Shampati’s fire, I start to say, but she interrupts.
“Not to her. To the people around.”
First Mother, you never taught us that.
I open my mouth to say this but no sound comes.
“Yes, for I hoped you would not need to know. But you have proved me wrong. Listen well, because now I will teach it.”
As through a telescope her face turns toward me, grows large and looming. Around it all else fades. And then I see.
It is blank. Devoid of nose and eye, lip and cheek. Only a blackness opening where a mouth should be.
“When a Mistress uses her power for herself, when she breaks the age-old rules—”
Her voice grows harsh and hollow, echo of chains clanking on prison stone. “—she tears through the delicate fabric of the balanced world, and—”
“And what, Mother?”
She does not answer. The black mouth stretches—grimace of sorrow, or a grin? The island begins to rock, the ground grows hot. And then I hear the roaring. It is the volcano, spewing ash and lava.
The Old One is gone now. The other novices also. Only I. Alone on the island that tilts like a plate someone wants to scrape clean. Pellets of scorching rock strike me like shot. I try to hold on, but the ground is smooth as burning glass. I am sliding off its edge into the jaw of nothing.
It is more terrifying than anything I have undergone.
Then I wake up.
And hear myself finishing what the Old One left unsaid. —and to all whom she has loved as she should not, chaos comes.
Ahuja’s wife hasn’t been to the store for months.
Earlier I would have spared it no more than a shrug. “What will be, will be,” the Old One told us. “Your duty is to give the spice only, not to anguish yourself over the consequence.”
But something began to change in me when the American came into the store. The hard husk of a grain removed, a seed moistened, turning soft. The hopes and sorrows of humans slipping under my skin like a razor.
I am not sure it is a good thing.
Now at night, I find myself worrying. Has she perhaps not used the turmeric, maybe she has not been cooking Indian food, maybe she is still using a store of old spices bought elsewhere. I imagine the packet slipping from her hand as she goes to pour, the spilled yellow rising in the kitchen air fine as gold dust, lost, lost. The other possibility I push away with all my strength for surely it cannot be, the spice failing which is a failing of my life also.
Instead I remember how at the door when she left, a shaft of sunlight fell on her face, held carefully blank but for that giveaway bruise.
“God be with you,” I had said. And she not answering had inclined her head in thanks, but under the dark glasses was a look that said, After months and months of unanswered prayers, how can I any longer believe.
Recently I catch myself trying to use the sight, to train it like a searchlight on the dark bedroom where she turns her back to the thick sleeping breath of her husband and lets the tears fall cold as pearl onto her pillow. Or are they hot and salt-searing, acid runnels that eat away at her until soon there will be nothing left?
It is forbidden, what I am doing.
“Open yourself to the sight,” the Old One told us, “and it will show you what you need to know. But never attempt to bend it to your will. Never pry into a particular life that has been brought to your care. That is to break trust.”
Was it me that she looked at as she spoke, her eyes flecked with sad knowing.
“Most important, don’t get too close. You’ll want to. Even though you’ve taken the oath to treat all alike, there’ll be the special ones whom you’ll want to warm at your heart’s heat, to whom you’ll want to be whatever they lack in life. Mother, friend, lover. But you cannot. When you chose the spices you gave up that right.
“One step too close and the cords of light connecting a Mistress to the one she helps can turn to webs, tar and steel, enmeshing, miring, pulling you both to destruction.”
I believe this. Have I not already approached the edge, felt it begin to crumble underfoot?
And so I repeat to myself the Old One’s words at night as I wrench my attention from that apartment across town where a man’s voice cracks across a room sudden as a slap, that apartment like a black hole waiting to implode, into which I, raging, could so easily disappear.
Spices I know you will keep her from harm.
Is it doubt I hear beneath my words? The faintest trace, like a whiff of something burning at once whisked away by a stronger wind? Do the spices hear it too?
So when she comes into the store this morning, a little thinner and with deeper circles under her eyes, but well enough, and even a timid, ready-to-take-flight smile quirking up the corner of her mouth as she says “Namaste,” relief wells in me. Relief and a slow pleasure like honey, so I must step from behind the counter. Must say, “How are you, beti, I was worried, you didn’t come for so long.” Must put my hand—no, Tilo—on her arm.
Yes spices I must admit it, this is no accident like the other touchings. I Tilo initiated this joining of skin and blood and bone.
Where my hand meets her, a pulsing. Cold fire, hot ice, all her terrors shooting up my own veins. Light dims as though a giant fist is squeezing the sun. A thick milky gray like cataracts covers my eyes.
This dizzy pain, is this what it is to be mortal human, unpowered by magic?
And Ahuja’s wife. What is she feeling?
I hear the spices crying to me, a sound like hot hands pressed over the ears. Pull away pull away Tilo, before you’re welded down.
I tighten my muscles to snatch me back to safety.
Then she says in a broken voice, “O mataji, I’m so unhappy I don’t know what to do.”
Her lips are pale as pressed rose petals, her eyes like broken glass. She sways a little and puts out her other hand. And what can I do except take it in spite of the smell that rises ominous through the floorboards, charred and ashy, take it and hold it tight and say, as mothers have done through time, “Hush, child, hush. Everything will be all right.”
“Mataji, maybe some of it was my fault.”
Sitting in my little kitchen in the back of the store where I should never have brought her, Ahuja’s wife tells me this.
My fault my fault. A refrain so many women the world over have been taught to sing.
“Why do you say that, beti?”
“I didn’t really want to get married. I had a good life, my sewing, my women friends I would go to the movies with and then to eat pani-puri, even my own bank account, enough so I didn’t have to ask my father for spending money. Still, when my parents asked, I said, All right, if you want. Because in our community it is a shame if a grown girl sits in the house not married and I did not want to shame them. But till the last moment I was hoping. Maybe something will happen, maybe the marriage plans will break.
“Ah, if only I had been so lucky.”
“But when you met your husband,” I ask as I hand her a stainless-steel glass full of tea, very hot and sweet with a slice of ginger steeped in it for courage, “what did you think then?”
She takes a sip. “He arrived from America only three days before the wedding. That was when I met him. I had seen a picture, of course …”
She pauses and I wonder if he had sent someone else’s photo. I have known it to happen.
“But when I saw him I realized the picture had been taken many years before.” For a moment her voice sparks with an old anger. Then her shoulders slump under their own weight, as they must have at that first encounter. “It was too late to cancel the wedding. All the invitations sent, already out-of-town relatives arriving, even a news announcement put in the paper. Ah, how much money my poor father had spent because I was his oldest. And if I said no, my sisters would get a bad name too. Everyone would say, O those headstrong Chowdhary girls, better not to arrange a match with that family.
So I married him. But inside I was furious. Insi
de I was calling him all kinds of insults—liar cheater son-of-a-pig. That first night lying in bed I wouldn’t talk to him. When he said sweet words, I turned my face. He tried to put his arm around me; I pushed it away.”
She sighs.
I sigh too, feeling for a moment pity for Ahuja, balding and potbellied and knowing it, approching with guilt this girl tender as green bamboo and yet at her core a hardness. Ahuja wanting so badly (and do we all not want it too) for love to happen.
“One night, two nights,” says Ahuja’s wife, “he is patient. Then he too gets angry.”
I think how it must have been. Maybe his friends were joking and talking, like men do. “Arre yaar, tell us, is it sweet as jaggery.” Or, “Look look, dark circles under Ahuja bhai’s eyes, his wife must keep him hard at work all night.”
“And next time I push him away he grabs me and …”
She falls silent. Perhaps it is the embarrassment, telling a stranger—for after all I am no more—what good wives should never. Perhaps it is surprise that she has dared so far.
O almost Lalita whose mouth turmeric is beginning to open like a morning flower, how can I tell you there is no shame in speaking out. How can I say I admire.
Inside her head the images, tumbling hot and sere like clothes left too long in a dryer. A hard male elbow holding her down on the mattress, a knee pushing her thighs apart. And when she tries to claw, to bite (soundlessly, for no one outside the bedroom must know this sharam), a slap to the head. Not hard, but the shock of it makes her go limp so he can do what he wants. The worst are the kisses after it is over, kisses that leave their wetness on her mouth, and his slaked repentant voice in her ear, lingering.
Pyari, meri jaan, my sweet love queen. Over and over and over. Every night until he leaves for America.
“I thought of running away, but where could I go? I knew what happened to girls that left home. They ended up on the streets, or as kept women for men far worse than him. At least with him I had honor”—her lips twist a little at the word—“because I was a wife.”
A question bursts from me, but I know its foolishness even before I have finished forming the words.
“Couldn’t you tell someone, your mother maybe. Couldn’t you ask them not to send you here to him.”
And now she bows her head, Ahuja’s wife who was earlier Chowdhary’s daughter, and her tears fall into the glass of tea, turning it salt. Until I must reach across the forbidden distance to wipe them away. Chowdhary’s daughter whose parents had brought her up in love and strictness the best they knew, to fit into her destiny, which was marriage. Who sensed her sorrow but were afraid to ask Daughter what is wrong, because what would they do if she answered. And she seeing that fear kept her silence kept her tears, for she loved them too, and hadn’t they done the most they could for her already.
Silence and tears, silence and tears, all the way to America. Bloated sack of pain swelling inside her throat until at last today turmeric untied the knot and let it out.
An hour later, and Ahuja’s wife is still talking, the words spilling as over the broken lip of a dam.
“I knew better, but still I hoped as women do. For what else is there for us? Here in America maybe we could start again, away from those eyes, those mouths always telling us how a man should act, what is a woman’s duty. But ah the voices, we carried them all the way inside our heads.”
I see her in those early days, Ahuja’s wife trying to please her husband, sewing new curtains to make the apartment into a home, rolling parathas to serve hot when he came home from work. And him too, buying her a new sari, a bottle of perfume, Intimate or Chantilly, a pretty lace nightdress to wear in bed.
“Hai mataji, once milk has curdled can all the sugar in the world turn it sweet again?
“In bed especially I could not forget those nights in India. Even when he tried to be gentle I was stiff and not willing. Then he would lose patience and shout the American words he’d learned. Bitch. Fucking you is like fucking a corpse.
“And later, You must be getting it somewhere else.
“Recently, the rules. No going out. No talking on the phone. Every penny I spend to be accounted for. He should read my letters before he mails them.
“And the calls. All day. Sometimes every twenty minutes. To check on what I’m doing. To make sure I’m there. I pick up the phone and say hello and there is his breathing on the end of the line.”
Now Ahuja’s wife tells me in a voice which is frightening-calm, which has run out of tears, “Mataji, I used to be afraid of death. I’d hear of women who killed themselves and think how could they. Now I know.”
O almost Lalita, that is not the way out. But what can I say to help you, I who am weeping inside me as much as you have done?
“What do I have to live for? Once, more than anything in the world I wanted a baby. But is this any kind of home to bring a new life into?”
Blinded by my tears I cannot see the spice remedy. It is as the Old One warned.
Tilo too close too close.
I breathe deep, holding the air in my lungs like she taught us on the island, until its roaring drives all other sounds from my mind. Until through the red blur a name comes to me.
Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. Waists that have given up, mouths drooping with the weight of their average lives they once dreamed would be so different. Fennel, brown as mud and bark and leaf dancing in a fall breeze, smelling of changes to come.
“Fennel,” I tell Ahuja’s wife who is plucking at her dupatta with restless fingers, “is a wondrous spice. Take a pinch of it, raw and whole, after every meal to freshen the breath and aid digestion and give you mental strength for what must be done.”
She looks at me despairing. Her crushed velvet eyes say Is this all the help you have to give?
“Give some to your husband as well.”
Ahuja’s wife smoothes the sleeve of her kurta, which she had pulled up to show me another bruise, and stands. “I need to get home. He must have called one dozen times. When he comes home tonight—”
Fear rises from her, shimmering, like heat from a cracked summer pavement. Fear and hate and disappointment that I am not doing more.
“Fennel cools the temper as well,” I say. I wish I could tell her more, but that would leach away the spice’s power.
She gives a bitter, not-believing laugh. She regrets having confided in me, witless old woman who talks as though a handful of dry seeds can help a breaking life.
“He could certainly do with that,” she says, gathering her purse. Regrets pound like blood inside her skull.
She will throw the packet I have put between us on the table in the back of a drawer, perhaps even in the trash when she thinks in shame of all she has told me.
Next time she will go to another grocery, even if it means changing buses.
I try to hold her eyes but she will not look. She has turned to leave, she is at the door already. So I must with my oldwoman shuffle catch up and touch her arm once more, though I know I should not.
Pincers of flame pierce my fingertips. She is still now, her eyes changing color, growing light like mustard oil when heated, intent as though she is seeing something beyond everyday sight.
I reach for the small bag of fennel to press into her palm, but it is not there.
Spices what—
Desperate I look around, feel Ahuja’s wife hurrying inside her head. For a moment I am afraid the spice will not give itself to me, I Tilo gone beyond boundaries.
But here is the packet on top of this stack of India Currents magazines, where surely I did not place it.
Spices is this a game or is it something you are telling me.
There is no time to ponder. I pick up the packet and a copy of the magazine. Give her both.
“Trust me. Do what I tell you. Every day, after every meal, some for you and some for him, and when you have finished it all come back and tell if it hasn’t helped. And
here, read this. It’ll keep your mind off your troubles.”
She gives a sigh and nods. It is easier than arguing.
“Daughter, remember this, no matter what happens. You did no wrong in telling me. No man, husband or not, has the right to beat you, to force you to a bed that sickens you.”
She does not say yes or no.
“Go now. And don’t be afraid. This morning he’s been too busy to call home.”
“How do you know?”
“We old women, we sense things.”
From the door she whispers, “Pray for me. Pray that I die soon.”
“No,” I say. “You deserve happiness. You deserve dignity. I will pray for that.”
Fennel, I call when she is gone, fennel that is shaped like a half-closed eye accented with surma, work for me. I reach into the bin and lift up a fistful. Fennel which the sage Vashistha ate after he swallowed the demon Illwal so he would not come back to life again.
I wait for the tingling, for the song to begin.
Only silence, and the pointed ends of the spice biting my palm like thorns.
Speak to me, fennel, mouri, colored like the freckled house sparrow that brings amity where it nests, spice to digest sorrows and in their digestion make us strong.
When it comes, the voice is no song but a booming, a wave crashing in my skull.
Why should we, when you have done that which you should not? When you have overstepped the lines you willingly drew around yourself?
Fennel equalizer, who can take power from one and give it to the other when two people eat of you at the same time, I entreat you, help Ahuja’s wife.
Do you admit your transgression, your greed in grasping for what you promised to give up forever? Do you regret?
I think back to her fingers, light as a bird’s hold on my arm, and as trusting. I think how I wiped away the tears, the feel of her damp eyelashes, her face in my hands. That living, breathing skin. How the band of steel that clenched my chest for so long had given a little.