The Mistress of Spices by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni Page A

man should act, what is a woman’s duty. But ah the voices, we carried them all the way inside our heads.”
    I see her in those early days, Ahuja’s wife trying to please her husband, sewing new curtains to make the apartment into a home, rolling
parathas
to serve hot when he came home from work. And him too, buying her a new sari, a bottle of perfume, Intimate or Chantilly, a pretty lace nightdress to wear in bed.
    “Hai
mataji
, once milk has curdled can all the sugar in the world turn it sweet again?
    “In bed especially I could not forget those nights in India. Even when he tried to be gentle I was stiff and not willing. Then he would lose patience and shout the American words he’d learned.
Bitch. Fucking you is like fucking a corpse
.
    “And later,
You must be getting it somewhere else
.
    “Recently, the rules. No going out. No talking on the phone. Every penny I spend to be accounted for. He should read my letters before he mails them.
    “And the calls. All day. Sometimes every twenty minutes. To check on what I’m doing. To make sure I’m there. I pick up the phone and say hello and there is his breathing on the end of the line.”
    Now Ahuja’s wife tells me in a voice which is frightening-calm, which has run out of tears, “Mataji, I used to be afraid of death. I’d hear of women who killed themselves and think how could they. Now I know.”
    O almost Lalita, that is not the way out. But what can I say to help you, I who am weeping inside me as much as you have done?
    “What do I have to live for? Once, more than anything in the world I wanted a baby. But is this any kind of home to bring a new life into?”
    Blinded by my tears I cannot see the spice remedy. It is as the Old One warned.
    Tilo too close too close
.
    I breathe deep, holding the air in my lungs like she taught us on the island, until its roaring drives all other sounds from my mind. Until through the red blur a name comes to me.
    Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. Waists that have given up, mouths drooping with the weight of their average lives they once dreamed would be so different. Fennel, brown as mud and bark and leaf dancing in a fall breeze, smelling of changes to come.
    “Fennel,” I tell Ahuja’s wife who is plucking at her
dupatta
with restless fingers, “is a wondrous spice. Take a pinch of it, raw and whole, after every meal to freshen the breath and aid digestion and give you mental strength for what must be done.”
    She looks at me despairing. Her crushed velvet eyes say Is this all the help you have to give?
    “Give some to your husband as well.”
    Ahuja’s wife smoothes the sleeve of her
kurta
, which she had pulled up to show me another bruise, and stands. “I need to get home. He must have called one dozen times. When he comes home tonight—”
    Fear rises from her, shimmering, like heat from a cracked summer pavement. Fear and hate and disappointment that I am not doing more.
    “Fennel cools the temper as well,” I say. I wish I could tell her more, but that would leach away the spice’s power.
    She gives a bitter, not-believing laugh. She regrets having confided in me, witless old woman who talks as though a handful of dry seeds can help a breaking life.
    “He could certainly do with that,” she says, gathering her purse. Regrets pound like blood inside her skull.
    She will throw the packet I have put between us on the table in the back of a drawer, perhaps even in the trash when she thinks in shame of all she has told me.
    Next time she will go to another grocery, even if it means changing buses.
    I try to hold her eyes but she will not look. She has turned to leave, she is at the door already. So I must with my oldwoman shuffle catch up and touch her arm once more, though I know I should not.
    Pincers of flame pierce my fingertips. She is still now, her eyes changing color, growing light like mustard oil when heated, intent as though she is seeing