The Mistress of Spices (20 page)

“She jerked the car to a stop and got out very straight and tall, holding my hand so tight it would hurt for days. She walked into a small clapboard house that smelled musty, like wet clothes left too long in a washer, all the way through to the kitchen, like she knew where to go. The kitchen was full of men and women, some of them drinking out of brown bottles, and when I saw
their heavy, flat faces, the hair that hung limp and black over their foreheads, it was like looking into a warped mirror. My mother moved past them as though they weren’t there. The click of her heels on the scarred linoleum was a precise, confident sound. But her fingers were damp with sweat as they gripped mine, and I knew she felt the eyes on the gleaming pearl buttons of her dress, heard the whisper that went around the room like the frost-wind that kills early fruit.”

The American stops as though he’s come up against a wall and doesn’t know which way to turn.

I look at him newly, hair and skin color and shape of bone, trying to see in him the people he is describing. But he is still my American, himself only, not like anyone else.

“At last we were in a narrow room with too many people in it and not enough light. On the bed in the corner was a thin stick-shape covered with a blanket. When my eyes got used to the dimness I saw it was a man. In my eyes he seemed enormously, completely old. Someone was shaking a rattle and singing. I didn’t understand the words, but I could feel them weaving thin and snakelike around us, binding us all together.

“When they saw my mother everything stopped. The silence was like a sudden fist slammed against your ear. They propped the old man up in bed, held him so he wouldn’t slump over.

“The old man raised his head with such effort that I could feel the slow muscles of his neck creak and pull. He opened his eyes, and in that dark room they glinted like flecks of mica in a cave wall. Evvie, he said. The word came out sharp and clear, like an arrow, not the way I expected an old man to sound. Then he said, Evvie’s son. The calling in his voice was like arms around
me. Right away I wanted to go to him, though I had always been bashful with strangers. But my mother’s hands were on my shoulders, her fingers tight and helpless as the grip of a small, scared bird.”

The American takes a deep, shuddering breath as though he’s pushed his way up out of a long, airless tunnel. Then he shakes his head. “I can’t believe I told you all this crap,” he says, shielding himself in the way of men behind that small hard word. “Whew. This pepper stuff is pretty potent.”

My American, say what you will. It is not the spice only but also you wanting me to hear. This is my belief and my hope.

Aloud I say, “It isn’t—what is that word—crap. You know that.”

But I see I will have to wait a long while, perhaps forever, to hear what happened in that dying room.

I am only half sorry that he has stopped. His words have filled the store already, wild water burst from its boundary. It pushes at me with all its opaque weight. It will take me time to swim through, to find out what edges this flooding has erased between us.

Meanwhile I want to tell him, I will carry this moment from your life like a spark in my heart. But I am suddenly shy, I Tilo, once so brash and bold. How the Old One would have laughed at it.

All I can say is “Anytime you want to talk, my door is open for you.”

He laughs his old laugh, easy again and mocking. His arm sweeps the shelves. “All this and free counseling too. What a deal.” But his eyes are holding mine and a deep light in them saying
I’m glad
.

One day you will have to tell me what you see when you look at this shape wrapped in its folds of oldwoman skin. Is it some truth about me that I myself do not know, or merely your own fantasy.

At the door he says, “You still want to know my name?”

I am almost laughing at his question. Lonely American, can’t you hear my heart singing its red rhythm of
yesyesyes
.

But I make myself say what the Old One told me when I left the island, in warning.

“Only if
you
wish it. Because a true-name has power, and when you tell it you give that power into your listener’s hands.”

Why am I telling you this when you will not understand.

“My true-name, that’s what you want? Well. Maybe I
can
figure out which one it is.”

“How,” I ask. And inside me: Surely he will not know.

“All the others were given to me, but this one I chose.”

American, once again you have amazed me. I who thought that you, being of the West and used always to choosing your own way, would take such a choice for granted.

He hesitates, then says, “My name is Raven.” And traces a pattern on the floor with his toe. He will not look at me. In tender amusement I see that my American is embarrassed, a little, by his unAmerican name.

“But it is beautiful,” I say, tasting the long wingbeat sound of it in my mouth, smell of hot sky rising and falling, dark wood in evening, bright eye, tailfeather formed of charcoal and smoke. “And right for you.”

“You think so?” Quick flash of pleasure, as quickly hidden, in his eye, Raven who feels he has made himself vulnerable enough for one day.

“How I got to it,” he says. “Ah. Another day I’ll tell you that story. Maybe.”

I nod assent, I Tilo this once not impatient for knowing. I trust them, the untold stories that stretch between us like filaments of beaten gold. His stories and mine. That will not be lost even if not spoken.

“Raven, now I must tell you my name. Will you believe if I say you are the only man in America, in the entire world, to know it?”

Somewhere ground bucks underfoot, shudders apart. Somewhere a volcano startles awake and coughs fire. Wind turns to ash.

Yes say his eyes, my American letting fall the cloak of his loneliness. He holds out his gleaming goldbrown hand (somewhere a woman is weeping) and into it I place my name.

Raven has left, and the store feels too large. Its silence makes a distant ringing in my ears. Like old fluorescent tubes, I think, and am surprised by the thought. For some time now I have been seeing this, my mind invoking impressions of which I have no experience. Are they left behind by those who pass through this space? Are they
his
memories becoming mine?

I wander the aisles, cleaning up though all is tidy already, giving my hands something to do. What I really want is to touch all he has touched. I am hungry for what little I can get. The faint soap-smell of his skin. The last lingering heat from his fingertips.

And thus I come to the newspaper which he left smoothed out on the counter. I lay my hands on it and close my eyes, wait for an image to tell me where he is now, driving down the freeway night perhaps with the windows open, drums on the radio and the sharp clean scent of an unseen ocean, the spices in his hair. What he is thinking. But nothing comes. So after a while what else is there to do but open my eyes and gather up the sheet to store carefully at the bottom of the bin where I keep old papers.

That’s when I see the headline. DOTBUSTERS GO FREE. And under it the picture of the two white teenagers, teeth bared in triumphant smiles. Even the blurred photo cannot hide the cocky tilt of their heads.

For a moment I am pulled by an urgent need, an instinct heavy in the pit of myself where the fears lie.
Tilo find out what has pleased them so. Tilo you must
. Instead I fold up the paper with fingers that tremble a little.

I have never read a newspaper, not even the Indian ones that are delivered to the store each week.

Don’t you want to, you ask.

Of course I do. I Tilo whose curiosity has pulled me so often past the limits set by wisdom. Sometimes I put my face to the newsprint. A smell like burning metal rises from the tiny black letters.

Then I move back. Haven’t I broken enough rules already.

This is what the Old One told us: “Events in the outer world are nothing to Mistresses. When you fill your head with inessentials, the true knowledge is lost, like grains of gold in sand. Set your mind only on what is brought to you, search only its remedy.”

“But First Mother, will it not help if I know what is happening elsewhere, to see how this one life given to my care fits the tapestry?”

Her sigh, impatient but not unkind. “Child, the tapestry is far larger than your seeing, or mine. Turn inward for what you need to know. Listen for the right spice to say its name.”

“Yes, Mother.”

But today I want to ask, Did you First Mother ever feel your thoughts awash around you like the wave-salt ocean, and one voice,
his
, calling like a gull so that all else grows dim and distant, like submarine sounds.

Mother what shall I do. All the certainties of my life are crumbling like cliffs in a sea gale, gritty dust stinging the eye.

My head so heavy I must rest it on the counter where the paper still—

The vision lashes at me, a whip against my eyelids. A young man in a bed with tubes trailing from his nose, from the insides of his elbows. The white of his bandages blend with the white of the hospital pillow. Only his skin stands out in patches, brown
like mine. Like mine, Indian skin. Radium blips jerk across a screen. In all the room there is no other movement.

Except inside his head.

Tilo
what
—

Then I am sucked in. As I go under in a thunderclap of pain I know I am at the start of the story whose end I read in the headlines.

Inside his head evening is falling, the pale sun swallowed up by trees, the downtown park darkened, almost deserted, only a few last office workers clustered tight around the bus stop thinking
home
and
dinner
. He takes down the red awning, the bright yellow letters that say MOHAN INDIAN FOODS crumpling in on themselves. He’s a little late but it’s been a good day, almost everything Veena cooked got sold, and so many people telling him “Tastes good,” bringing back friends. Maybe it’s time to hire a helper, put another cart on the other side of town, near the new office complexes. He’s sure Veena could find a friend to help her with the cooking….

Then he hears the steps, fall leaves breaking under boots, a sound like crushed glass. Why does it seem so loud.

When he turns the two young men are very close. He can smell their unbathed odor like stale garlic. He thinks how Americans always smell different from Indians, even the office
babus
under their cologne and deodorant. And then he realizes it is his own sweat, his sudden prickly fear he is smelling.

The young men’s hair is cut severely short. Their bristled scalps gleam white as bone, white as the glitter in their eyes. He guesses them to be in their late teens, not much more than boys. Their tight-fitting camouflage jackets make him uncomfortable.

“Sorry, closed already,” he says, wiping the top of the cart emphatically with a paper towel, kicking out the stones he’d wedged under the wheels. Would it be rude to start walking while they are still standing there? He gives the cart a tentative push.

The young men move deftly, block his way.

“What makes you think we want any of this shitty stuff,” one says. The other leans forward. Casually, elegantly even, he tips over a neat stack of paper plates. The Indian reaches automatically to grab them, and thinks two thoughts at once.

How flat their eyes are, like mud puddles
. And
I should have started running already
.

The blunt boot tip catches him in the armpit under his outstretched arm, a hot jolt of pain spurts down his side like molten iron, and through it he hears one of them spit, “Sonofa-bitch Indian, shoulda stayed in your own goddamn country.” But the pain’s not as bad as he feared, not so bad that he can’t pick up the stone and pitch it at the young man who’s kicking at the cart until it comes crashing down and the kababs and
samosas
that Veena so carefully rolled and stuffed scatter everywhere in the dirt. He hears the satisfying
thwack
of contact, sees the young man knocked backward with the force of it, his face almost comical in its surprise. The Indian feels good even though it hurts to breathe and a small jagged thought—
ribs?
—spins up for a moment into the lighted part of his mind. (He doesn’t know that later a lawyer will show the young man’s stone-bruise to the judge and say the Indian had started it all, his clients were only protecting themselves.) He believes for a moment that he can get away, can maybe run to the bus stop, the small safe halo of the streetlight, the
handful of commuters
(can’t they see what’s going on can’t they hear?)
waiting. And then the second young man is on him.

Even now that the Indian cannot remember much else (head yanked up, knuckles cased in metal smashing down), the memory of pain is clear. Pain like a constant throughout whatever happened next. (Kick to the groin, face dragged through gravel.) So many kinds of pain—like fire, like stinging needles, like hammers breaking. But not really. Pain, which is ultimately only like itself. (“Fucking turd, bastard, piece of shit, this’ll teach you.”) He thinks he shouted for help, only it came out in the old language,
bachao, bachao
. He thinks he saw a red tattoo on a forearm, the same
swastic
sign that they used to paint on the walls of village homes for good luck. But surely it couldn’t be (a blow to the head so hard that his thoughts splinter into yellow stars), surely it was only the blood in his eyes, the torn nerves playing tricks on him.