The Mistress of Spices - Softcover

Divakaruni, Chitra

Softcover

ISBN 10: 038548237X ISBN 13: 9780385482370

Publisher: Doubleday, 1997

Synopsis

A first novel by the author of the short story collection, Arranged Marriage, The Mistress of Spices is a mystical tale told by Tilo, a young Indian woman in an old woman's body who has been trained in the secret powers of spices. Her special knowledge leads her to Oakland, California where she uses it to help the local Indian community by opening a spice shop from which she administers spices as curatives. Tilo can see into people's hearts and minds but it is a mistress's duty to keep herself at a distance, "not too far nor too near, in calm kindness poised." However, Tilo is unable to obey her charge, and she becomes emotionally involved with her customers as they struggle with the demands of their families, the clash of the old way versus the American way, racism, abusive husbands-all of the complexities of living in the modern world.

It is also her duty to limit her involvement to the Indian community. But Tilo finds herself mysteriously drawn to an American man named Raven, whose innermost thoughts she cannot read. Her complex and passionate relationships with her customers and Raven are in violation of her spice mistress vows, and so she finds herself forced to choose between the magical of an immortal and the vicissitudes of life in the real world. Vibrant, vivacious, headstrong and daring, Tilo is unforgettable and so is her story."

About this title

About the Author

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni is the bestselling author of the novels Sister of My Heart and The Mistress of Spices; the story collections The Unknown Errors of Our Lives and Arranged Marriage, which received several awards, including the American Book Award; and four collections of prize-winning poetry. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, Ms., Zoetrope, Good Housekeeping, O: The Oprah Magazine, The Best American Short Stories 1999, and The New York Times. Born in India, Divakaruni lives near Houston.

For further information about Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, visit her Web site at www.chitradivakaruni.com.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

From the Inside Flap

l by the author of the short story collection, <i>Arranged Marriage</i>, <i>The Mistress of Spices</i> is a mystical tale told by Tilo, a young Indian woman in an old woman's body who has been trained in the secret powers of spices. Her special knowledge leads her to Oakland, California where she uses it to help the local Indian community by opening a spice shop from which she administers spices as curatives. Tilo can see into people's hearts and minds but it is a mistress's duty to keep herself at a distance, "not too far nor too near, in calm kindness poised." However, Tilo is unable to obey her charge, and she becomes emotionally involved with her customers as they struggle with the demands of their families, the clash of the old way versus the American way, racism, abusive husbands-all of the complexities of living in the modern world. <br><br>It is also her duty to limit her involvement to the Indian community. But Tilo finds herself mysteriously drawn to an American m

Reviews

The author of the promising story collection Arranged Marriage (1995) employs magical realism to delve back into the lives of Indian immigrants--all of whom, in this case, consult an ancient shamanic spice-vendor in their efforts to improve their lives. Born ugly and unwanted in a tiny village in India, Nayan Tara (``Flower That Grows by the Dust Road'') is virtually discarded by her family for the sin of being a girl. Resentful at being treated so shabbily, young Nayan Tara throws herself on the mercy of the mythical serpents of the oceans, who deliver her to the mystical Island of Spices. There, she is initiated into a priestly sisterhood of Spice Mistresses sent out into the world to help others, offering magic potions of fennel, peppercorn, lotus root, etc. The place where Nayan Tara (now renamed Tilottama, or Tilo) eventually lands happens to be the Spice Bazaar in a rough section of Oakland, California--a tiny, rundown shop from which the now- aged Tilo is forbidden to venture. Here, she devotes herself to improving the lives of the immigrant Indians who come to buy her spices--including an abused wife, a troubled youth, a chauffeur with dreams of American wealth, and a grandfather whose insistence on Old World propriety may have cost him his relationship with a beloved granddaughter. As long as Tilo follows the dictates of her ancient island-bound spice mentor, particularly thinking only of her charges' needs and never of her own, Tilo feels in sync with the spice spirits and with the world at large. Her longing for love tempts her to stray, however, when a mysterious American arrives in her shop. A sometimes clumsy, intermittently enchanting tale of love and loss in immigrant America. Still, the unique insights into the struggles of Indian-Americans to transcend the gulf between East and West make trudging through some rather plain prose worthwhile. (Author tour) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Daivakaruni's debut story collection, Arranged Marriages (1995), inspired high praise, and her first novel, which uses romance as a conduit to explore more serious matters of the soul, will win her even greater acclaim. Mythical and mystical, Mistress of Spices is reminiscent of fables and fairy tales. It revolves around the age-old magic of spices, which are imbued with powers as complexly spiritual as India itself, the birthplace of Divakaruni and her fearless heroine, Tilo. Clairvoyant from birth, Tilo eagerly learns the secrets of spices and becomes, in essence, a nun, wedded to these miraculous substances and devoted to the art of healing. She works her gentle magic in a tiny, rundown shop in Oakland, California, hidden within the body of an old woman. The spices are harsh taskmasters, and Tilo's life is limited until her rebelliousness reasserts itself, and she becomes involved in the lives of her troubled customers. She falls in love with Raven, the quintessential romantic hero--dashing, handsome, rich, and brooding--but Raven actually embodies nothing less than the great spirit of the American Indian. As the wild story of their unlikely ardor unfolds, Divakaruni draws evocative parallels between the racism and violence immigrants from India face in the U.S. and the tragic conquest of Native Americans. The story Divakaruni tells is transporting, but it is her gift for metaphor that makes this novel live and breathe, its pages as redolent as any freshly ground spice. Donna Seaman

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

I am a Mistress of Spices.

I can work the others too.  Mineral, metal, earth and sand and stone.  The gems with their cold clear light.  The liquids that burn their hues into your eyes till you see nothing else.  I learned them all on the island.

But the spices are my love.

I know their origins, and what their colors signify, and their smells.  I can call each by the true-name it was given at the first, when earth split like skin and offered it up to the sky.  Their heat runs in my blood.  From amchur to zafran, they bow to my command.  At a whisper they yield up to me their hidden properties, their magic powers.

Yes, they all hold magic, even the everyday American spices you toss unthinking into your cooking pot.

You doubt?  Ah.  You have forgotten the old secrets your mother's mothers knew.  Here is one of them again: Vanilla beans soaked soft in goat's milk and rubbed on the wristbone can guard against the evil eye.  And here another: A measure of pepper at the foot of the bed, shaped into a crescent, cures you of nightmare.

But the spices of true power are from my birthland, land of ardent poetry, aquamarine feathers.  Sunset skies brilliant as blood.

They are the ones I work with.

If you stand in the center of this room and turn slowly around, you will be looking at every Indian spice that ever was--even the lost ones--gathered here upon the shelves of my store.

I think I do not exaggerate when I say there is no other place in the world quite like this.   The store has been here only for a year.  But already many look at it and think it was always.

I can understand why.  Turn the crooked corner of Esperanza where the Oakland buses hiss to a stop and you'll see it.  Perfect-fitted between the narrow barred door of Rosa's Weekly Hotel, still blackened from a year-ago fire, and Lee Ying's Sewing Machine and Vacuum Cleaner Repair, with the glass cracked between the R and the e.  Grease-smudged window.  Looped letters that say spice bazaar faded into a dried-mud brown.  Inside, walls veined with cobwebs where hang discolored pictures of the gods, their sad shadow eyes.  Metal bins with the shine long gone from them, heaped with atta and Basmati rice and masoor dal.  Row upon row of videomovies, all the way back to the time of black-and-white.  Bolts of fabric dyed in age-old colors, New Year yellow, harvest green, bride's luck red.

And in the corners accumulated among dustballs, exhaled by those who have entered here, the desires.  Of all things in my store, they are the most ancient.  For even here in this new land America, this city which prides itself on being no older than a heartbeat, it is the same things we want, again and again.

I too am a reason why.  I too look like I have been here forever.  This is  what the customers see as they enter, ducking under plastic-green mango leaves strung over the door for luck: a bent woman with skin the color of old sand, behind a glass counter that holds mithai, sweets out of their  childhoods.  Out of their mothers' kitchens.  Emerald-green burfis, rasogollahs white as dawn and, made from lentil flour,  laddus like nuggets of gold.  It seems right that I should have been  here always, that I should understand without words their longing for the ways they chose to leave behind when they chose America.  Their shame for that  longing, like the bitter-slight aftertaste in the mouth when one has chewed amlaki to freshen the breath.

They do not know, of course.  That I am not old, that this seeming-body I took on in Shampati's fire when I vowed to become a Mistress is not mine.  I claim its creases and gnarls no more than water claims the ripples that wrinkle it.  They do not see, under the hooded lids, the eyes which shine for a moment--I need no forbidden mirror (for mirrors are forbidden to Mistresses) to tell me this--like dark fire.  The eyes which alone are my own.

No.  One more thing is mine.  My name which is Tilo, short for Tilottama, for I am named after the sun-burnished sesame seed, spice of nourishment.  They do not know this, my customers, nor that earlier I had other names.

Sometimes it fills me with a heaviness, lake of black ice, when I think that across the entire length of this land not one person knows who I am.


Then I tell myself, No matter.  It is better this way.

"Remember," said the Old One, the First Mother, when she trained us on the island.  "You are not important.  No Mistress is.  What is important is the store.  And the spices."

The store.  Even for those who know nothing of the inner room with its sacred, secret shelves, the store is an excursion into the land of might-have-been.  A self-indulgence dangerous for a brown people who come from elsewhere, to whom real Americans might say Why?

Ah, the pull of that danger.

They love me because they sense I understand this.  They hate me a little for it too.

And then, the questions I ask.  To the plump woman dressed in polyester pants and a Safeway tunic, her hair coiled in a tight bun as she bends over a small hill of green chilies searching earnestly: "Has your husband found another job since the layoff."

To the young woman who hurries in with a baby on her hip to pick up some dhania jeera powder: "The bleeding, is it bad still, do you want something for it."

I can see the electric jolt of it go through each one's body, the same every time.  Almost I would laugh if the pity of it did not tug at me so.  Each face startling up as though I had put my hands on the delicate oval of jaw and cheekbone and turned it toward me.  Though of course I did not.  It is not allowed for Mistresses to touch those who come to us.  To upset the delicate axis of giving and receiving on which our lives are held precarious.

For a moment I hold their glance, and the air around us grows still and heavy.  A few chilies drop to the floor, scattering like hard green rain.  The child twists in her mother's tightened grip, whimpering.

Their glance skittery with fear with wanting.

Witchwoman, say the eyes.  Under their lowered lids they remember the stories whispered around night fires in their home villages.

"That's all for today," one woman tells me, wiping her hands on nubby polyester thighs, sliding a package of chilies at me.

"Shhh baby little rani," croons the other, busies herself with the child's tangled curls until I have rung up her purchases.

They keep their cautious faces turned away as they leave.

But they will come back later.  After darkness.  They will knock on the shut door of the store that smells of their desires and ask.

I will take them into the inner room, the one with no windows, where I keep the purest spices, the ones I gathered on the island for times of special need.  I will light the candle I keep ready and search the soot-streaked dimness for lotus root and powdered methi, paste of fennel and sun-roasted asafetida.  I will chant.  I will administer.  I will pray to remove sadness and suffering as the Old One taught.  I will deliver warning.

This is why I left the island where each day still is melted sugar and cinnamon, and birds with diamond throats sing, and silence when it falls is light as mountain mist.

Left it for this store, where I have brought together everything you need in order to be happy.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Doubleday
• Publication date: 1997
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 038548237X
• ISBN 13: 9780385482370
• Binding: Print on Demand (Paperback)
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352