The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

this wanting? I close my eyes in knowing guilt.
    “I worry most about you,” she told me the day I left.
    We stood on the highest ridge of the volcano, only sky above us. Shampati’s fire was not yet lit. Against the dark silhouetteof the pyre the evening was violet-gray and soft as moths. Far below us the waves crashed white and silent as in a dream.
    Like tendrils of fog, her distress around me.
    I wanted to pull her close and place a comfort-kiss on the velvet corrugation of her cheek. As though I were the elder and not she. But I did not dare the intimacy.
    So I accused.
    “Always you are without faith in me, First Mother.”
    “Because I see your nature, Tilo shining but flawed, diamond with a crack running through it, which thrown into the cauldron of America may shatter asunder.”
    “What crack?”
    “Life-lust, that craving to taste all things, sweet as well as bitter, on your own tongue.”
    “Mother you worry needlessly. Before the moon crosses the sky will I not be walking into Shampati’s fire that burns up all desire?”
    She had sighed. “I pray it does for you.” And had gestured a blessing sign in the dim air.
    “
Chana besan,
” says the fat man now, smelling of garlic pickle and too-large lunches. “Didn’t you hear me say I want some
chana besan
.”
    My skull is hot and dry. There is a high buzzing inside, like bees.
    Fat man I could take a fistful of mustard seed and say a word, and for a month a fever would burn in your stomach, making you vomit up whatever you ate.
    Tilo, is this what you have come to.
    Inside my head, a sound like rain. Or is it the tears of the spices.
    I bite down on my lip till the blood comes. The pain cleanses me, starts to release the poison from my clenched body.
    “So sorry,” I tell the man. “I have big sack of
besan
inside.”
    I measure out a packet and trace on it with my finger a rune for self-control. For him and for me.
    O spices I am still yours, Tilottama essence of til, giver of life and love and hope. Help me not to fall from myself.
    Lonely American, though my body is a sudden soaring whenever I think of you, if you are to come to me, it will have to be by your own desire.

     
    Early morning he steps briskly into the store to do the week’s shopping for the family although his son has said many times
“Baba
why at your age.” Geeta’s grandfather still walking like a military major though it has been twenty years. His shirt ironed stiff with pointy collars, his steel-gray pants perfect-creased down the front. And his shoes, his midnight-black Bata shoes spit-polished to match the onyx he wears on his left hand for mental peace.
    “But mental peace I am not having, not even one iota, since I crossed the
kalapani
and came to this America,” he tells me once again. “That Ramu he said Come come
haha
we are all here, what for you want to grow old so far from your own flesh and blood, your granddaughter. But I tell you, better to have no granddaughter than one like this Geeta.”
    “I know what you are meaning,
dada,”
I say to placate him.“But your Geeta, such a nice girl she is, so pretty and sweet-speaking too, surely you are mistaken. She is coming so many times to my store and each time she is specially buying my hot mango pickles and telling me most polite how tasty they are. And so smart, passed out of college with all A marks, is it not, I think her mother is telling me, and now she is doing job in some big engineer company?”
    He dismisses my compliments with a wave of his carved mahogany cane.
    “May be okay for all these
firingi
women in this country, but you tell me yourself
didi
, if a young girl should work late-late in the office with other men and come home only after dark and sometimes in their car too?
Chee chee
, back in Jamshedpur they would have smeared dung on our faces for that. And who would ever marry her. But when I tell Ramu he says
Baba
don’t worry they’re only friends. My girl knows better than to get