The Mistress of Spices Read Online Free PDF

later when she would teach us the herbs of memory would I recollect it—and my past life—again.
    “What do you want of me?”
    Dumbly I stared at her, she who seemed at once oldest andmost beautiful of women with her silver wrinkles, though later I would see that she was not beautiful in the way men use the word. Her voice, which I would later learn in all its tones—anger and mockery and sadness—was sweet as the wind in the cinnamon trees behind her. A yearning to belong to her buffeted me like the waves I had fought all night.
    I think she read my heart, the Old One. Or perhaps it was merely that all who came to her were drawn by the same desire.
    She gave a small sigh. The weight of adoration is hard to bear, I know that now.
    “Let me see.” And she took my hands in hers that had passed through fire, who knows where.
    Too light, too hot, too damp. My hands freckled as the back of a golden plover. Palms where at midnight thorn-purple blood-wort would burst into bloom.
    The Old One had taken a step back, letting go.
    “No.”
    Each year a thousand girls are sent back from the island because they do not have the right hands. It does not count if they have the second sight, or if they can leave their bodies to travel the sky. The Old One is adamant.
    Each year a thousand girls whose hands have failed them throw themselves into the sea as they sail home. Because death is easier to bear than the ordinary life, cooking and washing clothes and bathing in the women’s lake and bearing children who will one day leave you, and all the while remembering her, on whom you had set your heart.
    They become water wraiths, spirits of mist and salt, crying in the voices of gulls.
    I too would have been one of them, but for the bones.
    They were why the Old One could not resist taking my hands in hers again. Why she let me stay on the island though all wisdom must have shouted
no
.
    Most important in a good hand are the bones. They must be smooth as water-polished stone and pliant to the Old One’s touch when she holds your palm between hers, when she places the spices in its center. They must know to sing to the spices.
    “I should have made you go,” the Old One would tell me later, shaking her head ruefully. “They were volcano hands, simmering with risk, waiting to explode. But I couldn’t.”
    “Why not, First Mother?”
    “You were the only one in whose hands the spices sang back.”

 
    Let me tell you about chilies.
    The dry chili,
lanka
, is the most potent of spices. In its blister-red skin, the most beautiful. Its other name is danger.
    The chili sings in the voice of a hawk circling sun-bleached hills where nothing grows: I lanka
was horn of Agni, god of fire. I dripped from his fingertips to bring taste to this Wand earth
.
    Lanka
, I think I am most in love with you.
    The chili grows in the very center of the island, in the core of a sleeping volcano. Until we reach the third level of apprenticeship, we are not allowed to approach it.
    Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.
    Lanka, lanka
. Sometimes I roll your name over my tongue. Taste the enticing sting of it.
    So many times the Old One has warned us against your powers.
    “Daughters, use it only as the last remedy. It is easy to start a flame. But to put it out?”
    That is why I hold on,
lanka
, whose name the ten-headed Ravana took for his enchanted kingdom. City of a million jewels turned at the last to ash. Though more than once I have been tempted.
    As when Jagjit comes to the store.
    In the inner room of the store, on the topmost shelf, sits a sealed jar filled with red fingers of light. One day I will open it and the chilies will flicker to the ground. And blaze.
    Lanka
, fire-child, cleanser of evil. For when there is no other way.

     
    Jagjit comes to the store with his mother. Stands partly behind her, his