The Mistress of Spices Read Online Free PDF Page B

fingers touching her
dupatta
although he is ten and a half already and tall as wild bamboo.
    “Oi Jaggi don’t hang on me like a girl, go get me a packet of
sabu papads
.”
    Jagjit with his thin, frightened wrists who has trouble in school because he knows only Punjabi still. Jagjit whom the teacher has put in the last row next to the drooling boy with milk-blue eyes. Jagjit who has learned his first English word.
Idiot. Idiot. Idiot
.
    I walk to the back where he stares in confusion at the shelves of
papads
, the packets stamped with hieroglyphs of Hindi and English.
    I hand him the
sabu papads
. I tell him “They’re the bumpy white ones, see. Next time you’ll know.”
    Shy-eyed Jagjit in your green turban that the kids at school make fun of, do you know your name means world-conqueror?
    But already his mother is shouting “What’s taking you so long Jaggi, can’t find the papads, are you blind, the hairs on my head will go white waiting waiting by the time you get back.”
    In the playground they try to pull it off his head, green turban the color of a parrot’s breast. They dangle the cloth from their fingertips and laugh at his long, uncut hair. And push him down.
    Asshole
, his second English word. And his knees bleeding from the gravel.
    Jagjit who bites down on his lip so the cry will not out. Who picks up his muddy turban and ties it on slowly and goes inside.
    “Jaggi how come you’re always dirtying your school clothes, here is a button gone and look at this big tear on your shirt, you
badmash
, you think I’m made of money.”
    At night he lies with his eyes open, staring until the stars begin to flicker like fireflies in his grandmother’s
kheti
outside Jullunder. She is singing as she gathers for dinner bunches of
saag
green as his turban. Punjabi words that sound like rain.
    Jagjit, do they come back when you at last must close your eyes because what else can you do. The jeering voices, the spitting mouths, the hands. The hands that pull your pants down in the playground and the girls looking.
    “Chhodo mainu”
    “Talk English sonofabitch. Speak up nigger wetback asshole.”
    “Jaggi what you meaning you don’t want to go to school, what for your father is killing himself working working at the factory, two slaps will make you go.”
    “Chhodo”
    At the checkstand I say, “Here’s some
burfi
for you, no no madam, no cost for children.” I see him bite eager into the brown sweet flavored with clove and cardamom and cinnamon. He smiles a small smile to answer mine.
    Crushed clove and cardamom, Jagjit, to make your breath fragrant. Cardamom which I will scatter tonight on the wind for you. North wind carrying them to open your teacher’s unseeing.And also sweet pungent clove,
lavang
, spice of compassion. So your mother of a sudden looking up from the washboard, pushing tired hair from her face, “Jaggi
beta
, tell me what happened,” will hold you in her soapsud arms.
    And here is cinnamon, hollow dark bone that I tuck unseen in your turban just before you go. Cinnamon friend-maker, cinnamon
dalchini
warm-brown as skin, to find you someone who will take you by the hand, who will run with you and laugh with you and say See this is America, it’s not so bad.
    And for the others with the pebble-hard eyes, cinnamon destroyer of enemies to give you strength, strength which grows in your legs and arms and mostly mouth till one day you shout
no
loud enough to make them, shocked, stop.

     
    When we had passed the ceremony of purification, when we were ready to leave the island and meet our separate destinies, the Old One said, “Daughters it is time for me to give you your new names. For when you came to this island you left your old names behind, and have remained nameless since.
    “But let me ask you one last time. Are you certain you wish to become Mistresses? It is not too late to choose an easier life.
    “Are you ready to give up your young bodies, to take on age and ugliness and