Free The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page A

where. And so I must listen to the spaces between, must weigh them in my coral-boned hands. Must whisper chants over packets and sacks even as I weigh and measure and ring up, even as I call out in my pretend-strict voice “Please no touching
mithais”
and “If bottle breaks you must pay.”
    All who come to my store on Saturday, I love them.
    You must not think that only the unhappy visit my store. The others come too, and they are many. A father carrying his daughter on his shoulders, picking up
laddus
on the way to the zoo. A retired couple, she holding his elbow as he leans on his cane. Two wives out for an afternoon of shopping and talk. A young computer scientist planning to impress his visiting parents with his new cooking skills. They step through my doors lightly, and as they move from aisle to aisle, choosing, the faintest of radiances flickers around them.
    See, hunches of
podina
leaves green as the forests of our childhood. Hold them up and smell how fresh and pungent, isn’t this cause enough for gladness. Tear open a packet of chili-cashews and cram a handful into the mouth. Chew. That hot taste, that crumble and crunch against your
cheeks, the delicious tears that rise to your eyes. Here’s
kumkum
powder red as the heart of a hibiscus flower to put on our foreheads for married luck. And look, look, Mysore sandalwood soap with its calm bright fragrance, the same brand you used to buy me in India so many years ago when we were newlyweds. Ah life, how fine it is
.
    I send a blessing behind them as they leave, a whisper of thanks that they have let me share their joy. But already they are fading from my mind, already I am turning from them to the others. The ones whom I need because they need me.
    Manu who is seventeen, in a 49ers jacket so shiny red it’s like a yell, running in impatient to pick up a sack of
bajra atta
for his mother before he goes to shoot some hoops at school. Angry Manu who is a senior at Ridgefield High, thinking Not fair not fair. Because when he said “prom” his father shouted “All that drinking whiskey-beer and dancing pressed up against cheap American girls in miniskirts, what are you thinking of.” Manu poised tiptoe inside furious fluorescent Nike shoes that he bought with money saved up cleaning bathrooms in his uncle’s motel, ready to take off if only he knew where he would land.
    Manu I give you a slab of sesame candy made with sweet molasses,
gur
to slow you down just enough to hear the frightened love in your father’s voice losing you to America.
    And Daksha who comes in with her white nurse’s uniform starched and shiny, even her shoes even her smile.
    “Daksha what do you need today?”
    “Aunty today is
ekadasi
you know, eleventh day of the moon, and my mother-in-law being a widow must not eat rice. So I thought maybe some cracked wheat to make a
dalia
pudding for her and as long as I was here, might as well pick up some of your
methi
, my husband is so fond of
methi parathas
.”
    As she sifts through the bittergreen leaves I watch her face. Under the edges where the shine has rubbed off, the smile pulls down. Every night coming home from the hospital to cook, rolling out
chapatis
hot hot with ghee because her mother-in-law says old food from the fridge is good only for servants or dogs. Boiling frying seasoning ladling serving wiping up while everyone sits saying “Good,” saying “Yes, more,” even her husband, because after all isn’t the kitchen the woman’s place.
    In answer to my asking she says “Yes Aunty it’s hard but what to do. After all we must take care of our old. It makes too much trouble in the house if I say I can’t do all this work. But sometimes I wish—”
    She stops. Daksha to whom no one listens so she has forgotten how to say. And inside her, pushing up against her palate enormous and silent, the horror of what she sees all day. In the AIDS ward those young, young men grown light as children in their eroding bones. Their