“Actually it is for Hameeda, for you both together.”
I push the bundle which had once been red chilies behind me. Then I reach around my neck and lift out the sachet of lotus root. Put it in his hands.
If regret wisps over my heart (O Raven) like a snatch of fog, I pay it no mind.
“She must wear it on the night of your nikah,” I say, “for a lifetime of passionate loving.”
Now he is the one who blushes.
“Give her my mubaarak,” I say from the door. “And Haroun. Be careful.”
“Yes, Ladyjaan. I have learned my foolishness. Hameeda too is scolding me about same thing. No more late-night work, no going in dangerous neighborhoods, no taking customers that I get a bad feeling for. Also I will keep in front seat a baseball bat. Shamsur is getting it for me already.”
He waves me Khuda hafiz, Haroun who has so much to live for, for whom the immigrant dream has come true in a way he never thought.
“You were gone forever,” says Raven. In the muted streetlamp his eyes accuse me just a little. “How come you look so glowing?”
“Raven!” I am laughing, remembering the bougainvillea girls. “Are you jealous?”
“Can you blame me? Look at you.” He touches my cheek. Pulls me to him for a long breath-stopping kiss, nuzzles my throat, Raven learning the contours of my body. Then he grows serious. “It’s more like—I know this sounds foolish—but I feel like you might disappear any minute. Like we have only a little time.” He draws back to fix his gaze on mine. ‘Tell me it’s foolish.”
“Foolish,” I say, looking down at my fingers, their shell-pink glow.
“Hey. You still have that package. I thought that’s why you came here, to give it to your friend.”
“I changed my mind. Raven. Will you take me to one more place.”
He sighs. “Woman, don’t do this to me.”
“It’ll take just a few minutes.”
“Oh very well. Try to be quick, okay?”
When he turns off the engine I kiss his eyes, let my lips linger over the brows, the soft hollows beneath. “To keep you till I return,” I say.
He groans. “I think I just ran out of patience.”
I laugh with the power of it, I who can for the first time in all my lives make a man speak this way.
The dim-lit pier seems very long, the water very black, the package very heavy. Or is the weight in my heart. My breath is a jerking in my chest. I fear I will never reach the end.
Unbidden, that old longing comes to me again. Snakes, are you—
The words are a tumble of snowflakes in a car’s headlamps, gone already. I know this is not the time.
Spices I am sorry, I say, standing at the water’s inky edge. But finally I think I have done right. It is best for Haroun to live a life of love, not hate and hurting which brings only more of its kind.
You should have thought that before, Tilo. Their voice comes from nowhere and everywhere, as in a trickster play, Now you have roused us, we must work our power. Something must be destroyed. You tell us what.
Spices I am singing the chant of propitiation. Can you not this once travel the path of forgiveness.
The world does not work that way, foolish Mistress who thinks she can roll up the falling waterfall, can make the forest fire suck in its blaze-red tongue. Or as that man waiting in his car would say, hold again in your hands the bird already flown.
Leave him out of this, spices, this is between you and me.
The package in my hand glows with heat. Or is it rage. Tilo who should not have played with forces beyond your understanding, the destruction you have set in motion will touch every life around you. The entire city will shake with it.
There is no more then to say, I tell them, my lips dry with a sudden fear I would shake off but cannot. I lower the package into the water, let it go. It sinks slowly, incandescent. When finally it has disappeared I let out my breath. And this is what I say before I turn to walk the long way back.
Spices start with my life if you must. Take me first. Spend your hate on me.
Tilo how little you have understood. From the deep the voice is a hiss, like water on hot iron. Or is it a sigh. Like the waterfall the avalanche the forest fire, we do not hate. We only do what we must.
Raven lives on the topmost floor of a building that seems to me the tallest in the world. It is walled with glass. As the elevator rises we see falling away beneath us the entire glittering city. Almost it is like flying.
He throws the door open with a flourish. “Welcome to my home.” There is a slight tremble to his voice. I am amazed to realize he is nervous, my American. Deep in me, a surging. Love and a new desire, to reassure this man.
“It’s beautiful,” I say, and it is. Light wells around us, though from where it comes I cannot tell. Soft white carpet into which my feet sink ankle deep. Wide low sofas of smooth white leather. A coffee table that is a simple oval of glass. One large painting on a wall, swirling with sunrise colors, or is it the beginning of the world. In the corner, under a large ficus, the statue of an apsara. I kneel to touch the sharp-honed features. It is not unlike touching my own face.
In the bedroom, the same understated luxury, the same surprising spareness. A bed covered with an embroidered silk bedspread, white on white. A lamp. One large bookshelf filled to the top with books that have been read late into the sleeping hours. The outer wall is all glass. Through it I can see lights, tiny yellow holes punched into the nighttime, then the dark swatch of the Bay. The only decoration in the room is a batik of Buddha, lotus hand raised in compassion.
Playboy Raven, my American of the party scene, I never would have guessed this.
As though in answer he says, “I’ve been redoing things, throwing out a lot of my old junk, picturing you here. Do you like it?”
“Yes.” My voice is low. I am humbled that someone should build his home around his imagination of me. And guilt-filled because.
“Although it doesn’t really matter, does it,” he adds, “since pretty soon we’ll be gone.”
“Yes, soon,” I say through stiff lips.
Raven turns off the lamp. In the cool silver moonlight I feel his breath behind me, smelling of almonds and peaches. He twines his arms around my waist. His lips against my ear, his whisper warm as skin.
“Tilo.”
I close my eyes. He is kissing my shoulders, my neck, little kisses on each separate nub of the backbone. He is turning me to him, unbuttoning my dress and letting it fall in a silken swirl to my feet. His hands move like doves over my body.
“Tilo, look at me, touch me too.”
I am too shy to open my eyes but I slip my hand under his shirt. His skin is firm and smooth everywhere except at the collarbone, where there is a small puckered scar, vestige of some long-ago fight. It rouses in me a tenderness I am amazed by, I who have always craved the power of perfection and find now that human frailty has its own power too. I kiss it and hear the breath sharp in his throat. Then his lips are everywhere, his tongue, teasing, drawing me out of myself. I Tilo who never thought I would learn the ways of pleasure so surprising-fast, pleasure that flows over the body like warm honey, fingertips, toes, each pore of the skin.
We are in bed now, the walls fallen away, the stars shining in our hair. He lifts me on top, lets my hair cover his face like a song of water. “This way, dear one.”
But I know already. Makaradwaj kingspice tells me what to do so that Raven laughs low in his throat, “Tilo!” then gasps and shudders.
The voice of the spice is in my ears, Use everything. Mouth and hand, yes, nails and teeth, flutter of eyelash against his skin, that special look in your eye. Give and take back, teasing. As did the great courtesans in the courts of Indra the godking.
Let him be discoverer of the land that you are, mountain and lake and cityscape. Let him carve out roads where none went before. Let him enter finally where you are deepest and most unknown, thick vines, jaguar cry, the dizzying odor of raja
nigandha, the wild tuberose, flower of the bridal night. For isn’t love the illusion that you will open yourselves totally to each other, suffering no distance to be kept.
O makaradwaj, why do you say illusion. I am willing to give this man all my secrets, my past and my present both.
And your future? Will you tell him when your loving is done that this first time is also the last? Will you tell him of Shampati’s fire?
“Tilo,” cries Raven urgently, pulling my hips into him, again, again, bone to bone, till I feel the hot release take us both. Till we are one body and many bodies and no body all at once.
It is then I feel the sadness, a heat forsaking my skin like the last color forsakes the evening sky, making me shiver. A part of me dying, a receding song I feel in every hollowed bone, every brittled hair, every limb slumping toward its old shape. Does Raven feel it too.
Is it the spices, leaving me? Tilo don’t think of it now.
For now let us lie holding each other under this bedspread white as faithfulness, our breath slowing. For a moment his arms circling me are a battlement time cannot storm. Mouth against mouth we whisper sleepily, little endearments that make no sense unless you are hearing with the heart. Smell of love-sweat on his skin. The rhythm of his blood that I already know as intimately as my own.
This tenderness after desire is spent, what can be sweeter.
Just before I fall into dreaming I hear him say, “Tilo, dear one, I can’t believe we’ll be together for a lifetime of such nights.” But I am too deep in the dreaming waters to answer.
You who have more knowledge than me of loving, I ask you this: Do you, sleeping in your lover’s arms, dream his dreams? For that is what I see behind my closed lids. Red-barked sequoia and innocent blue eucalyptus, squirrels with their silk-brown eyes. A land to grow into, to be transformed by. Its winter of chill caves and smoky fires, its waterfalls frozen into soundlessness. Its summers of gritty earth under our bare feet, under our bare backs as we make love in fields of wild poppies.
Raven I know now you are right, the place you call earthly paradise is somewhere waiting. And so I ache more wanting it, knowing that I will never go there with you, I Tilo whose time is running out.
He stirs with a groan as though he is hearing my thought. He murmurs a word that sounds like fire.
I stiffen. My American, are you dreaming my dream?
He emerges from sleep for a moment to offer me an un focused smile, to nuzzle my shoulder, my throat. “My tropical blossom,” he says. “My mysterious Indian beauty.” Then he is gone again, unaware that I have drawn back.
American, it is good you remind me, I Tilo who was at the point of losing myself in you. You have loved me for the color of my skin, the accent of my speaking, the quaintness of my customs which promised you the magic you no longer found in the women of your own land. In your yearning you have made me into that which I am not.
I do not blame you too much. Perhaps I have done the same with you. But how can the soil of misconception nurture the seedling of love? Even without the spices standing guard between us, we would have failed. And who can tell if we would have come to hate each other.
It is better this way.
The thought gives me strength to tear my reluctant body from his warmth. To do what I must before he wakes.
In a kitchen drawer I find paper and pencil. Begin.
The note takes a long time. My fingers are numb. My disobedient eyes wish to weep. My mind brings forth lovewords only. But at last I am done. I open the bathroom cabinet, wrap the note around the tube of paste where Raven will find it tomorrow morning.
Then I wake him.
We have a disagreement, our first lover’s quarrel. (And our last, says the voice in my head.)
I must return to the store, I tell Raven. He is upset. Why can’t we stay together till morning, make love once more in early light? He will bring me breakfast in bed.
O Raven if you knew how much I would love—
But by dawn, when Shampati’s fire will blaze whether I wish it or not. I must be far from him.
I make my voice cold, tell him I need to be alone, think things through.
“Are you tired of me already?” Raven, Raven, I cry inside.
I tell him there’s something urgent that needs to be done which I cannot explain.
His mouth sets in a line of hard hurting. “I thought we were to have no more secrets. That we were to share our life, all of it, from now. Isn’t that what you just promised me with your body?”
“Please, Raven.”
“And what of our special place? Aren’t we going to look for it together?”
“What’s the hurry?” I am amazed at the calm deceit of my voice even as my stomach tightens and churns.
“We shouldn’t waste any more time,” Raven’s voice is urgent, “now that we’ve found each other. You of all people should know how uncertain life is, how fragile.”
In my ears the blood beats an echo, fragile, fragile. Outside his window the stars are hurtling dizzily toward morning.
“Okay,” I say to Raven finally, I who am too cowardly to watch the truth shatter in his eyes. “Come back in the morning and I’ll go with you.” Under my breath I add, “If I’m still there.”
I know I will not be.
We drive in silence. Raven, still displeased, fiddles with the dial of his radio. The animals in the Oakland 200 have been acting strange, crying and calling all evening, states a late-night newscaster. A singer with a voice like reeds in wind informs us that if we travel faster than the speed of sound, we must expect to get burned.
Shampati’s fire, how fast will I travel, how brightly will I burn.
I am seeing the note as Raven will see it in the morning, stumbling into the bathroom, his sleep-filled eyes still imprinted with the shape of my lips. Eyes that in surprise he will open, shaking the wool of dreams from them.
Raven forgive me, the note will say. I do not expect you to understand. Only to believe that I had no choice. I thank you for all you have given me. I hope I have given you a little too. Our love would never have lasted, for it was based upon fantasy, yours and mine, of what it is to be Indian. To be American. But where I am going—life or death, I do not know which—I will carry its brief aching sweetness. Forever.
I do not unlock the door of the spice shop until after Raven has roared away. I am afraid of what retribution I will find for this last act, love snatched in a way a Mistress never should.
But everything is as I left it. I laugh. Almost I feel let down. All this time I have been a worryheart for no reason at all. It will be as the First Mother said—I will step in Shampati’s fire, wake on the island to take up her load. O, there will be punishment, I do not doubt that. Perhaps a scorching branded on my skin to make me always remember, perhaps (for I feel it changing already, the bones gnarling back) a body older and uglier, with all such a body’s pains.
I walk the emptied aisles, saying good-bye, remembering the moments. Here Haroun first offered me his palm to read, here Ahuja’s wife leaned admiring over a sari colored like the silken heart of a papaya. Here Jagjit stood behind his mother, innocent in his turban green as parrots. But already their names are slipping from me, their faces, even this sadness of forgetting muted, as though I were long gone already.
Raven will I forget you too.
Only after I am halfway across the store do I sense it, subtle, like the shift of light and shade in a night sky when a star has gone out. The old Tilo would have known it at once.
The shop is a shell only. Whatever was in it giving heat and breath has long left.
Spices what does this mean.
But I have no leisure to ponder it now. The third day is ending. I hear the planets spinning faster, the hours hurled like rocks through the sky. There is barely time to prepare Shampati’s fire.
I bring all that is left in the store—spices, dals, sacks of atta and rice and bajra—and make a pyre in the center of the room. Over it all I sprink
le my name-spice, sesame, grainy til to coat and protect me through my long journey. I let fall the white dress, shivering a little. I must take nothing from this life, go from America naked as I came into it.
Now I am ready. I dip my hands in turmeric, spice of rebirth with which I began this story, and pick up the stone jar that had held the chilies. I sit in lotus asana on the pyre of spices (but already my limbs are groaning a protest) and for the last time I open the jar. I draw my mind back from all that I have loved, and as it empties (is this what death is like) I feel a surprising peace.
I hold up the single chili I had left in the jar for this moment, and speak the invoking words. Come Shampati, take me now.
First Mother, are you at this very moment singing the song of welcome, the song to help my soul through the layers, bone and steel and forbidding word, that separate the two worlds. Or have you in illness or perhaps disappointment let me fall from your mind.
Fear beats against my ears like a storm-scared bird. Any moment now the flames—But nothing happens.
I wait, then say the words again. And again. Louder each time.
Nothing.
I am sobbing the words, trying other chants, even the smallest magic, please, please. Nothing still.
Spices what are you doing what teasing trick is this.
No answer.
Spices, in my mind I am gone already, plummeting through space and time, my skin grazed by meteors, my hair on fire. Don’t prolong my agony, I beg you, I Tilo humbled at last and terrified, as you wanted.
Silence more profound than ever I have heard it, even the planets ground to a halt.
And in that silence I see the spices’ punishment.
They have left me here, alone and reft of magic. For me there will be no Shampati’s fire.
Shampati’s fire, which I have feared for so long. Now suddenly I fear more my life without it.
Ah beautiful body in whose veins already the blood grows thick and sluggish, I see it now. I am doomed to live in this pitiless world as an old woman, without power, without livelihood, without a single being to whom I can turn.