“And this”—I open a lid and sift the fine powder through my fingers—“is amchur. Made from black salt and mangoes dried and pounded, to heal the taste buds, to bring back love of life.”
Tilo don’t babble like a girl.
“Ah.” He bends his head to sniff, lifts his eyes to smile approval. “It’s like nothing I’ve ever smelled before—but I like it.”
Then he moves away.
And says in a voice grown formal, “I’ve kept you too long already. You should be closing up.”
Tilottama. Fool who should know better. To think he’d be interested.
At the door he raises his hand, in salute or good-bye or maybe just to wave away the hovering moths. I feel a great sorrow because he is leaving empty-handed, because I couldn’t find what he was looking for. Because something is twisting inside, telling me I am losing him, the one man whose heart I could not read.
And then.
“I’ll be seeing you,” says the lonely American, and smiles a rhinestone smile. As though he really means it. As though he too will be waiting.
After the lonely American leaves, I wander the store, aimless-sad. Dissatisfaction, that old poison I thought I’d been cured of, bubbles up thick and viscous in me. I cannot bear to lock up. Barring the door would be to admit that he is really gone. Outside, streetlights blink on. Men and women turn up the collars of their coats and disappear underground into the dim clank and clatter of the subway. A yellow fog fills the deserted streets, and in the distance sirens begin to wail, reminding us how fugitive happiness is. But of course no one listens. I am looking for a spice for him.
“Different spices may help us with different troubles,” the Old One told us after she had taught us the common cures. “But for each person there is one special spice. No, not for you—the Mistresses must never use the spices for their own ends—but for all who come to you it exists. It is called mahamul, the root spice, and for each person it is different. Mahamul to enhance fortune, to bring success or joy, to avert ill luck. When you do not know how else to help someone, you must go deep into your being and search out the mahamul.”
Lonely American, how shall I begin, I who have always prided myself on the quick remedy?
I roam the shelves. Kalo jire? Ajwain? Powder of mango-gingerroot? Choon, the burning white lime that is wrapped in betel leaves? Nothing seems suitable. Nothing feels right. Perhaps the fault is in me, in my distracted soul. I Tilo who cannot stop thinking about those eyes dark as a tropical night, as deep, as filled with peril.
And why do I persist in calling him lonely? Perhaps even now, even as I stalk discontented down the aisle of lentils, as I plunge restive arms elbow-deep in a bin of rajma and let the cool red pods roll over my skin, he is turning a key. The door opens, and a woman with hair like gold mist rises from the couch to take him in her—
No. It isn’t so. I will not let it be so.
He enters and turns on a light, flips a switch, and the sound of a sarod fills the empty room. He leans back against a Jaipuri cushion—for he loves all things Indian—and thinks about what he has seen today, a store smelling of all the world, a woman whose ageless eyes pull at him like-Idle wishing. Idle, riskful wishing.
“When you begin to weave your own desires into your vision,” the Old One told us, “the true seeing is taken from you. You grow confused, and the spices no longer obey you.”
Back Tilo, before it’s too late.
I force my mind to emptiness. I will trust only my hands, my hands with their singing bones to know what the lonely American needs.
The store stands unbarred, lucent crystal vial under the poised boot-heel of night. The doorway swarms gray with mothwings. But I cannot tend to it now.
I enter the inner room and close my eyes. In the dark my hands glow like lanterns. I trail my fingers along the dusty shelves.
Phosphorous fingers coral fingers, I wait for you to tell me what I must do.
In his bedroom the lonely American kicks off his shoes, turns down the silk covers of his bed. He shrugs off his shirt and lets it fall to the floor. Candlelight plays liquid on his shoulders, his back, the hard, muscled swell of his buttocks as he lets his pants fall too and stands straight, lithe, made of ivory. In a moment he will turn—
Fluid fills my mouth in a hot sweet rush. In all my lives before, fortune-teller and pirate queen and apprentice of spices, I have never seen a naked man, never desired to see it. Then my hands shudder to a stop.
Not now, hands, not now. Give me just a moment more.
But they are immovable, adamantine. Mine and not mine. Fisted around something hard and grainy, a pulsing lump whose acrid smell cuts through my vision.
The images crumble, dust or dreaming, and are gone.
Sighing, I open unwilling eyes.
In my hand, a nugget of asafetida.
A crash in the other room, like something breaking. Or is it the night throwing itself against the store’s windowpanes?
Spark-hard rock of Mars, urging the receiver to glory and fame, away from Venus’s seductions. Baleful yellow asafetida to leach away softness and leave a man all sinew and bone.
A gust of wind blows in the smell of wet overcoats. The floor is a floe of ice under my stumbling. I force myself to the door. In my hands the bar feels deadly heavy. Almost I cannot lift it. I must use all my strength to push it shaking into place before it is too late.
Asafetida hing, which is the antidote to love.
I lean against the door, spent, knowing what is expected of me, Mistress of Spices, but also their handmaid.
I feel them watching, like a held breath.
Even the air is like iron.
When I can move again, I go to the handicrafts case. I push aside batik scarves and mirrored cushion covers and brass paper knives and terra-cotta goddesses, let them all tumble to the floor until I find it, a small smooth ebony box lined with velvet like a blackbird’s wing. I open it and drop in the asafetida, and in the precise, angled island script the Old One taught us I write, For the lonely American.
Around me rises a soft relieved humming. A breeze caresses my cheek, a gentle exhalation, moist with approval. Or is it tears—I who have never cried before?
I avert my face from the store, from the million spice eyes, tiny, bright, everywhere. Steel points like nails for me to step on. For the first time since I became a Mistress, I pull a covering around my inmost thoughts.
I am not sure it will work, my deception.
But it seems to. Or is it only the spices humoring me?
I slide the box to the back of the shelf under the cash register, to wait in the dust until he comes. I lie down. Around me the spices calm, settle into the rhythms of the night. Their love winds around me heavy as the sevenfold gold Benarasi that women must wear at their wedding.
So much love, how will I breathe?
When the store is lulled into sleep, I uncover the secret chamber of my being and look in. And am not surprised at what I find.
I will not give it to him, heart-hardening asafetida to my lonely American.
No matter what the spices want. Not yet, or never?
I do not know the answer to that.
But deep inside I feel the first tremor, warning of earthquakes to come.
The rich Indians descend from hills that twinkle brighter than stars, so bright that it is easy to forget it is only electricity. Their cars gleam like waxed apples, glide like swans over the potholes outside my store.
The car stops, the uniformed chauffeur jumps out to hold open the gold-handled door, and a foot in a gold sandal steps down. Soft and arched and almost white. Rosepetal toes curling in disdain away from what lines the street, wadded paper, rotting peels, dog shit, shucked-off condoms thrown from the back windows of cars.
The rich Indians rarely speak, as if too much money has clogged their throats. Inside the store which they have entered only because friends said “O it’s so quaint, you must go see at least once,” they point. And the chau
ffeur springs to fetch. Basmati rice, extra-long grain, aged in jute sacking to make it sweet. The finest flour, genuine Elephant brand. Mustard oil in a costly glass bottle, even though sitting right beside are the economy tins. The chauffeur staggers beneath the load. But there’s more. Fresh lauki flown in from the Philippines, and emerald-leafed methi saag that I have grown in a box on the back windowsill A whole box of saffron like shavings of flame and, by the pound, tiny shelled pistas—the most expensive kind—green as mango buds.
“If you wait one week,” I say, “they will go on sale.”
The rich Indians look at me with heavy eyes that are almost no color at all. They nod at the chauffeur and he picks up another two pounds.
I hide my smile.
The rich Indians crane their necks and lift their chins high because they have to be more always than other people, taller, handsomer, better dressed. Or at least richer. They heave their bodies like moneybags out the door and into their satin cars, leaving the crumbly odor of old banknotes behind.
Other rich people send lists instead, because being a rich person is a busy job. Golf cruises charity luncheons in the Cornelian Room shopping for new Lamborghinis and cigar cases inlaid with lapis lazuli.
Still others have forgotten to be Indian and eat caviar only.
For all of them in the evening I burn tulsi, basil which is the plant of humility, curber of ego. The sweet smoke of basil whose taste I know on my own tongue, for many times the Old One has burned it for me too. Basil sacred to Sri Ram, which slakes the craving for power, which turns the thoughts inward, away from worldliness.
Because inward even rich people are people only.
I must tell this to myself over and over. And also what the Old One taught us: “Not for you to pick and choose your compassion. The ones who anger you most, you must bend most to help.”
There is something else that I must tell you.
When I look deep into the lives of rich people, sometimes I am forced to humility, to say Who would have thought. For instance. Anant Soni who at the end of a day of corporate video conferences sits by his mother’s bedside to rub her arthritic hands. And Dr. Lalchandani’s wife who stares unseeing out the bedroom window of her designer home because across town her husband is in bed with another woman. And Prameela Vijh who sells million-dollar houses and sends money to her sister in a battered women’s shelter. And Rajesh whose company went public the same day the doctor pushed the biopsy report across the table at him and said chemo.
And right now in front of me a woman in oversize Bill Blass jeans and Gucci shoes is buying stacks and stacks of Naans for a party tonight, is drumming rubyflash fingers on the counter as I ring up the flat brown bread, is saying shrill as tin “Come on I’m in a hurry.” But inside she is thinking of her teenage son. He’s been acting so strange lately, hanging out with boys who frighten her with their razor earrings and biker jackets and heavy boots as though for war, their cold, cold eyes and slits of mouths that are becoming his eyes, his mouth. Could he be taking—. Her mind shudders away from the word she cannot say even inside her clamped lips, and under the layers, foundation and concealer and rouge and thick fuchsia eyeshadow, her face grows bruised with love.
Rich woman I thank you for reminding me. Beneath the shiniest armor, gold-plated or diamond, the beat of the vulnerable flesh.
Into a corner of her matching Gucci purse I place hartuki, shriveled seed in the shape of a womb, which has no American name. Hartuki to help mothers bear the pain that starts with the birthing and continues forever, the pain and joy both, tangled dark and blue as an umbilical cord around an infant’s throat.
Saturday comes upon me like the unexpected flash of rainbow under a bird’s black wing, like the swirl-spread skirt of a kathak dancer, fast and then faster. Saturday is drums bursting from the stereos of the young men who drive by dangerous-slow, and what are they looking for. Saturday takes my breath. For Saturday I put up signs: FRESH-FRESH METHI. HOME GROWN; DIWALI SALE LOWEST PRICES; LATEST MOVIES BEST ACTORS, JUHI CHAWLA-AMIR KHAN, RENT 2 DAYS FOR COST OF ONE. And even, daringly, ASK IF YOU CANNOT FIND.
So many people on Saturday, it seems the walls must take a deep breath just to hold them in. All those voices, Hindi Oriya Assamese Urdu Tamil English, layered one on the other like notes from a tanpura, all those voices asking for more than their words, asking for happiness except no one seems to know where. And so I must listen to the spaces between, must weigh them in my coral-boned hands. Must whisper chants over packets and sacks even as I weigh and measure and ring up, even as I call out in my pretend-strict voice “Please no touching mithais” and “If bottle breaks you must pay.”
All who come to my store on Saturday, I love them.
You must not think that only the unhappy visit my store. The others come too, and they are many. A father carrying his daughter on his shoulders, picking up laddus on the way to the zoo. A retired couple, she holding his elbow as he leans on his cane. Two wives out for an afternoon of shopping and talk. A young computer scientist planning to impress his visiting parents with his new cooking skills. They step through my doors lightly, and as they move from aisle to aisle, choosing, the faintest of radiances flickers around them.
See, hunches of podina leaves green as the forests of our childhood. Hold them up and smell how fresh and pungent, isn’t this cause enough for gladness. Tear open a packet of chili-cashews and cram a handful into the mouth. Chew. That hot taste, that crumble and crunch against your cheeks, the delicious tears that rise to your eyes. Here’s kumkum powder red as the heart of a hibiscus flower to put on our foreheads for married luck. And look, look, Mysore sandalwood soap with its calm bright fragrance, the same brand you used to buy me in India so many years ago when we were newlyweds. Ah life, how fine it is.
I send a blessing behind them as they leave, a whisper of thanks that they have let me share their joy. But already they are fading from my mind, already I am turning from them to the others. The ones whom I need because they need me.
Manu who is seventeen, in a 49ers jacket so shiny red it’s like a yell, running in impatient to pick up a sack of bajra atta for his mother before he goes to shoot some hoops at school. Angry Manu who is a senior at Ridgefield High, thinking Not fair not fair. Because when he said “prom” his father shouted “All that drinking whiskey-beer and dancing pressed up against cheap American girls in miniskirts, what are you thinking of.” Manu poised tiptoe inside furious fluorescent Nike shoes that he bought with money saved up cleaning bathrooms in his uncle’s motel, ready to take off if only he knew where he would land.
Manu I give you a slab of sesame candy made with sweet molasses, gur to slow you down just enough to hear the frightened love in your father’s voice losing you to America.
And Daksha who comes in with her white nurse’s uniform starched and shiny, even her shoes even her smile.
“Daksha what do you need today?”
“Aunty today is ekadasi you know, eleventh day of the moon, and my mother-in-law being a widow must not eat rice. So I thought maybe some cracked wheat to make a dalia pudding for her and as long as I was here, might as well pick up some of your methi, my husband is so fond of methi parathas.”
As she sifts through the bittergreen leaves I watch her face. Under the edges where the shine has rubbed off, the smile pulls down. Every night coming home from the hospital to cook, rolling out chapatis hot hot with ghee because her mother-in-law says old food from the fridge is good only for servants or dogs. Boiling frying seasoning ladling serving wiping up while everyone sits saying “Good,” saying “Yes, more,” even her husband, because after all isn’t the kitchen the woman’s place.
In answer to my asking she says “Yes Aunty it’s hard but what to do. After all we must take care of our old. It makes too much trouble in the house if I say I can’t do all this work. But sometimes I wish—”
She stops. Daksha to whom no one listens so she has forgotten how to say. And inside her, pushing up against her palat
e enormous and silent, the horror of what she sees all day. In the AIDS ward those young, young men grown light as children in their eroding bones. Their fragile bruised skin, their enormous waiting eyes.
Daksha here is seed of black pepper to be boiled whole and drunk to loosen your throat so you can learn to say No, that word so hard for Indian women. No and Hear me now.
And Daksha before you go, here is amla for a different resistance. Amla which I too would like to take somedays to help bear the pain that cannot be changed, pain growing slow and huge like a monsoon cloud which if you let it will blot out the sun.
Now Vinod sidles in, Vinod who owns India Market on the other side of the bay and comes sometimes to check out the competition, who hefts a five-pound packet of dal with practiced hands to see if it’s just a little less, like in his store. Who thinks fool when it isn’t. Vinod who jumps when I say “How’s business Vinod-bhai.” because he has always thought I don’t know who he is. I give him a packet filled with green-brown-black and say “Compliments of management” and hide my laugh behind my hand while he sniffs at it suspiciously.
“Ah kari patti” he says finally. Inside he is thinking Crazy woman, is thinking $2.49 profit, as he slips it into his pocket, astringent leaf dried dark on the stem to reduce mistrust and avarice.
Saturday when the store is throbbing bloodbeat and desire, sometimes the future-sight comes to me. I do not control it. Nor do I trust it fully. It shows me people who will visit the store, but whether in a day or a year or a lifetime it does not say. The faces are hazy and shapeless, seen thickly as through Coke-bottle glass. I pay them scant attention. I am too busy, and happy to let time bring me what it will.
But today the light is pink-tinted like just-bloomed karabi flowers, and the Indian radio channel spills out a song about a slim-waisted girl who wears silver anklets, and I am hungry for the sight. There is a smell like seabirds in the air. It makes me long to open windows. I pace the front aisle looking out, though there is nothing except a bag lady shuffling behind a grocery cart and a group of boys lounging lazy against the graffitied walls of Myisha’s Hair Salon Braiding Done. An impatient voice calls me back to the register. A long low aquamarine Cadillac with shark fins cruises by. A customer complains because I have rung up a purchase twice. I apologize. But inside I am trying to remember, did the lonely American come in a car.