire opens its mouth and all around her are devoured by it.”

I stare out the dusty window at a woman in a red
kameez
getting out of an old Chevy, lifting a child out of a car seat, shouting at her daughter to “Hurry up I have
hazar
things to do.” Over her shoulder the infant stares at me unblinking, curly head haloed by the morning sun. The girl’s oiled braids glisten as she skips through the doorway to offer me a gap-toothed smile.

It is like a fist punching me in the center of my chest, the love I feel for them, even the mother who mutters loud enough for me not to miss that my
dals
are too expensive, why can’t I charge the same as Mangal Groceries?

Strange how many loves there are that we can feel. Strange how they rise in us without reason. Even I a novice at this know so already.

I feel their names moving through me, bubbles of light, all these people I love in opposing ways. Raven and the First Mother, Haroun and Geeta and her grandfather also. Kwesi. Jagjit. Ahuja’s wife.

Ah Lalita-to-be, how can I go without seeing you one more time. And Jagjit caught in the gold jaws of America, how—

But for their own good I must leave.

“Listen,” I say to the woman in the red
kameez
. “You take all the
dal
you want for free.”

She gives me a suspicious stare, certain this is some trick. “What for?”

“Just like that.”

“No one gives just like that.”

“Then take because the sun is shining so bright, take because of your children’s sweet faces, take because I am going out of business and must close up this shop tomorrow.”

Long after she has left with her bags I stare out. The air seems to hold impressions, as when one shuts one’s eyes after
staring at the sun. Luminous and throbbing, the outlines of people that once walked this way.

Air will you hold my shape after I am gone.

“What’s this,” says Raven, walking in.

I have put up signs in the windows. BIGGEST SALE OF THE YEAR. BEST BARGAIN IN TOWN. EVERYTHING MUST GO.

“O just an Indian custom, year end.”

“I didn’t realize the Indian year ended at this time.”

“For some of us it does,” I say and swallow the tears crowding my throat. I slip under the counter, before he can see, the sign I have just finished lettering, the one I will put up tomorrow.

SHOP CLOSING, LAST DAY.

Will another Mistress soon be standing here making another sign, UNDER NEW MANAGEMENT. Who will she be. Will Raven come to her too and—

Stop foolish Tilo. Where you are going (but where is that) none of this will matter.

Raven waits patiently for my attention. I notice that he is wearing jeans. A plain cotton shirt white as the sun at noontime. In his simplicity he dazzles me.

“I came to tell you the rest of my story. If you have time.”

“The best time I’ll ever have,” I say, and he begins.

“The death of my father cut me free of all ties, all caring. I was like a boat that had come unmoored, bobbing in an ocean filled with treasure troves and storms and sea monsters, and who knew where I would end up.

“Have you ever felt this way, Tilo? Then you know what a lonely feeling it is, and how dangerous. It can turn men into murderers, or saints.

“I had no one to love, for in their different ways both my father and mother were lost to me—and my great-grandfather too, though I was careful not to think of him. And so the laws of the world no longer seemed to apply to me. The opinions of others meant nothing. I felt light and porous, as though I could become anything I wanted—if I found something worth being—or implode into nothingness.

“I spent a lot of time alone in bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining possible lives. My present existence—scraping through classes, getting in fights, partying with the guys, sitting at the dinner table with my mother, swallowing forkfuls of silence-filled me with dissatisfaction. There was no direction to it, no intensity. No
power
.

“For slowly it came to me as I lay in my room while outside the world rushed by that there was only one thing in life worth having. Power. It was what my great-grandfather had offered me in that dying room. It was what my mother had snatched from me. And though I could never go back to
that
moment,
that
power, there were other kinds in the world. I needed to find the one that would be right for me.

“I toyed with wildly different thoughts—becoming part of a gang, going off with the Peace Corps, joining the army. Even going back to that clapboard house to find someone who knew my great-grandfather’s ways. But in the end I did none of them. In the end I went to business school.

“You’re laughing? I knew you would. But this is what came to me as I lay wondering: money was at the center of the world—
at least the one I lived in. Money was power. With money I could remake myself—not like my poor mother strained to do, but completely, suavely, at once and forever. “For the most part I was right.

“The finances were not a problem—my father had had life insurance—but I knew I’d have to work hard and change my habits—pull up my grades, quit hanging around with the guys, things like that. But it was less difficult than I’d thought. I discovered an unexpected hardness in myself, a drivenness, something that shook off all that could hold me back, something that didn’t mind cutting through all that was in the way. Maybe it was a quality I’d got from my mother, but in the passing down it had crystallized, grown more adamantine.