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

fear.
    “Toronto,” said the Old One. “Calcutta Rawalpindi Kuala Lumpur Dar es Salaam.”
    Burned-out streetlamps, grilled storefronts, brick-lined alleywalls slashed with letters dripping blackness. Wedding canopy, wail of
shehnais
, a girlbride in a
sharara
seeing for the first time the stooped, wrinkled man her father sold her to. Turbaned coolies drinking
daru
and playing cards by open drains. Garment factories smelling of starch and sweat and immigration raids, women handcuffed and piled crying into vans. Children coughing and struggling blind out of sleep into lung-burning gas. Bloody
bugger Hindoostani. Fucking Dothead
, Paki
go home
. Black men in dusty dashikis stalking hot streets, staring through plate-glass windows at air-conditioned Indian shops. Jostling chanting crowd carrying an elephant-headed god down to an ocean made slick with poisons.
    “London Dhaka Hasnapur Bhopal Bombay Lagos.”
    The lost brown faces looked out at us, unseeing, unknowing, calling. We looked back, silent with shock.
    We had known it would be hard to leave this island of women where on our skin the warm rain fell like pomegranate seeds, where we woke to birdcall and slept to the First Mother’s singing, where we swam naked without shame in lakes of blue lotus. To exchange it for the human world whose harshness we remembered. But
this?
    “Los Angeles New Jersey Hong Kong.”
    “Colombo Singapore Johannesburg.”
    The images loomed smoking at their edges, searing themselves into our eyeballs.
    Eventually the Mistresses began, their voices low and filled with misgiving, pointing at pictures that danced on the acrid air. For what else was left for them to do.
    “Perhaps I will go here, First Mother.”
    “And I here.”
    “First Mother, I am too frightened, you choose for me.”
    And she inclining her head, assigning to each Mistress what she desired, what she should have desired: the place where she would spend the rest of her life, the place toward which her nature pointed her.
    Dubai Asansol Vancouver Islamabad.
    Patna Detroit Port of Spain.
    Only a few images left now to waver in the night’s-end air.
    Still I said nothing. I waited, not knowing for what.
    Then I saw it. Waves of eucalyptus and ponderosa pine, dry grass the color of lionskin, gleam of glass and polished redwood, the villas of the California rich poised precariously on restless hills. Even as I watched, the images changed to sooty-tenements stacked like crushed cereal boxes, sooty children chasing one another among a crumble of concrete and barbed wire. Now nightdropped like a net, and men in torn overcoats huddled around trashcan fires. Beyond, water crested and ebbed dark as mockery, and on the tops of the bridges burned the beautiful, unreachable lights.
    And under it all, earth waited with her lead-filled veins, impatient to shrug herself clean.
    Even before she spoke I knew its name, Oakland, the other city by the Bay. Mine.
    “O Tilo,” she said, “I must give you what you ask for, but consider, consider. Better you should choose an Indian settlement, an African market town. Any other place in the world, Qatar Paris Sydney Kingston Town Chaguanas.”
    “Why, First Mother?”
    She sighed and looked away, for the first time not meeting my eyes.
    But I waited until she said, “I have a feeling.”
    The Old One seeing more than she told, her spine bent and tired under the weight of it. And I stubborn with youth, with wanting to walk the cliff edge like the lion’s tooth. Telling her “It is the only place for me First Mother,” and holding her eye until she said “Go then, I cannot stop you.”
    I Tilo thinking through a wild wave of joy, I won I won.
    In the last hours of the night we piled wood in the center of the volcano, in readiness. We danced around it singing of Shampati, bird of myth and memory who dived into conflagration and rose new from ash, as we were to do. I was last in line, and as we circled the pyre I watched the faces of my