The Mistress of Spices (1997)
Divakaruni’s bestselling novel Mistress of Spices, written in a unique style that blends prose and poetry, magic and reality, was named one of the top 100 books of the 20th Century by the San Francisco Chronicle. Divakaruni comments, “I wrote the book in a spirit of play, collapsing the divisions between the realistic world of twentieth century America and the timeless one of myth in my attempt to create a modern fable.”
The novel follows the adventures of Tilo, a mysterious figure who runs a grocery store in inner-city Oakland and uses her knowledge of spices to help her customers overcome difficulties. Tilo provides magical spices not only for cooking but also for the challenges that Indian immigrants in an alien land experience. She develops dilemmas of her own when she falls in love with a mysterious stranger she calls the Lonely American, as now she has to choose whether to serve her people or to follow the path leading to her own happiness.
The novel was shortlisted for the Orange Prize and made into a film by Gurinder Chadha and Paul Berges of Bend It Like Beckham fame.
Praise for The Mistress of Spices:
“Divakaruni’s prose is so pungent that it stains the page, yet beneath the sighs and smells of this brand of magic realism she deftly introduces her true theme: how an ability to accommodate desire enlivens not only the individual heart but a society cornered by change.” (The New Yorker)
“The Mistress of Spices becomes a novel about choosing between a life of special powers and one of ordinary love and compassion. If Tilo’s choice is rather predictable, the way Ms. Divakaruni gets us there is anything but.” (The New York Times Book Review)
“The Mistress of Spices is a dazzling tale of misbegotten dreams and desires, hopes and expectations, woven with poetry and storyteller magic.” (Amy Tan)
“A splendid novel, beautifully conceived and crafted.” (Pat Conroy)
Excerpt
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.
When you open the bin that sits by the entrance to the store you smell it right away, though it will take a little while for your brain to register that subtle scent, faintly bitter like your skin and almost as familiar.
Brush the surface with your hand, and the silky yellow powder will cling to the pads of your palm, to your fingertips. Dust from a butterfly wing.
Bring it to your face. Rub it on cheek, forehead, chin. Don’t be hesitant. For a thousand years before history began, brides—and those who long to be brides—have done the same. It will erase blemishes and wrinkles, suck away age and fat. For days afterward, your skin will give off a pale golden glow.
Each spice has a day special to it. For turmeric it is Sunday, when light drips fat and butter-colored into the bins to be soaked up glowing, when you pray to the nine planets for love and luck.
Turmeric which is also named halud, meaning yellow, color of daybreak and conch-shell sound. Turmeric the preserver, keeping foods safe in a land of heat and hunger. Turmeric the auspicious spice, placed on the heads of newborns for luck, sprinkled over coconuts at pujas, rubbed into the borders of wedding saris.
But there is more. That is why I pick them only at the precise moment when night slides into day, those bulbous roots like gnarly-brown fingers, why I grind them only when Swati the faith-star shines incandescent in the north.
When I hold it in my hands, the spice speaks to me. Its voice is like evening, like the beginning of the world.
I am turmeric who rose out of the ocean of milk when the devas and asuras churned for the treasures of the universe. I am turmeric who came after the nectar and before the poison and thus lie in between.
Yes, I whisper, swaying to its rhythm. Yes. You are turmeric, shield for heart’s sorrow, anointment for death, hope for rebirth.
Together we sing this song, as we have many times.
And so I think at once of turmeric when Ahuja’s wife comes into my store this morning wearing dark glasses.
