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

sister-Mistresses. Theydid not flinch too much when at a word from the Old One the wood burst ablaze.
    The fire of Shampati. Ever since we came to the island we had heard the whispers, seen stamped on the lintels and doorposts of the motherhouse the runes of the bird rising, its flame-beak angled toward sky. In one rune only, on the door to the chamber where the Old One slept, forbidden to Mistresses, the rune was reversed, the bird forever plunging into the fierce heart of a blaze. We did not dare ask what it meant.
    But she told us, one day.
    “Look well Mistresses. Once in a great while a Mistress, grown rebellious and self-indulgent, fails her duty and must be recalled. Warning is sent to her, and she has three days only to settle her affairs. Then Shampati’s fire blazes for her once more. But this time entering she feels it fully, scorch and sear, the razors of flame cutting her flesh to strips. Screaming, she smells her bones shatter, skin bubble and burst.”
    “And then?”
    The Old One had shrugged, spread those palms with the lines melted out of them, and seeing them I had wondered once again,
How?
“The spices decide. Some Mistresses are allowed to return to the island, learn and labor again. For some it is the end, crumbled charcoal, a last cry dangling in the air like a broken cobweb.”
    I remembered all this as I watched my sister-Mistresses. One by one they walked into the fire, and when they reached its center they disappeared. Watching the empty air flicker where a moment earlier they had been, I was struck by a sorrow deeper than I had thought I could feel. Always I had kept my distance,all these years on the island, knowing this day was to come. And yet when had they slipped into my heart, these girl-women glowing translucent, chaste as alabaster, the last ones in the world to know who I was, and how it felt to be that.
    When it was my turn I closed my eyes. Was I afraid? I believed what the Old One had told us: “You will not burn you will not feel pain. You will wake in your new body as though it has been yours forever.” There had been no agony on the faces of my sisters before they vanished. Still it was a hard thing, to confront for the third time in my brief existence the extinguishing of all I knew life to be.
    And so far. So far. I had not thought this before. Between the island and America, a galaxy of nights.
    On my elbow, a touch like petals.
    “Wait Tilo.”
    Behind a veil of smoke, that shimmering in her eyes. Was it tears. And the stinging in my heart, what was that.
    Almost I said it.
Mother take back the power. Let me stay here with you. What satisfaction can be greater than to serve the one I love
.
    But the years and days, the moments that had pushed me to this place, inexorable, and made me who I was, would not let me.
    “Tilo my daughter,” said the Old One, and by her face I knew she felt my struggle in her own heart, “most gifted most troublesome most loved, Tilo traveling to America eager as an arrow, I have here something for you.”
    And from the folds of her clothing she removed it and placed it on my tongue, a slice of gingerroot, wild island
ada
to give my heart steadfastness, to keep me strong in my vows.
    Hot prick of ginger, you were the last taste on my tonguewhen I stepped into the heart of Shampati’s fire. Flametongues licked like a dream at my melting skin, flamefingers pushed down my eyelids.
    And when I woke in America on a bed of ash, an age later or was it only a breath, the store already hardening its protective shell around me, the spices on their shelves meticulous and waiting, you were the first taste, ginger, gritty and golden in my throat.

     
    When the sky turns arsenic-red from sunset and smog, and the palm that stands scrawny by the bus stop throws its long ragged shadow in my doorway, I know it is time to close up.
    I unpleat the wooden shutters and slide them across the pockmarked curve of a pale moon. In the gray window glass which is the