The Mistress of Spices (8 page)

When the sky turns arsenic-red from sunset and smog, and the palm that stands scrawny by the bus stop throws its long ragged shadow in my doorway, I know it is time to close up.

I unpleat the wooden shutters and slide them across the pockmarked curve of a pale moon. In the gray window glass which is the store’s only mirror, the shadow of my face wavers for a moment. I shut my eyes, move away. Once a Mistress has taken on her magic Mistress-body, she is never to look on her reflection again. It is a rule that causes me no grief, for I know without looking how old I am, and how far from beautiful. That too I have accepted.

You are wondering if it were always so.

No.

Ah that first waking in the silent store, the smell of damp cement flowing down the walls down my body. How I lifted my arm, so heavy in its loose-lapped skin and felt the scream taking
shape like a dark hole in my chest.
Not this not this
. The trembling in my knees as I pushed myself up, the pain that jabbed the twisted bones of my hands.

My beautiful hands
.

Anger whose other name is regret surged like wildfire through me. Yet who could I blame. The Old One had warned us a hundred times.

O foolish Tilo always rushing in thinking you know letter

After a while it receded, the anger the pain. Perhaps I grew used to it. Or was it the spicesong? For when I held them in my misshapen hands the spices sang clearer than ever before, their notes true and high like ecstasy, like they knew I was now theirs wholly.

And I was. Am. Happy.

At the store entrance I shut the door. Turn the latch. Hook. Heft the heavy metal bar in place. At each entrance I clap and speak the words to keep out the rats and voles, the goblins that turn the lentils furry-green with mildew and make the chutneys rot inside their sealed jars of glass.

To keep out the boys that prowl the nightstreets. Soft-chinned apricot-fuzz boys, their bodies hard with the anger of not having. Wanting and not having and shouting inside their heads,
Why. Why when you have
.

The walls of the store grow dim, dimmer, till it is invisible to alien eyes. Even you standing outside will think you see merely shadow-shapes flickering on an empty lot.

Time now to spread my bedding in the center, where the floor dips just a little. Above, a naked bulb casts great domed
shadows, the roof disappears into the color of smoke. Around me, buckets of
bajra
flour, squat casks of rapeseed oil, reassuring-solid. Sacks of sparkling sea salt to keep me company. The spices whispering their secrets, sighing their pleasure.

I too sigh my pleasure. When I lie down, from every direction the city will pulse its pain and fear and impatient love into me. All night if I wish I can live it, the ordinary life I gave up for the spices, through the thoughts that roll into me.

Tilo whose life is so calm so controlled so always-same, is it not fine as wine, this taste of mortal sorrow, and mortal hope.

Each thought is a pattern of heat that will shape itself into words, into a face, and around it a room if I try hard enough.

First come the thoughts of the night boys, a high humming as in electric wires just before storm.

O the power the joy we are high with it when we step along the late street whistling chains swinging, and the people they scuttle into their holes, scuttle and scurry like roaches. We are king. And the orange spurt of flame from the mouths of our lovers our metal lovers our lovers who will give us death, death so much letter than love, as many times as we ask
.

The night boys with albino eyes colorless as acid. They curdle my heart. I push back their thoughts into the dark that spawned them, but I know that invisible does not mean gone.

But here is another image. A woman in a kitchen, cooking my rice. She is fragrant as the grains she rolls between her fingers to see if they are done. Rice steam has softened her skin, has loosened hair tied back taut all day. Has gentled the smudges under her eyes. Payday today, so she can begin the frying, mustard seeds sputtering in the pan, brinjal and bitter gourd turning yellow-red. Into a curry of cauliflowers like white fists, she mixes
garam masala
to bring patience and hope. Is she one, is she many, is she not the woman in a hundred Indian homes who is sprinkling, over sweet
kheer
that has simmered all afternoon, cardamom seeds from my shop for the dreams that keep us from going mad?

Inside my head her thoughts knock against one another, falling.

All evening I am running back and forth from kitchen to front window like a wild woman until the children come home. I am this way ever since what happened to the Gupta girl last week and in daylight too, the gods protect us. I am worrying also about their father, layoffs at work, fights with the foreman with the moneylender. Or is he again at Bailey’s today with the other men and forgetting the time. When I put the wedding garland around his neck, was I ever knowing that this is what is being a wife and mother, walking the edge of a knife with fear like a wolf waiting on both sides. And worst of all the mouths, the mouths coming to me even after I finally sleep, the mouths crumbled with hunger so many days this month, crying “So good Amma give us another half spoon more please Amma please” and I turning away with eyes like anguished stone
.

The men, where are they? Their thoughts give off the smell of parched earth in a year of failed monsoons, lead me into rooms hung with pictures from old calendars. Juhu Beach, the Golden Temple, Zeenat in a spangled sundress. Now I see them, boots kicked off, swollen feet released and lifted heavily to rickety tables. They are breathing in the old comforting smells. Ground coriander, roasted
saunf
, the small tinkling of a woman’s bangles. Almost it could be home. They close their hands around sweating brown bottles of Taj Mahal beer they bought at my store, chew the inside of their lips. I feel in my mouth the salt taste of blood as their thoughts come rushing.

Ah, that beer it goes down so foam-sweet and smooth but then in
the throat a bitterness, like a long-ago dream unfinished. No one told us it would be so hard here in Amreekah, all day scrubbing greasy floors, lying under engines that drip black oil, driving the belching monster trucks that coat our lungs with tar. Standing behind counters of dim motels where we must smile as we hand keys to whores. Yes, always smile, even when people say “Bastard foreigner taking over the country stealing our jobs.” Even when cops pull us over because we’re in the wrong part the rich part of town. We thought we’d he back home by now, in Trichy, in Kharagpur, in Bareilly. Under the sweet whirr of a ceiling fan in a mosaic room with a seagreen floor, leaning back on satin pillows, and the servant bringing ice-cold lassi with rose petals floating in it. But the landlord keeps hiking up the rent, last week the car wouldn’t start, and the children grow so fast out of their clothes
. Phir bhi,
no matter. This week we’ll take the bus up to Tahoe, Dilip bhaiya and I, play a few casinos, maybe get lucky like Arjun Singh, who won the lottery and the next day he went into 7-Eleven and told his boss “I spit on you and your job your job your job
.”

But it is dinnertime now. The mothers call out and the children come running from homework, chairs are pulled up, the steaming dishes brought in. Rice.
Rajma. Karela sabji. Kheer
.

A
girl. Her hair tied in twin tight braids, oiled and obedient, her legs pressed together the way her mother has told her nice girls sit. She lifts a bowl of
kheer
and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.

Kheer
today after so long, and there’s enough after Father and Elder Brother have been served, enough even for Mother who eats always last of all
. Kheer
with almonds and raisins and crunchy pods of
elaichi
because the oldwoman at the store said they were on sale when she saw us looking. I dip my mouth into its sweetness, milkwhite lines my lips, and
it’s like New Year, and like New Year I can wish for anything. So I do, for a house, a big two-story house with flowers in front and no clothes hanging out of windows, and enough rooms so we don’t sleep two to a bed, enough bathrooms for long long baths and hot water also. I am wishing a shiny new car with gold hubcaps and white seats like cat’s fur, and maybe a motorcycle as well, a red motorcycle that pulls the breath right out of you when Elder Brother zooms off with you behind. For Mother, a new pair of shoes instead of the one she lines with newspaper, and sparkly earrings like the women on TV. And for me, for me, lots and lots of Barbie dolls, Barbie in a nightgown and Barbie in a prom dress and Barbie in a swimsuit, silver high heels and lipstick and real breasts. Barbie with waist so narrow and hair so gold and most of all skin so white, and yes, even though I know I shouldn’t, I must be proud like Mother says to be Indian, I wish for that American skin that American hair those blue blue American eyes so that no one will stare at me except to say
WOW.

At the store each day has a color, a smell. And if you know to listen, a melody. And Friday, Friday when I am closest to restlessness, hums like a car getting ready. Humming and vibrating, all set to disappear down that neon freeway beyond which surely lie open fields colored like indigo. You breathe it in all the way because who knows when you will breathe next. And then you find the brake is jammed.

So perhaps it’s fitting that the lonely American comes into the store on a Friday evening, the full moon already floating above the shoulder of the woman on the cut-out billboard by the freeway, and she in a black evening gown holding up a glass of Chivas. The headlights of oncoming cars hit the rhinestone straps of her gown so they shine like anticipation. Her eyes are like smoke, her mouth like pomegranates. They hurt me. And when I listen, the speeding cars sound mournful as wind in island bamboo.

I start to say I’m closing, but then I look at him and I can’t.

It’s not as if I haven’t seen Americans. They come in here all the time, the professor types in tweed with patches on jacket elbows or in long skirts in earnest earth colors, Hare Krishnas in wrinkled white kurtas with shaved heads, backpack-toting students in seldom-laundered jeans, leftover hippies lankhaired and beaded. They want fresh coriander seed, organic of course, or pure ghee for a karma-free diet, or yesterday’s
burfis
at half price. They lower hoarse voices
Hey lady got any hashish
.

I give them what they want. I forget them.

Sometimes I am tempted. For instance. When Kwesi comes in, with his wine-dark skin, his hair the tight-curled tendrils of night clouds. Kwesi who walks like a warrior, without sound,
who holds his body in grace and without fear so I long to ask what he does.

And that scar like lightning on his forehead, that bump of knuckle broken and mended on his left hand. But I do not. It is not permitted.

“Remember why you are going,” the Old One said. ‘To help your own kind, and them only. The others, they must go elsewhere for their need.”

And so I let the clamor of the store drown out Kwesi’s heart beating its story. I look away from his desires, which are colored simple as childhood meadows. I weigh and pack what he has bought, powder of garbanzo, ground cumin, two bunches of cilantro. “Very nice,” I say when he tells me he’s going to make
pakoras
for a special friend, and without more talk wave him good-bye. And all the while I keep the door of my mind firmly shut.

But the lonely American feels different, feels like I might have trouble doing the same with him. It isn’t what he’s wearing. Black tailored pants, black shoes, a plain black leather jacket—but even I so little experienced in this can tell their expensiveness. Nor how he stands, slim and easy-hipped, a casual hand slipped into a pocket, rocking back a little on his heels. Nor his face, though it is arresting enough with its sharp jawline, its high tilted cheekbones hinting stubbornness, his thick blueblack hair falling onto his forehead in careless elegance. And his eyes, very dark, with little points of light flickering deep within. There’s nothing in him to show lonely except a spiderweb thought in the corner of my mind, nothing to account for why I’m drawn so.

Then it comes to me. With the others I have always known what they wanted. At once.

“Oh, just looking,” he says when I ask in my oldwoman voice that I suddenly wish were not so quavery.

Just looking
, and gives a surprisingly lopsided smile and gazes at me from under straight brows, as though he’s really seeing me, me underneath this body, and likes what he sees. Though how can that be.

He keeps on gazing straight into my eyes as no one except the Old One has ever done.

There’s a lurching inside me, like something stitched up tearing loose.

O danger.

And now I can’t read him at all. I go inside him to search and am wound around in a silk cloud. So all I have for knowledge is the quirk of his eyebrow as though he finds it amusing, all of it, but surely I’m silly to think he knows what I’m doing.