The Mistress of Spices (5 page)

“Not cold and dry as the snake’s belly, for a Mistress of spices must feel the other’s pain.

“Not warm and damp as the breath of a waiting lover against the windowpane, for a Mistress must leave her own passions behind.

“In the center of the good hand is imprinted an invisible lily, flower of cool virtue, glowing pearl at midnight.” Do your hands fit this litany? Nor did mine. How then, you ask, did I become a Mistress. Wait, I will tell you.

From the moment the oldest serpent told me the way, I drove my pirates day and night, relentless, till they dropped on the deck exhausted, not daring to ask why or where. Then one evening we saw it on the horizon, a smudge like smoke or seacloud. But I knew what it was. Anchor, I ordered, and would not say more. And while the tired crew slept as though tranced, I dived into the midnight ocean.

The island was far, but I was confident. I sang a chant for weightlessness, and pushed through the waves easy as air. But while the island was still small as a fist pushing up into the sky, the chant died in my throat. My arms and legs grew heavy and would not obey. In these waters charmed by a greater sorceress, my power was nothing. I struggled and thrashed and
swallowed brine like any other clumsy mortal until at last I dragged myself onto the sand and collapsed into a dizzy whorl of dreams.

The dreams I do not remember, but the voice that woke me from them I will never forget. Cool and grainy with a hint of a mocking laugh in it, yet deep, deep, a voice to plunge your heart into.

“What has the god of the sea belched up on our shore this morning?”

The Old One, surrounded by her novices, and the sun a halo behind her head and shimmering many-colored in her lashes. So that I scrambling to my knees felt impelled to lower my own sand-caked ones.

It was then I saw that I was naked. The sea had stripped me of all, clothes and magic and for the moment arrogance even. Had thrown me at her feet bereft of all but this dark, ugly body.

In shame I pulled at my salt-stiff hair to cover me. In shame I crossed my arms over my chest and bent my head.

But already she was removing her shawl, placing it around my shoulders. Soft and gray as a dove’s throat, and the spice-smell rising from it like a mystery I longed to learn. And her hands. Soft, but with the skin burned pink-white and puckered to the elbows as though she had plunged them into a long-ago blaze.

“Who are you, child?”

Who was I? I could not say. Already my name had faded in the rising island sun, like a star from a night that has passed away. Only much later when she would teach us the herbs of memory would I recollect it—and my past life—again.

“What do you want of me?”

Dumbly I stared at her, she who seemed at once oldest and
most beautiful of women with her silver wrinkles, though later I would see that she was not beautiful in the way men use the word. Her voice, which I would later learn in all its tones—anger and mockery and sadness—was sweet as the wind in the cinnamon trees behind her. A yearning to belong to her buffeted me like the waves I had fought all night.

I think she read my heart, the Old One. Or perhaps it was merely that all who came to her were drawn by the same desire.

She gave a small sigh. The weight of adoration is hard to bear, I know that now.

“Let me see.” And she took my hands in hers that had passed through fire, who knows where.

Too light, too hot, too damp. My hands freckled as the back of a golden plover. Palms where at midnight thorn-purple blood-wort would burst into bloom.

The Old One had taken a step back, letting go.

“No.”

Each year a thousand girls are sent back from the island because they do not have the right hands. It does not count if they have the second sight, or if they can leave their bodies to travel the sky. The Old One is adamant.

Each year a thousand girls whose hands have failed them throw themselves into the sea as they sail home. Because death is easier to bear than the ordinary life, cooking and washing clothes and bathing in the women’s lake and bearing children who will one day leave you, and all the while remembering her, on whom you had set your heart.

They become water wraiths, spirits of mist and salt, crying in the voices of gulls.

I too would have been one of them, but for the bones.

They were why the Old One could not resist taking my hands in hers again. Why she let me stay on the island though all wisdom must have shouted
no
.

Most important in a good hand are the bones. They must be smooth as water-polished stone and pliant to the Old One’s touch when she holds your palm between hers, when she places the spices in its center. They must know to sing to the spices.

“I should have made you go,” the Old One would tell me later, shaking her head ruefully. “They were volcano hands, simmering with risk, waiting to explode. But I couldn’t.”

“Why not, First Mother?”

“You were the only one in whose hands the spices sang back.”

Let me tell you about chilies.

The dry chili,
lanka
, is the most potent of spices. In its blister-red skin, the most beautiful. Its other name is danger.

The chili sings in the voice of a hawk circling sun-bleached hills where nothing grows: I lanka
was horn of Agni, god of fire. I dripped from his fingertips to bring taste to this Wand earth
.

Lanka
, I think I am most in love with you.

The chili grows in the very center of the island, in the core of a sleeping volcano. Until we reach the third level of apprenticeship, we are not allowed to approach it.

Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.

Lanka, lanka
. Sometimes I roll your name over my tongue. Taste the enticing sting of it.

So many times the Old One has warned us against your powers.

“Daughters, use it only as the last remedy. It is easy to start a flame. But to put it out?”

That is why I hold on,
lanka
, whose name the ten-headed Ravana took for his enchanted kingdom. City of a million jewels turned at the last to ash. Though more than once I have been tempted.

As when Jagjit comes to the store.

In the inner room of the store, on the topmost shelf, sits a sealed jar filled with red fingers of light. One day I will open it and the chilies will flicker to the ground. And blaze.

Lanka
, fire-child, cleanser of evil. For when there is no other way.

Jagjit comes to the store with his mother. Stands partly behind her, his fingers touching her
dupatta
although he is ten and a half already and tall as wild bamboo.

“Oi Jaggi don’t hang on me like a girl, go get me a packet of
sabu papads
.”

Jagjit with his thin, frightened wrists who has trouble in school because he knows only Punjabi still. Jagjit whom the teacher has put in the last row next to the drooling boy with milk-blue eyes. Jagjit who has learned his first English word.
Idiot. Idiot. Idiot
.

I walk to the back where he stares in confusion at the shelves of
papads
, the packets stamped with hieroglyphs of Hindi and English.

I hand him the
sabu papads
. I tell him “They’re the bumpy white ones, see. Next time you’ll know.”

Shy-eyed Jagjit in your green turban that the kids at school make fun of, do you know your name means world-conqueror?

But already his mother is shouting “What’s taking you so long Jaggi, can’t find the papads, are you blind, the hairs on my head will go white waiting waiting by the time you get back.”

In the playground they try to pull it off his head, green turban the color of a parrot’s breast. They dangle the cloth from their fingertips and laugh at his long, uncut hair. And push him down.

Asshole
, his second English word. And his knees bleeding from the gravel.

Jagjit who bites down on his lip so the cry will not out. Who picks up his muddy turban and ties it on slowly and goes inside.

“Jaggi how come you’re always dirtying your school clothes, here is a button gone and look at this big tear on your shirt, you
badmash
, you think I’m made of money.”

At night he lies with his eyes open, staring until the stars begin to flicker like fireflies in his grandmother’s
kheti
outside Jullunder. She is singing as she gathers for dinner bunches of
saag
green as his turban. Punjabi words that sound like rain.

Jagjit, do they come back when you at last must close your eyes because what else can you do. The jeering voices, the spitting mouths, the hands. The hands that pull your pants down in the playground and the girls looking.

“Chhodo mainu”

“Talk English sonofabitch. Speak up nigger wetback asshole.”

“Jaggi what you meaning you don’t want to go to school, what for your father is killing himself working working at the factory, two slaps will make you go.”

“Chhodo”

At the checkstand I say, “Here’s some
burfi
for you, no no madam, no cost for children.” I see him bite eager into the brown sweet flavored with clove and cardamom and cinnamon. He smiles a small smile to answer mine.

Crushed clove and cardamom, Jagjit, to make your breath fragrant. Cardamom which I will scatter tonight on the wind for you. North wind carrying them to open your teacher’s unseeing.
And also sweet pungent clove,
lavang
, spice of compassion. So your mother of a sudden looking up from the washboard, pushing tired hair from her face, “Jaggi
beta
, tell me what happened,” will hold you in her soapsud arms.

And here is cinnamon, hollow dark bone that I tuck unseen in your turban just before you go. Cinnamon friend-maker, cinnamon
dalchini
warm-brown as skin, to find you someone who will take you by the hand, who will run with you and laugh with you and say See this is America, it’s not so bad.

And for the others with the pebble-hard eyes, cinnamon destroyer of enemies to give you strength, strength which grows in your legs and arms and mostly mouth till one day you shout
no
loud enough to make them, shocked, stop.

When we had passed the ceremony of purification, when we were ready to leave the island and meet our separate destinies, the Old One said, “Daughters it is time for me to give you your new names. For when you came to this island you left your old names behind, and have remained nameless since.

“But let me ask you one last time. Are you certain you wish to become Mistresses? It is not too late to choose an easier life.

“Are you ready to give up your young bodies, to take on age and ugliness and unending service? Ready never to step out of the places where you are set down, store or school or healing house?

“Are you ready never to love any but the spices again?”

Around me my sister-novices, their garments still wet from
the seawater she had poured on them, stood silent, shivering a little. And it seemed to me the prettiest ones kept their eyes lowered longest.