The Mistress of Spices (28 page)

“Hospital?” asks Shamsur, a slightly stooped man with gentle eyes still dazed with sleep and shock.

“No no, who knows who-all they will tell, police-folice, all kinds of
jhamela
. He might not be wanting that. Call Rahman-
saab
instead.”

Time seems to skip a beat, or is it my mind, for here is Rahman-
saab
already, a dapper, mustachioed man in a maroon velvet nightrobe and matching slippers, opening up a scuffed black medical bag, explaining to me how he used to be a surgeon in Lahore, army hospital, before he came here. “I am thinking I will be big doctor in
phoren
,” he says as he deftly examines the head wound Hameeda has cleaned. “But authorities say, take this test, and this one, and this one, and oral examination also. In the exam hall I am not understanding their
taan taan toon toon
American accent, and so now I run my own gas station. Who can say I am better off or worse?”

He gives Haroun a shot, pauses for the anesthetic to work, for his moans to die away.

“But doctoring I still love, so I help my friends on the side. What-what things I am seeing, what-what things I am having to do! Luckily there is no problem to buy supplies illegal.” He grins as he stitches up the cut, gives a couple more shots, instructs Hameeda on the pills he is leaving behind, discreetly pockets the bills Shamsur has handed him. “Good for them and good for me, no? Not to worry too much about this fine young man. His kismet was good this time. Next time who knows. Looks like they used an iron rod. Skull could have cracked like snail shells. Call me if
fever comes more than one hundred and two.” I hear his voice giving Shamsur stockmarket tips all the way down the stairs.

Just the two of us in the room now. Hameeda didn’t want to leave but I told her to get some sleep. “He will need you more tomorrow when I am gone,” I said.

She nodded and slipped away, this intelligent girl with doe eyes who asks no questions although surely she must wonder who I am, why I am here. Hameeda who I hope will heal Haroun’s wounded life with the balm of her holding hands.

But how will she keep him safe.

I lay my palm on Haroun’s forehead, willing the pain to rise, to pass out through his skin into mine. His eyes are closed, sleeping or unconscious, I don’t know which. His chest moves so slightly that time to time I must hold my hand to his nostrils to check his breath. His face is pale and stern against the bandage.
You failed
, say his drawn silent lips.

Yes Haroun, I have failed you. I Tilo held back by timid prohibitions, distracted by my own desires.

I clasp his hands, place all my attention on them.

Burning, come
.

Instead, his eyelids flicker open. For a moment his eyes circle the room in wild panic, not recognizing. My mouth is ashes, my body hot and tight inside its skin. Then “Ladyjaan,” he says with a smile so pleased that my heart breaks open like pomegranates. Before I can respond he is asleep again.

I walk to the window where in the pre-dawn Dhruva, the star of resolution, stares at me unblinking-bright.

Dhruva star on you I promise I will not fail again. I
will
bring to Haroun that which will make him safe, whatever the cost.

I take out the bag of
kao jire
seeds I carried so carefully all day. Pour them into my palm. For a moment I watch them glisten in the moist starlight, then fling them out over the sleeping city.

Kalo jire
wasted once again, what apology can I offer you? I can say only what you know already. It is too late for you to work your power. One spice alone is left that can help Haroun now.

What would you have seen if you had been waiting this morning outside the store? In gray first light a bent woman in a gray shawl, carrying the weight of her new promise to add to all else, her guilt and her sorrow. Tired. She is so tired. Her fingers fumble at the knob, fail. Fear stings at her like poison nettle: Has the store set itself against her entering it ever again? She twists the knob once more, leans in with the weight of her body. Pushes. And look, the door swings open, sudden as a taunt or a trick, making her almost fall.

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.