The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Read Free Book Online

thought. Put it in the pouch I wear at my waist, for the knife has other uses also.
    All of them dangerous.
    You are thinking, what does it look like, such a knife.
    Most ordinary, for that is the nature of deepest magic. Deepest magic which lies at the heart of our everyday lives, flickering fire, if only we had eyes to see.
    And so. My knife could be a knife bought at any store, Thrifty or Pay Less or Safeway, the wood handle faded smooth with sweat, the flat dark blade with no shine left to it.
    But O, how it cuts.

     
    If you ask me how long I lived on the island, I cannot tell you, for time took on a different meaning in that place. We lived our days without hurry, and yet each moment was urgent, a spinning petal borne seaward by a swift river. If we did not grasp it, did not learn its lesson, it would pass beyond our reach forever.
    The lessons we learned on the island might surprise you, you who think our Mistress-lives to be full of the exotic, mystery and drama and danger. Those were there, yes, for the spice-power we were learning to bend to our purposes could have destroyed us in a moment if wrongly invoked. But much of our time was spent in common things, sweeping and stitching and rolling wicks for lamps, gathering wild spinach and roasting
chapatis
and braiding each other’s hair. We learned to be neat and industrious and to work together, to protect one another when we could from the Old One’s anger, her tongue that could lash like lightning. (But thinking back I grow unsure. Was it real, that anger, or a disguise put on to teach us fellowship?) Most of all we learned to feelwithout words the sorrows of our sisters, and without words to console them. In this way our lives were not so different from those of the girls we had left behind in our home villages. And though then I chafed and considered such work a waste of my time (I who despised all things ordinary and felt I was born for better), now I sometimes wonder if it might not have been the most worthwhile of the skills I learned on the island.
    One day after we had been on the island a long time, the Old One took us up into the core of the sleeping volcano and said, “Mistresses, I have taught you all I could. Some of you have learned much, and some little. And some have learned little but think you have learned much.”
    Here her eyes rested on me. But I merely smiled, thinking it another of her barbed jokes. For was I not the most skillful among Mistresses.
    “There is no more I can do for you,” she said, watching me smile. “You must now decide where you are to go.”
    Night wind wrapped us in its dark secret smells. Black lava dust sifted soft as powder between our toes. The ridges of the volcano rose spiraled around us. We sat in silence wondering what was to come.
    The Old One took the branches she had given us earlier to carry and wove them into a lattice fan. What branches they were we did not know. There was still much she chose to keep from us. She waved the fan into the air till its swirling became a fog around us.
    “Look,” she said.
    Cleaving through the milk-thick fog the images piled one on another, their edges hard and glinting.
    Skyscrapers of silver glass by a lake wide as ocean, furcoatedmen and women, white like the snow that lines the pavements, crossing the street to avoid dark skin. Brown-sugar girls in flimsy bright dresses, leaning lipsticked on shantytown porches, waiting for customers. Marble mansion walls embedded with glass shards to tear a man’s palms to strips. Pothole road lined with beggars whose skin can’t hold in their jagged bones. A woman watching through her barred window a world beyond her reach, while on her forehead the marriage sindur presses down like a coin of blood. Narrow cobble streets, shuttered houses, men in fez caps eating medjool dates and spitting out
infidel dog
as an Indian passes.
    All around us, overpowering like singed flesh, the odor of hate which is also the odor of