Read Online The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
Tags: Literary Fiction
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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 caressesmy 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 chauffeur 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
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 caressesmy 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 chauffeur 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
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