Something is different in the room, she knows it right away. Something added or taken, leaving it out of balance. Uneasiness pricks at the back of her throat.
Who has been here and why.
Then she sees it at her feet—how could she have missed it even a moment—giving off its cold phosphorescent glow. Alum. She picks up the icecube shape and wonders at how it sits so small and innocent in her palm, alum purifier. But wrongly used she knows it can bring death. Or worse, the death-in-life that imprisons will and desire inside a body turned to stone.
Alum phatkiri, what message do you bring to me today.
She runs her fingers idly over its smoothness as she thinks this. Then she feels it, the ridged image rising under her hand. Taking on its inexorable shape. And suddenly. There is no air. To breathe. The room tightens around her like a pulled-in net, red-and-blue-veined wherever she turns, or is it only in her eyes.
She runs her hand over the block again. Once, twice. No error. It is there, clear as thunder, clear as lightning, the outline of the firebird as she has seen it a hundred times on the island, only reversed this time so it is not rising out of the flames. But headfirst, plunging in.
“Shampati’s fire calling me back,” whispers the woman, remembering the lessons in the motherhouse. Her voice is old, and without hope. There is no bargaining this, she knows. No space for refusal. She has only three nights left.
I shut the door of the shop behind me, my hands firm as though my mind were not a sandstorm whirling and whittling. I keep the CLOSED sign on the door. Think Tilo think.
Seventy-two hours only, the moments dripping through my cupped palms like silver water faster and faster.
Not that. Think one by one of what you must complete, who you must help before you—
Before I do what I never thought I would again in this life—light Shampati’s fire and step into it. But this time without the Old One’s protecting eyes. I Tilo who have broken so many rules that I do not know what the spices will-Stop Tilo. Think one thing only at a time and yourself last of all. Think Haroun.
I close my eyes, will the breath to slow, speak the words of re-creation. And he is there.
Haroun in a neighborhood he doesn’t know well, a faraway neighborhood with buildings that crouch in the gloom, the night-fog thick as the voice in the backseat directs him to take a left and then another. Haroun driving his taxicab yellow as a sunflower, such a frail yellow on this street of warehouses, dim lights pooling brownly over stains and potholes. Haroun thinking, But no one lives here, thinking, I should have said no to this fare only he gave a twenty-dollar tip up front.
“Stop,” says the man in the back and Haroun hearing something else in the voice turns and sees the upraised arm, the rod a bent black thing. Begins to cry out No, don’t, don’t, you can have the money. But there’s a shower of stars, hot silver and stinging inside his eyes his mouth his nose. Through them he hears the hands that grope his pockets and jerk the glove compartment open, the voice shouting, “C’mon blood, time to split man.” A car starts up somewhere close, no, it is a motorcycle into whose roar he falls and falls and falls.
And I am falling too, into the anger I could not allow myself till this breath-space. Anger that burns the lining of the throat, anger red like the slow glowing of coals like the bursting heart of a volcano like the eye-searing smell of scorched chilies, telling me what to do.
In the inner room I do not need to turn on the light. To open my eyes. My hands guide me where I need to go.
The jar of red chilies is surprising-light. I hold it in my hands, and for a moment I hesitate.
Tilo you know from this point there will be no turning back.
Doubts and more doubts crowd the cage of my chest, clawing and crying for release. But I think of Haroun’s face, and behind him Mohan with his blinded eye, and behind him all the others, a line of injustice that stretches beyond the edge of eternity.
The seal is easier to break than ever I had thought. I reach in, feel the papery rub of the pods against my skin, the impatient rattle of the seeds.
O lanka who has been waiting so long for a moment like this, I pour you onto a square of white silk, all except one which I leave in the bottom of the jar. For myself, for soon I will need you too. I tie the cloth ends into a blindman’s knot that cannot be untied, that will have to be cut open. I hold the bundle in my hand and sit facing the east, where storms arise. I begin the transforming chant.
The chant comes slow at first along the ground, then gathers speed and strength. It lifts me high so the sun pierces my skin with its trident. It is the clouds, it is the whisper of rain. It drops me to the ocean-bottom where blind fish colored like mud graze in silence.
The chant like a tunnel I am traveling, and suddenly at the end of it an unexpected face. The Old One.
The chant coils like smoke, hangs unmoving for a moment, giving me time to ask.
“First Mother, what—”
“Tilo you should not have broken open the red jar—”
“Mother it was time.”
“—should not have released its power into this city that has too much anger in it already.”
“But Mother, the anger of the chili is pure, impersonal. Its destruction is cleansing, like the dance of Shiva. Did you not tell us this yourself?”
She only says, “There are better ways to help those who come to you.”
“There was no other way,” I say in exasperation. “Believe me. This land, these people, what they have become, what they have done to—. Ah, rocked in the safe cradle of your island, how can you understand?”
Then I see she cannot hear me. I see too the new lines carved into her face, age and worry. The sickness swelling the skin beneath the eyes.
“Tilo time is short let me tell you what I should have earlier. Before I became First Mother who I was. Like you a Mistress. Like you rebellious—”
The chant is restless, climbing again, and I who have tied myself to it must follow.
“—like you recalled. I too was forced to throw myself into Shampati’s fire a second time.” She lifts her burned-white hands to show me. “But I did not die.”
I am pulled faster and faster, the wind a wailing in my ears. “Stop,” I cry. There is so much I must ask her. But the chant is master now.
Very far and fading I hear her say, “Maybe you too will be allowed to come through. I will put my last powers to it, intercede on your behalf. Pull you back to the island. Tilo to be Mother for the Mistresses to come.”
I open my eyes not knowing for a moment when or where I am. Around me all is silent, no shape no color, the chant disappeared, air into air. The only thing I remember is the Old One’s voice, the promise in it but the doubt also.
Questions prick me like gadflies. I Tilo to be the new Old One, is it possible, do I want, can I even imagine. Such power, such ultimate power, mine.
Then the weight in my hands brings the present back.
The bundle is different now, heavier. Squat and solid. Glinting a little through the cloth. Whatever the chilies have changed themselves into fits firmly in my hand as though made for it. I feel through the cloth the smooth cylinder shape, the comma-shaped curve of metal where a finger could so easily tighten. My breath comes faster.
For a moment I am tempted. But no. Only Haroun must cut the bundle open.
Besides. I know already in my knocking heart (o elation, o pity and terror) what the spices have given Haroun as final remedy.
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 t
ake 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.