The Mistress of Spices (3 page)

Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as reality, an objective and untouched nature of being. Or if all that we encounter has already been changed by what we had imagined it to be. If we have dreamed it into being.

I think this most when I remember the pirates.

The pirates had teeth like polished stone and scimitars with handles made from the tusks of boars. Their fingers were laden with rings, amethyst and beryl and carbuncle, and around their necks hung sapphires for luck at sea. Polished with whale oil, their skin gleamed dark as mahogany or pale as birchbark, for pirates come from many races and many lands.

All this I knew from the stories we children were told at bedtime.

They raided and pillaged and burned, and when they left they took the children. Boychildren to make into more pirates, and girlchildren, whispered our old maidservant, shuddering with relish as she blew out our bedside lamps, for their evil pleasures.

She knew no more about the pirates than any of us children. No pirates had been sighted around our little river village for at least a hundred years. I doubt that she even believed in them.

But I believed. Long after the stories were done I lay awake and thought of them with yearning. Somewhere out in the great ocean they stood, tall and resolute at the prows of their ships, arms crossed, granite faces turned toward our village, hair whipped free by the salt wind.

That same salt wind would sweep through me. Restlessness. How tiresome my life had become, the endless praise, the songs of adulation, the mountains of gifts, my parents’ fearful deference.
And these unending nights lying sleepless among a gaggle of girls who groaned out the names of boys in their dreams.

I would turn my face into my pillow to escape the emptiness opening like a black hand inside my chest. I would focus my attention on my discontent until it glittered sharp as a hook, and then I would cast it out over the ocean in search of my pirates.

I was using the calling thought, though only later on the island would I learn its name. The calling thought which, as the Old One told us, can draw to you whoever you desire—a lover to your side, an enemy to your feet. Which can lift a soul out of a human body and place it raw and pulsing in your palm. Which used imperfectly and without control can bring destruction beyond imagining.

And so. Others may blame the merchant-sailors who carried tales of me to every land for the coming of the pirates. But I know better.

They arrived at dusk. Later I would think it a fitting time, that moment when day cannot be told apart from night, truth from longing. A black mast cleaving through evening mist, a score of torches flickering their avid red over hut and grainstack and cowbarn, already smelling of charred flesh. And later, the flared eyes of villagers, mouths open to scream and only smoke billowing out.

We had been eating when the pirates splintered the bamboo walls of my father’s house and burst upon us. Grease dripped from their blackened faces, and between curled lips, yes, their teeth were polished stone. Their eyes also. Polished and blind as
they came toward me, pulled by the force of the calling thought, that gold hook I had sent so heedlessly over the waters. A foot kicked away bowls and pitchers, scattering rice and fish and palm honey, an arm curved casually through the air, driving a sword into my father’s chest. Other hands pulled tapestries from walls, dragged women into corners, piled necklaces and earrings and jeweled waistbands onto a green skirt that one of my sisters had been wearing.

Mother, I never thought it would
feel like
this
.

I tried to stop them. Cried out all the charms I knew till my throat was raw, made the signs of power with shaking hands. Blew on a pot-shard to turn it into flint and aimed it at the pirate chiefs heart. But he flicked it away with a finger and motioned to his men to bind me.

My calling thought had set in motion a juggernaut wheel whose turning even I could not arrest.

They carried me through the burning village, I dazed by shock and shame, by this new helplessness. Smolder of rubble. Animals bellowing their terror. The pirate chiefs voice lifted above dying moans, giving me in awful irony my new name. Bhagyavati, Bringer of Luck, for so I was to be for them.

Father, sisters, forgive me, I who had been Nayan Tara, who had wanted your love but only won your fear. Forgive me, my village, I who in boredom and disappointment did this to you
.

Their pain stung like live coals in my chest as the pirates flung me onto the deck of their ship, as we took sail, as the flaming line of my homeland disappeared over the horizon. Long after the calling thought had worked itself out and my powers came to me again, strengthened by hate as power often is, long
after I overthrew the chief to become queen of the pirates (for what else I could be I did not know), that pain ate at me. Vengeance did not appease it, as I had thought it would.

This was not the last time I would misguess the workings of my heart.

Ah, I thought I would burn forever, scar and peel and still burn, and I welcomed the punishment.

For a year—or was it two, or three? Time runs into itself at moments in my tale—I lived as queen, leading my pirates to fame and glory, so that bards sang their fearless exploits. I carried this secret pain that branded itself onto each chamber of my heart. This pain, the other face of which was the truth I had learned so hard: The spell is greater than the spellmaker; once unleashed, it cannot be countered.

Nights I walked the decks alone and sleepless, I Bhagyavati, sorceress, pirate queen, bringer of luck and death, my cloak dragging in salt dust like a torn wing.

I would have laughed, except I had no smiles left. Nor tears.

I will never forget them, this pain and this truth, I told myself. Never.

I did not know then that everything is forgotten. Someday.

But now I must tell you about the snakes.

The snakes are everywhere, yes, even in your home, in your favorite room. Under the hearthstone perhaps, or curled in a nest of insulation in the wall, or camouflaged among carpet strands.
That flickering at the corner of your eye, gone when you swivel around.

The store? The store is full of them.

You are surprised? You have never noticed any, you say. That is because they have perfected the art of invisibility. If they do not wish, you will never see them.

No, I do not see them either. Not anymore.

But I know they are there. That is why each morning before the customers come I set earthen bowls of milk in the far corners of the store. Behind the extra bags of Basmati, in the thin sliver of space under the shelves of
dals
, near the glass case heaped with gaudy handicrafts that Indians buy only when they need to give gifts to Americans. I must do it just right, feel along the floor for the correct spot, warm as skin and throbbing. I must face the right direction, north-northwest, which is called
ishan
in the old language. I must whisper the words of invitation.

Snakes. Oldest of creatures, closest to the earth mother, all sinew and glide against her breast. Always I have loved them.

Once they loved me too.

In the heat-cracked fields behind my father’s house, the land snakes shielded me from sun when I was tired with playing. Their hoods spread ripple-wide, their smell cool as wet earth at the bottom of banana groves. In the streams that ribboned the village, the river snakes swam with me skin to skin, arrows of gold cutting through sun-flecked water, telling stories. How after a thousand years the bones of drowned men turn to white coral, their eyes to black pearl. How deep in a cavern underwater sits the king snake, Nagraj, guarding mounds of treasure.

And the snakes of the ocean, the sea serpents?

They saved my life.

Listen, I will tell you.

When I had been queen of the pirates for some time, one night I climbed to the prow of the ship. We were in the doldrums. Around me the ocean lay dark and thick, like clotted iron. It pressed in upon me like my life. I thought of the years behind me, all the raids I’d led, all the ships I’d plundered, all the riches I’d amassed meaninglessly and meaninglessly given away. I looked into the years ahead and saw the same, wave upon inky frozen wave.

“I want, I want,” I whispered. But what I longed for I didn’t know, except that it wasn’t this.

Was it death? It seemed possible.

And so I sent another calling thought over the water.

Sky grew dull like the scales of a
hilsa
fish stranded on sand, air sparked and stung, wind keened in our masts and ripped at our sails. And then it appeared on the horizon, the great typhoon I’d called up from its sleep in the ocean troughs of the east. It came at me, and beneath it the water was boiling.

The pirates screamed their terror in the holds below, but the sound was muffled, like an echo out of my past. When your heart is crusted over with your own pain, it is easy to feel little for others. A question rose in me like the tip of a broken mast in a storm-tossed sea. Had other voices cried to me in these tones once, long ago? But I let it fall back unanswered into the roaring.

O exhilaration, I thought. To be lifted up through the eye of chaos, to balance breath-stopped on the edge of nothing. And the plunge that would follow, the shattering of my matchstick body to smithereens, the bones flying free as foam, the heart finally released.

But when I saw that funnel mouth poised over me, and in it flashes of gray, like whirling knives, a heavy coldness filled my limbs. I knew I was not ready. The world was sweet as never before, suddenly, piercingly, sweet, and I wanted it with all my being.

“Please,” I cried. But to whom I did not know. Too late Bhagyavati bringer of death. Then I heard them.

A low sound no more than a hum, no match surely for that shrieking gale. But coming from someplace deep and slow, the center of the ocean perhaps, the ship vibrating with it and my heart also. And their heads held still above the spinning water, the calm glow from the jewel each wore on its crest. Or was it the glow from their eyes that held me so.

I did not know when the typhoon lifted into the sky, when the waves gentled. My body was filled with their song, and weightless, and shining.

The sea serpents who sleep all day in caves of coral, who ascend to the surface only when Dhruva, star of the north, pours its vial of milk-light over the ocean. Their skin like molten mother-of-pearl, their tongues a ripple of polished silver. Who are seldom seen by the mortal eye.

Later I would ask, “Why did you save me, why?”

The serpents never answered. What answer is there for love.

It was the sea serpents who told me of the island. And doing so, saved me once again.

Or did they? Some days I am not so sure. ‘Tell me more.”

“The island has been there forever,” said the snakes, “the Old One also. Even we who saw the mountains grow from buds of rock on the ocean bed, who were there when Samudra Puri, the perfect city, sank in the aftermath of the great flood, do not know their beginning.”

“And the spices?”

“Always. Their aroma like the long curling notes of the
shehnai
, like the
madol
that speeds up the blood with its wild beat, even across an entire ocean.”

“The island itself, what does it look like? And she?”

“We have only seen it from far: green slumbering volcano, red sand of beaches, granite outcrops like gray teeth. Nights when the Old One climbs the highest point, she is a pillar of burning. Her hands send the thunder-writing across the sky.”

“Haven’t you wanted to go to it?”

“It is dangerous. On the island and also the waters that touch its roots, her power alone prevails. Once we had a brother, Ratna-nag, he with the opal eyes, the curious one. He heard the singing, ventured closer though we warned.”

“And then?”

“His skin floated back to us after many days, his perfect skin still supple as newborn seaweed, smelling of spice. And above it, crying wild, circling till sunset, an opal-eyed bird.”

“The island of spice,” I said, and it seemed that I had finally found a name for my wanting.