The Mistress of Spices

Each day has a color, a smell.

Each spice has a special day 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.

How can I forgive if you are not ready to give up that which caused you to stumble?

Fenugreek, Tuesday's spice, when the air is green like mosses after rain.

Fennel, which is the spice for Wednesdays, the day of averages, of middle-aged people. . . . Fennel . . . smelling of changes to come.

Monday is the day of silence, day of the whole white mung bean, which is sacred to the moon.

Chili, spice of red Thursday, which is the day of reckoning. Day which invites us to pick up the sack of our existence and shake it inside out. Day of suicide, day of murder.

...don't create snakes out of ropes. You have enough to worry about.

She lifts a bowl of kheer and her thoughts, flittering like dusty sparrows in a brown back alley, turn a sudden kingfisher blue.

Hope not built on reason brings disappointment only.

Each desire in the world is different, as is each love.

Sometimes I wonder if there is such a thing as reality, an objective and untouched nature of being. Or if all that we encounter has already been changed by what we had imagined it to be. If we have dreamed it into being.

The mark of a wise man is that he changes his mind when he sees mistake.

Ah, now I have learned how deep in the human heart vanity lies, vanity which is the other face of the fear of being unloved.

When your heart is crusted over with your own pain, it is easy to feel little for others.

In your yearning you have made me into that which I am not.

Who held his cries in until red swam behind his eyelids like bleeding stars.

O exhilaration, I thought. To be lifted up through the eye of chaos, to balance breath-stopped on the edge of nothing. And the plunge that would follow, the shattering of my matchstick body to smithereens, the bones flying free as foam, the heart finally released.

When you begin to weave your own desires into your vision, the true seeing is taken from you.

And under it all, earth waited with her lead-filled veins, impatient to shrug herself clean.

Open yourself to the sight, and it will show you what you need to know. But never attempt to bend it to your will. Never pry into a particular life that has been brought to your care. That is to break trust.

Maybe it was that sense that comes to us all at some point in the growing-up process, that we are separate from our parents and must suffer our own lives, with our own sorrows. Or maybe it was something simpler, a childish spite, Let her hurt like I’m hurting. And then the light changed and she started driving again.

A volte mi chiedo se la realtà esiste davvero, se c'è varamente una natura delle cose, obiettiva e intatta. O se tutto ciò che ci accade è già modificato in anticipo dalla nostra immaginazione. Se sognando qualcosa gli diamo vita.

til which fried in its own oil restores lustre when one has lost interest in life. I will be Tilottama, the essence of til, life-giver, restorer of health and hope.

We had known it would be hard to leave this island of women where on our skin the warm rain fell like pomegranate seeds, where we woke to birdcall and slept to the First Mother’s singing, where we swam naked without shame in lakes of blue lotus. To exchange it for the human world whose harshness we remembered. But this?