Free The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page B

fragile bruised skin, their enormous waiting eyes.
    Daksha here is seed of black pepper to be boiled whole and drunk to loosen your throat so you can learn to say No, that word so hard for Indian women. No and
Hear me now
.
    And Daksha before you go, here is
amla
for a different resistance. Amla which I too would like to take somedays to help bear the pain that cannot be changed, pain growing slow and huge like a monsoon cloud which if you let it will blot out the sun.
    Now Vinod sidles in, Vinod who owns India Market on the other side of the bay and comes sometimes to check out the competition, who hefts a five-pound packet of
dal
with practiced hands to see if it’s just a little less, like in his store. Who thinks
fool
when it isn’t. Vinod who jumps when I say “How’s business Vinod-bhai.” because he has always thought I don’t know who he is. I give him a packet filled with green-brown-black and say “Compliments of management” and hide my laugh behind my hand while he sniffs at it suspiciously.
    “Ah kari patti” he says finally. Inside he is thinking
Crazy woman
, is thinking $2.49
profit
, as he slips it into his pocket, astringent leaf dried dark on the stem to reduce mistrust and avarice.
    Saturday when the store is throbbing bloodbeat and desire, sometimes the future-sight comes to me. I do not control it. Nor do I trust it fully. It shows me people who will visit the store, but whether in a day or a year or a lifetime it does not say. The faces are hazy and shapeless, seen thickly as through Coke-bottle glass. I pay them scant attention. I am too busy, and happy to let time bring me what it will.
    But today the light is pink-tinted like just-bloomed
karabi
flowers, and the Indian radio channel spills out a song about a slim-waisted girl who wears silver anklets, and I am hungry for the sight. There is a smell like seabirds in the air. It makes me long to open windows. I pace the front aisle looking out, though there is nothing except a bag lady shuffling behind a grocery cart and a group of boys lounging lazy against the graffitied walls of Myisha’s Hair Salon Braiding Done. An impatient voice calls me back to the register. A long low aquamarine Cadillac with shark fins cruises by. A customer complains because I have rung up a purchase twice. I apologize. But inside I am trying to remember, did the lonely American come in a car.
    Yes I admit it, he’s the reason. And yes I want to see him again. And yes I’m disappointed when the sight falls on me like fever, and shuddering I look among the faces to come and do not see his. He
promised
, I tell myself, and am angrier because he didn’t really. Suddenly I want to sweep the
mithais
from their case to the floor,
laddus
and
rasogollahs
sent rolling in dust, syrup and splintered glass sticking to shoe soles. And the shock in the eyes of the customers whose desires I’m tired of.
    It’s
my
desire I want to fulfill, for once.
    It would be so easy. A
tola
of lotus root burned in evening with
prishniparni
, a few words spoken, and he would not be able to keep away. Yes it would be
him
standing across from me and not this fat man in round-rimmed glasses who is telling me I’m all out of
chana besan
. If I wanted, he would see not this old body but what I wished, curve of mango breast to cup in one’s palm, long lean line of eucalyptus thigh. I would call on the others,
abhrak
and
amlaki
to remove wrinkles and blacken hair and firm the sagging flesh. And king of all,
maharadwaj
rejuvenator whom the Ashwini Kumars, twin physicians of the gods, gave to their disciple Dhanwantari to make him foremost among healers.
Makaradwaj
which must always be used with greatest care for even one measure too much can bring death, but I am not afraid, I Tilo who was most brilliant of all the Old One’s apprentices.
    The fat man is saying something, his tongue moving thick and pink in his open mouth. But I do not hear him.
    The Old One, the Old One. What would she say to