Love Story for the People

By by Lydia Lowe
posted 6/16/01

The Mistress of Spices, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, published by Doubleday, New York, 1997

The Mistress of Spices successfully blends romance, mysticism, and community consciousness in a very readable Asian American novel. This is the first novel of Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, an award-winning poet, president of a helpline for South Asian women called MAITRI, and author of the short story collection Arranged Marriage.

Tilo is a young woman who is trained by the Old One in the magic of the spices, which hold the power to address a variety of human frailties and problems. She is sent to modern-day Oakland, California to help people with her powers. With turmeric, cinnamon, fenugreek, or neem, she attends to her customer-patients: Geeta, whose traditional family cannot except her wild ways or her Chicano boyfriend. Jagjit, who runs from playground bullies to join the gangster life. Haroun, the taxi cab driver who is beaten in the night. Ahuja's wife, who searches for the strength to leave her abusive husband.

Spices is a love story on two levels. Intertwined with events is a traditional happy-ever-after love story that touches on themes of fantasy and reality. But it is primarily the story of Tilo's discovery of love for the people, felt by the reader through the author's compassion for her characters and sense of heroic optimism.

A woman in a kitchen, cooking my rice. She is fragrant as the grains she rolls between her fingers to see if they are done. Rice steam has softened her skin, has loosened hair tied back taut all day. Has gentled the smudges under her eyes . . . Is she one, is she many, is she not the woman in a hundred Indian homes who is sprinkling, over sweet kheer that has simmered all afternoon, cardamom seeds from my shop for the dreams that keep us from going mad?

Divakaruni's mastery of language has the mark of a poet, but her style is direct and immensely readable. Her sympathetic portrayal of the struggles of ordinary working people is a breath of fresh air in a body of literature too often dominated by middle class angst and the perpetual identity crisis.